Well, when I said this request would be controversial, I wasn't kidding. So, here goes.
May I request: Non-MC knows her marriage with Caleb is over when he requests (read: demands) that she let MC have his first child.
okay i actually had a lot of fun writing this one cuz i was writing fluff and smut all day and this angst just hit PERFECTLY šāāļø thank you for leaving this request, it was such a breath of fresh air and got my brain all excited for it!! hopefully i didn't misunderstand your request and you'll enjoy it! ā”
p.s. not proofread
ā. ā content warnings: heavy angst, no comfort, infidelity, marriage falling apart, unrequited love, self-deception, caleb loves mc & is married to non!mc/reader
The kettle was still whistling when he said it.
Youād been pouring tea, that ridiculous oolong heād bought you for your birthday last year, the one in the tin with the gold lettering, and your hand was steady on the handle and the steam was rising and Caleb was sitting at the kitchen island with his sleeves pushed up and his forearms resting on the marble and he said it the way someone might mention the weather.Ā
So fucking casual, you almost couldnāt believe your ears.
āI need you to let her carry the first.ā
It was important, somehow, to finish pouring the tea. The amber liquid filled the cup. Steam curled. Your hand did not shake. Whose first, your brain offered politely, because your brain was being kind to you, was buying you time, was pretending it didnāt already know.
Caleb didnāt look at you. That was the first thing you noticed, focusing on that instead of how your stomach turned involuntarily. He looked at his hands, at the marble, at the soft fold of his rolled sleeve. Anywhere but at you. Caleb who could meet anyoneās eye through anything, Caleb whoād talked you down through three panic attacks and held your stare during all of them, was looking at the countertop like the answer was etched into it.
āMy first child,ā he said quietly. āI need it to be hers.ā
The cup was hot. You only noticed because your fingers were still wrapped around it. You were going to burn yourself if you didnāt let go. So you let go. You set it down on the saucer almost too carefully, and watched your own hand do this, like your hand belonged to a stranger, like you were watching a film of someone receiving the worst news of their life and being very polite about it.
It was strange how fast the rest of you caught up. How the body knew. Your stomach was already cold. Your ears were already ringing. There was an ache low in your chest, somewhere beneath your ribs, like something with weight had just settled there permanently.
āCaleb.ā Your voice was flat. You were proud of your voice. āWeāve been married for two years.ā
āWe were going to start trying in spring.ā
āYou saidāā and here it almost cracked, you caught it just in time, āāyou said you wanted a little girl with my eyes.ā
A long silence. He still wasnāt looking at you. His jaw was working in that small, controlled way that meant he was holding something back, and the worst part was that you knew he was holding back something gentle. Some softening. Some apology. He was going to try to make this kind, and you were going to have to sit there and let him, and it was going to be the most violent thing that had ever happened to you.
āIt has to be hers first,ā his words hit bullseye straight into your heart, finally. āYou understand.ā
You did, actually. That was the obscene part. Youād always understood.
Youād known the day he proposed.
Heād done it sweetly. Heād done it on the balcony of the apartment you used to rent together, with a ring heād had resized twice to make sure it fit, and heād said all the right things, I want to build a life with you, you make me steadier, I love you, I love you, I love you, and youād cried and said yes and meant it. You meant it with your whole chest, tears ruining your makeup, but they were happy tears, because youāve wanted the same life for so, so long.
Then his phone buzzed twice in his pocket while he was on one knee, and youād watched his eyes flicker, just for a second, just for less than a second, and youād known.
Youād known and youād said yes anyway.
Because she hadnāt said yes to him. Because sheād never said yes to him. Because Caleb had been in love with her since they were children, and sheād chosen someone else, several someone elses if the rumors were accurate, and Caleb had needed somewhere to put all of that ruined devotion, and you had been right there, kind and patient and so stupidly in love with him that youād opened your hands and said give it to me, Iāll hold it for you.
Youād thought, in the deluded little corner of your heart you didnāt show anyone, that maybe if you held it long enough it would become yours.
Youād seen it. That was the thing you would have to admit to yourself now, in the unflinching light of the present nightmare staring you dead in the eye. You had seen it every time, and you had decided every time not to see it.
Youād seen it at your engagement dinner, when his phone lit up across the table and he had glanced down for a fraction of a second too long, his thumb hovering over the screen before he turned the phone face down as if he wasnāt dying to pick it up and run to her. You had not asked whose name was on it. You hadnāt needed to, really.
Youād seen it the night she came to your housewarming. Sheād hugged Caleb hello, a polite hug, a friendly hug, exactly the kind of hug an old friend gives, and Calebās hand had landed at the small of her back in a way it had never landed at yours. Light. Familiar. Cherished, loving, as if he waited lifetimes to hug her exactly like that.Ā
You had watched it from across the room with a glass of wine in your hand and you had smiled at someoneās joke. Whose joke, you couldnāt remember.
Youād seen it every time her name came up at dinner. The way he stopped chewing for a beat. The way his shoulders would set themselves before he answered, oh, sheās fine, sheās traveling, I havenāt seen her in a while, careful and casual, the cadence of a man speaking around a hot coal in his mouth.
Youād seen the gift he kept in the back of his desk drawer, wrapped in pale blue paper, never given. Youād found it once, while looking for some tape. You had not asked who it was for. You had closed the drawer very gently and walked away and told yourself, fiercely, it could be for anyone. It could be for one of his friends. It could be for a colleague. It could be forā
It could be for anyone but you. That was the truth. You had known that even then.
You had built a marriage on top of every one of those moments. You had laid bricks over them, paved them over, planted gardens above them. And every so often the ground would tremble and you would pretend it had not, and you would pour another glass of wine and tell yourself you were imagining things.
You had not been imagining things. But lies were much easier to swallow than the humiliating truth.
āHow long?ā you heard yourself say.
He looked up at last, purple eyes finding your hollow ones. His eyes were red-rimmed. That, somehow, was the cruelest part. He was upset. He was upset on your behalf, he was sorry, he genuinely felt terrible, and that was so much worse than if heād been cold about it. A cold man you could have hated cleanly. A man who cried while ruining your life had to be loved through it, and you didnāt have the strength.
āItās notāit isnāt what you think,ā he started. Oh, but you knew. Still, you let him explain, let him feed you sweet lies, hollow words, words he had served you time and time again throughout your whole marriage. You let him every single time.Ā
āSix weeks ago.ā he sighed in resignation, āWe didnātāit was once. She came to me aboutāit doesnāt matter. It was once.ā
The word hit your body before your brain caught up. Once.
You had braced, somewhere in the back of yourself, for the slow betrayal. For the years of unspoken longing. For the leftover heart you had married. You had made peace with that, deep down in your currently breaking, fragile heart. You had told yourself, he doesnāt act on it. Thatās the thing that matters. He chose me with his life, even if he didnāt choose me with his heart.
You had not braced for once.
For the literal, physical once. For his hands on her. For whatever night it had been, and your mind was already searching, already flipping through your shared calendar like a desperate librarian, and the version of him that had come home afterwards. Had he kissed your forehead good night with her still on his skin? Had he made you breakfast the next morning? Had he held you, three weeks ago, when you cried about something stupid at work, his palm steady on your back, with the memory of her warmth still in his mouth?
Your stomach folded in on itself.
You set your hand flat on the marble to steady yourself. The marble was cool. The cup was still steaming. Calebās eyes were red and puffy across the island, and you wanted very suddenly to throw the kettle through the kitchen window just to hear something break that wasnāt you.
āAnd sheās pregnant,ā you supplied the answer for him. Your voice was a thing operating without you. It was not your voice. You hated it.
āNot yet.ā he swallowed. āShe wants to be. Sheāll only consider it ifāā he stopped. Coward.
āIf Iām out of the way.ā you hated your own voice, hated the hollowness of it. Hated how the words kept pouring out of you, unable to stop saying and imagining the worst.
āIf youāā he closed his eyes. āIf you give us your blessing.ā
You didnāt mean to. It came out of you like something physical and unwelcomed, like a thing dislodged, and Caleb flinched at the sound of it, which made you laugh harder, your hand finding the edge of the counter for balance because the kitchen was tilting, your whole life was tilting, and somewhere in the back of your throat the laugh was already turning into something else.
Blessing. He wanted your blessing. He wanted you to bake them a cake. He wanted you to be gracious, to be the bigger person, to perform the dignified exit of a woman who had always understood she was the placeholder.
It was the demanding of it that finally lit something in you.
Not asking for permission or pleading for forgiveness or understanding. Demanding, in that quiet, reasonable voice, like a surgeon explaining a procedure you did not have the right to refuse. He had thought it through. He had decided this was the kind path. He had cast you, in the script of this conversation, as someone gracious enough to step aside, because the version of you who lived in his head had always been someone gracious enough to step aside. The wife who understood. The wife who was grown-up about it.
Of course he thought you would say yes. You had said yes to everything. You had been saying yes to less than you deserved for two years, and he had taken it, and now he was assuming, with the easy confidence of a man who had never once been told no by you, that you would say yes to this too.
The audacity of it rose into your throat like smoke.
You thought of the morning, six months ago, when heād brought you breakfast in bed because youād had a fever, and heād sat on the edge of the mattress and pushed your hair back and said, I donāt know what Iād do without you, and you had believed him.
You thought of him, two months ago, going still at the sound of her name on someoneās phone in a restaurant, and how he had ordered another bottle of wine and pretended not to have heard.
You thought of the spare bedroom youād been quietly redecorating in soft yellow, because he wanted a little girl with your eyes, and he had said the words out loud, and you had built a future on them.
āGet out,ā your mouth moved before the feeling could catch up. Voice dull, scraped clean of anything soft.Ā
āDonāt.ā Your voice was very quiet. You barely recognized it. āDonāt sweetheart me. Donāt you dare, Caleb.ā
He hesitated, like he wanted to say something else, like there was a version of this where he could thread the needle and keep some part of you, and you looked at him through it all and saw the moment he understood that there wasnāt.
He went to the door, and you thought he would leave without saying more. It would have been too kind, so he paused with his hand on the frame.
āI do love you,ā the confession left his lips, but it only made your heart break faster, āI want you to know that IāI do.ā
You did know. That was the thing. He did love you. He had loved you in the secondhand, leftover way that men love the women they marry when they cannot have the women they want. He had loved you sincerely and he had loved you less, and you had taken less because less was more than nothing, and you had told yourself it would be enough.
The door closed behind him.
You stood in the kitchen with the tea you would never drink and the ring you would not be wearing by morning, and you finally, finally let yourself feel it.
It rose up out of you in one long, silent wave. It wasnāt a sob, you felt too hollow to accept that, you still clung to your last drop of control. But it was present nonetheless, the terrible understanding that you had spent two years of your life building a loving home for a man who had been waiting, the entire time, for someone else to come back for him.
The tea went cold on the counter.
You did not move for a long time.
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š·ļø: @young-adult-summer, @aiycnlyme
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