Coda Books 06 - Fear, Hope, and Bread Pudding (MM)

knows, the last thing I need is to be more unstable than I already am.
    Oh well. You know what they say, sweets. Neurotic is the new black.

    T HE home study was, as Thomas had warned, tedious in the extreme, bordering on offensive, but in the end, it wasn’t a problem. Once we’d been approved, we drafted a letter with Thomas’s help, outlining our desire to become parents, and Thomas began distributing it through whatever channels he had. When that was done, Cole turned his attention to our spare bedroom. He got rid of every bit of furniture and had the carpet cleaned and the walls repainted. Then he quietly shut the door on the room and tried to pretend it didn’t exist. The word “nursery” was never uttered.
    Hope had carried us this far, but suddenly we found ourselves with nothing to do but wait. Hope began to feel like something ominous. For two months, I tried to not see the closed door at the end of our hallway. For two months, neither of us mentioned the way our house had become both too big and too small at the same time. Then one morning, as I left our bedroom, I noticed the footstep pattern. Rosa vacuumed religiously, creating perfectly parallel tracks on the floor, but now someone had traversed the hallway between our room and the closed door, leaving barely perceptible dark splotches where the carpet fibers lay flat instead of upright.
    I crept down the hallway, wondering even as I did it why I felt the need to tiptoe. I cracked the door open and peeked in. It was still the same room—white walls, cream-colored carpet. It still smelled of fresh paint. The room had one window, long and low and bowed outward to form a bench. The blinds were open, and the window seat was bathed in sunlight. Cole wasn’t there. Whatever he’d sought in this room, he’d intentionally done it before I was awake.
    I found him in the kitchen, cooking. I sat at the breakfast bar and asked, “Is everything all right?”
    “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be? I was trying to decide if we wanted mimosas with breakfast, or plain orange juice.”
    “You went in the bedroom.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Should I make bacon?”
    “Do you want to buy a crib?”
    “Whatever for, love? I’ll just heat up some ham instead.”
    His tone was light and cheery as always, yet false, and the fragility of it made me ache for him. He was fighting to maintain a sense of normalcy, and if I pushed against that, he’d become defensive. I weighed my answer as I watched him bustle around the kitchen, taking eggs, milk, and fresh green chilies out of the refrigerator and lining them up neatly on the counter. He kept his body angled away from me, his head down so the fall of his bangs hid his expression. “We could call Thomas and see if he’s heard anything.”
    “Honey, the man knows his job. If there was anything to tell us, we’d have heard from him already.”
    He was right, of course. Still, when I came home from my jog that night, I found him again in the empty room, sitting on the window seat. Behind him, our backyard and pool were lost to the night. Inside the room, the lights felt too stark.
    “Talk to me,” I said.
    “There’s nothing to say.”
    He could never discuss anything important with me unless he could hide, so I reached over and turned off the light, leaving the room in darkness. With no furniture, it was easy for me to cross the room and sit next to him. “ Now talk to me.”
    He laughed quietly. “You know me too well.”
    “It goes both ways.”
    “I suppose that’s true.” He stopped and looked down at his hands, clasped between his knees. I waited in silence for him to work his way around to what needed to be said. “Nobody’s ever slept in this room.”
    “Never?”
    He shook his head. “I don’t have any family to visit. The few guests I had… well, they weren’t sleeping in here.”
    I winced at the casual mention of the other lovers who’d been in his home before me, and he reached out to take my hand, as if sensing my thoughts. “There were far fewer of them than you probably think, Jonny. I made it a habit not to invite them to my home.”
    “You invited me.”
    “You were always the exception.”
    I smiled, comforted, as he’d meant for me to be. I continued to hold his hand while I waited for him to go on.
    “They say rooms hold an echo of whatever they’ve seen. I never believed it, but in here, it’s true. I’ve lived in this house for eight years, and