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It’s nearly midnight when Abby steps in the front door and stomps her feet on the rug, ridding them of residual snow and slush. The cold and snow that have stuck around after last week’s nor’easter have been giving her more Minnesota vibes than Massachusetts, and she’s officially over it. She leaves her boots on the mat next to Luka’s and Joe’s, shucks her coat off and lets her bag fall to the floor, too tired to deal with it before the morning.
Trudging up the stairs, she pushes Joe’s bedroom door open slowly and pads quietly to his bed, sitting on the edge of it next to her son. Joe sleeps like his father, dead to the world, his arms flung out wide and his mouth open just slightly. She watches him for a while in the gentle glow from his nightlight, wondering when his legs got to be so impossibly long. She reaches out and traces a finger over his ear, brushes her knuckles across his cheek that’s only recently lost most of its baby-face chub, much to her simultaneous pride and slight, stinging grief. Leaning over, she presses a kiss to the soft skin just beside his ear, his too-long hair that she adores and is loathe to cut tickling her nose. “Love you, kiddo,” she whispers, standing up and tucking his blanket closer around him before leaving his room with the door cracked slightly, and heading for the master bedroom.
Shutting the door behind her, she pauses, listening for Luka’s even breaths before she makes her way to her dresser, exchanging her slacks and blouse for a pair of flannel pants and a t-shirt mostly by feel in the darkened room. In their ensuite bathroom she pees, brushes her teeth, and briefly considers taking a shower to warm up. The thought is short-lived, though, after a jaw-cracking yawn and a critical glance in the mirror at the bags under her eyes, and instead she exits the bathroom, shuffles over to her side of the bed and tugs back the covers.
Her husband is a human space heater, and as she slips into bed beside him she wastes no time burrowing her body up to his warmth. Luka groans a little and mutters in his sleep and she smiles to herself as he shifts his body and snakes his arm around her back.
She takes the unconscious invitation and moves even closer, pressing her face to his bare chest, and she can’t help but chuckle a little as he squirms awake and yelps. “Abby! Christ!”
“I’m sorry,” she mumbles against him, cold nose still pressed against his skin.
“No, you’re not,” he grouses, his voice thick with sleep.
She sighs and squeezes her arms around him. “’S cold out there,” she complains, “Remind me again why we moved somewhere with nor’easters?”
“You’re from Minnesota,” he reminds her, muttering more grumpily than she feels is necessary, so she retaliates by pressing her cold toes against his shins. It earns her a hissed swear in Croatian and she smirks to herself. Sometimes, he is nothing if not predictable.
“So?” She softens the insult of her frozen attack by stretching up to brush a kiss to his neck, and he relents, dragging his fingers through her hair, making her sigh. “All that means is I did my time in the frozen north. And then in Chicago. Winters here are supposed to be milder.”
“Not by much, I don’t think,” he replies absently, his breath warm on her face as he presses a kiss to her temple. “How was your shift?”
Abby hums something noncommittal and pads her fingertips across his back. “Long. Busy. Then I ended up staying a bit longer than I’d planned…That med student I told you about, Stephen? He’s been having some issues with a couple procedures so I walked him through some scenarios, helped him practice, before coming home.”
She feels Luka smile against her forehead. “He’s got a crush on you.”
“Who, Stephen? No.” She laughs, quietly. “He’s just a kid. He’ll be a good doctor, but he overthinks. He just needs to get out of his own head and trust that he can actually do the procedures.”
“I remember telling you nearly the same thing,” Luka replies, amusement in his voice, “And then you kissed me.”
Abby snorts softly and shakes her head, tipping her chin to kiss him lightly. “He didn’t kiss me. He’s not going to kiss me. He doesn’t have a crush.”
“Sure he doesn’t.”
“What, are you jealous?” she teases, then tips her head, considering. “I mean, he did give me a box of those disgusting chalky candy hearts you like so much, but…”
Luka bursts out in laughter. “Oh, he definitely has a cr—”
Just then, it occurs to her. “Oh, shit.” Abby buries her face in his chest again and groans softly.
“See? I’m right.” He sounds smug.
She groans again and shakes her head. “No. Not Stephen. Candy hearts. It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow, isn’t it?”
“Don’t worry, you don’t have to get me anything.”
“Luka, god.” She swats at his chest, looking up at him, wincing. “Joe. His school party. He’s supposed to bring Valentines for his class, and I completely forgot.”
“Abby –”
“Do you think Walgreens will still have some if I swing by before dropoff in the morning? Shit.”
“Abby.” She looks up at her husband again, who’s shaking his head at her, amused. “Calm down. He’s all set. We picked them out at the store after school yesterday afternoon, and he wrote them out tonight. They’re already in his backpack.”
“What?” She blinks. “You did that?” Maybe Walgreens will have something appropriate for a forgetful wife to gift her ridiculously adorable, not forgetful husband. Candy hearts, maybe. IM SRY. U R GR8.
He kisses her cheek. “Well, Joe did it, really. I was just the mean dad who made him write his name on Wreck-It Ralph twenty-six times.”
“Thank you,” she squeezes him, gently. “Wreck-It Ralph, huh?”
Luka pulls away from her and pushes himself up to sit, leans to click on the lamp on his bedside table. He reaches for something on the table and holds it out to her. “He wrote one for you, too.”
Abby eases up to sit against the headboard and takes the small, folded card, smiling as she runs her thumb over the letters spelling out Mommy in her son’s first grader penmanship. Peeling off the little red heart-shaped sticker keeping the card closed, she opens it and sees, over Wreck-It Ralph’s muscled forearm, the same careful, childish printing: Josip Kovač. Her throat tightens unexpectedly and she turns her head to press her lips to Luka’s shoulder. “God, he’s so great.”
Luka squeezes her thigh, “Who, Ralph?” He chuckles as she elbows him, lightly, thankful for the levity.
“Joe. You know, our kid?” she admonishes affectionately.
“Oh, right. Him.”
Abby sighs as she rests her head on his shoulder. Though she’s drowsy again, she doesn’t want to lay back down to sleep just yet. While their schedules are decidedly less crazy now than they were in their County days, they still hit weeks like this one, from time to time, when she and Luka land on opposite shifts and barely see each other for days. Weeks like this, she lives for these moments, both of them half asleep, talking about everything and nothing at once, just being. She tightens her arm around his middle, grateful.
After several long minutes of silence, during which Abby wonders if Luka’s beginning to drift off again, he shifts and reaches towards his bedside table again. “I got you a card, too,” he says, a hint of abashed nervousness in his voice as he hands her an envelope with a small smile.
“Luka…” she sits up straighter and watches him out of the corner of her eye as she opens the envelope. God, this man.
From the envelope, she pulls out a card – mainstream flowers-and-hearts style, not Wreck-It Ralph, she notes with a smirk – and runs her thumb over the scripted for my wife on the front. She reads through the accompanying Hallmark verse about love and forever, but as she flips the card open, her eyes are drawn to Luka’s scrawled handwriting below the printed text:
A-
Blood is red,
cyanosis is blue,
I get tachycardia when I think of you.
-L
She reads it once. Then again, her lips pressed together so the laughter threatening doesn’t burst out on accident. She reads it a third time before she can look up at him, eyes sparkling in endeared amusement. “Luka. Oh my god.”
“I know it’s corny –”
She leans up to press her lips to his. “Of course it’s corny,” she mutters, finally letting her laughter out in a giggle against his mouth. “I love it.” She kisses him again. “I love you.”
“Yeah?” He looks so earnest and hopeful that she has to laugh again.
“Of course, you idiot,” she assures him, and she reaches to set his card and Joe’s on her bedside table. She slides down onto the bed then, tugging at Luka’s arm.
“Come here, and I’ll give you something to be tachycardic about,” she murmurs, attempting to make her voice low and seductive through her laughter.
Luka’s eyes widen and he grins slowly, reaching to turn the lamp off, following her and covering her body with his.
“Never say I didn’t get you something for Valentine’s Day,” she teases, as he slips his hands under her top, palms warm against her skin.
“Never,” he agrees, and she wraps her legs around him, pulling him close.
