Post by Emma “Emmz” Squalor on Aug 16, 2008 13:58:34 GMT -5
Title: Routine
Author’s Disclaimer: I do not own A Series of Unfortunate Events or any of its characters or places. They belong to Lemony Snicket a.k.a. Daniel Handler.
Rating: G
Genre: Romance
Story-Type: One-Shot
Summery: Late one night, Esmé and Jerome share an intimate conversation.
***
Jerome wasn’t surprised when he noticed a yellow light flooding out of the kitchen and spilling into the carpeted hallway. It was the same routine every night: he would fall asleep with his arms around Esmé, his hands resting protectively over her belly, only to wake hours later and find her gone. Jerome would then head out into the hallway and (depending on what sort of snack his wife was in the mood for) trace her steps to one of the kitchens.
It was on this night— or morning rather, as the hall clock read 2:00 a.m. —that Jerome found Esmé standing before the refrigerator of the kitchen with the blue stove. The door shielded all but the top of her head, though it wasn’t impossible to tell what it was she was doing. Jerome and Esmé had been playing the same game for nearly five months, after all. Tilting his head to the side and resting it on the doorframe, Jerome said, “I was cold and thought I’d come looking for you.”
Esmé shut the refrigerator door, and her husband couldn’t help but grin. In one hand she was holding a carton of salmon ice cream, while in the other she held an ice cream scooper. The tank-top she was wearing just barely covered her stomach, which seemed to get fuller and rounder every week. Jerome could see a hint of porcelain skin peeking out halfway between Esmé’s shirt and pajama shorts.
“Did you miss me, darling?” she asked, licking a bit of ice cream off the scooper.
“Every moment I spent being away from you,” Jerome said.
“How long did it take you this time to realize that I’d left?”
Shrugging, he shuffled into the kitchen and over to his wife’s side. Esmé scooped up another helping of ice cream, and Jerome took this as the opportunity to tug her shirt up over her ribs, sighing in utter happiness as he looked upon her pregnant belly. He was just about to ask permission to kiss it when a bit of pinkish ice cream dripped off the spoon and landed on the area just above Esmé’s bellybutton.
She giggled and said, “Jerome, would you fetch me a napkin?”
“I’ve got a better idea,” he replied.
Before Esmé could ask what it was that Jerome had in mind, he had lowered his head and licked the ice cream off her stomach.
“Delicious.”
“I thought you hated the taste of salmon.”
“I wasn’t talking about the ice cream.”
At Jerome’s words, Esme’s cheeks went as pink as the ice cream she was holding, and she smiled warmly. “I love you,” she said. “And I feel privileged to be having your child, Jerome.”
Jerome threw his arms around his wife, being careful not to squeeze her too tightly. “I love you, too,” he said. “And there’s no other woman in the world who I’d want to be the mother of my child more than you, Esmé.”
“If someone had told me six years ago that I would someday be the mother of three children, I would never have believed it.”
Jerome let go of his wife and looked into her dazzling blue eyes as he answered her. “Well, you aren’t the same person you used to be.”
Esmé set the carton of ice cream with the scooper inside it down on the countertop. She then turned back to her husband, and cupped her hands around the curve of her stomach. “I never thought I’d say this,” she began, “seeing as I complained about it for months after Emma’s birth, but…” Esmé was almost too shy to admit to what had been a growing obsession of hers for the last four months. It had all started from the moment she had looked in the mirror and noticed for the first time the physical changes in her body. “But now I… I love what I see every time I look in the mirror.”
“Really, Esmé?” Jerome asked, disbelieving. “Oh, darling, do you— really?” He had spent years trying to convince his wife of the positive effects that her first pregnancy had had on her once undernourished frame. In the beginning he had been concerned that seeing those changes again might upset her, but in the end they were proving to have the opposite effect.
Esmé nodded as the first of her tears appeared at the corners of her eyes. “I love it, Jerome,” she said, running her long-nailed hand fondly over her belly. “And I… I almost hate to lose it.” As she said this, the tears loosened from her lower lashes and splashed onto her stomach.
Jerome suddenly felt as though he had entered some sort of alternate universe. Listening to his wife say such sweet, lovely things in regard to something she had once loathed was a dream come true. Unable to control himself, he burst into tears.
“Honey, why on Earth are you crying?” Esmé exclaimed. “Did I say something to upset you?”
“No,” Jerome answered through his tears. “I’m crying because you finally see what I’ve been trying to get you to realize for the past five years.”
Esmé went to tug her shirt back down, somewhat amused when it rode up a few inches at the bottom. Jerome laughed, and his wife threw herself into his arms.
“I’m so happy,” she whispered into his shoulder, smiling as she felt his own arms wrap protectively around her. “Thank you for everything you’ve given me, and for always making me feel so beautiful.”
The End