New fic, set after Jake left. Not sure how many parts there'll be, but there shouldn't be many. The title is from The Stolen Child by W.B. Yeats.
To The Waters and the Wild
Part I
It takes a month before Chrissie will take the test – not even going to the doctor, just a simple pee on a stick test. She knows what it will say, but still decides it can’t be true.
She wants to keep that night to herself – special, and hidden. She wants no consequences of it, (except for the burning in her gut that twists when she thinks of him.) She does not want it made solid, tangible. She wants it to stay a dream.
That’s where she wants the story to end – not here. She doesn’t want to be sat on the toilet, barefoot and crying, as a faint blue line appears, and the sound of a tolling bell ringing through her head.
**
Sharon asks her if anything’s wrong, every morning, like a ritual. And Chrissie says of course not, why? And Sharon shrugs and smiles and goes back to planning this damn wedding, and Chrissie wants to scream and cry and throw up, in that order.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when she pretends that Jake never left, she is happier than she has ever been. A baby is growing inside of her, finally, and she puts her hand on her stomach, even though there’s nothing there to feel yet, and thinks ‘God, I have never loved anything more,’ because there is a part of him inside her, and he has given her more than anyone else ever has.
But then, she remembers that Jake has gone, and she is left, alone and pregnant, and a murderer.
**
Eventually, when nothing seems to be happening, and she realises that it isn’t going to go away, she tells Sharon.
She tells Sharon that she was stupid, and naïve, and let herself hope which is always always dangerous. Well…she edits some bits out. Like the bits that reveal the fact that she has feelings and emotions, because that’s dangerous as well.
And Sharon hovers in between congratulations and pity, and Chrissie wants to smack her, because this isn’t something to be pitied, this baby isn’t something to feel sorry about, but then again it’s not something to be happy about either, so what is it.
“Chrissie…you have to tell Jake,” Sharon says. “You know you do.”
She’s wrong there as well though, because Chrissie doesn’t have to tell Jake. She won’t tell Jake. She won’t be like Danny, and Johnny, and everyone else, and hold a gun to his head, and drag him back to her, and make him give things up for her, for some outdated idea of honour and duty.
Also, she is selfish. She doesn’t want him to come back for a baby. She wants him to come back for her, and she wants to know that is his only reason.
**
But eventually she does, because it’s showing now, just a little, and people will begin to notice and Alfie isn’t that self-involved, and Jake can’t hear about it from someone else, so she has to tell him.
She takes the little folded square of paper out of her drawer that Alfie had given her, a row of numbers scrawled out messily, with J&D written above them. (As if she cares about Danny. Why should she care about Danny when it was Danny who took him away from her? That’s unfair she knows, but she still thinks it.)
She takes the phone into her bedroom, sits on her bed, and tries not to think about the short time he was lying beside her, because that’s what got her here in the first place.
“The number you have called is no longer in service.”
It should not hurt the way it does. As far as Jake is concerned, he has no obligation to her, nothing that ties them together.
But it feels like a betrayal. He has always been there, even when she pushed him away. And now the one time she is reaching out for him, he is nowhere to be found.
Hope you like it.