Chapter Text
He turns over and checks his phone, clocking literally that he is now 33. Not a milestone birthday for many. But it means he has now lived more than half his life as a Cohen.
Over the past few weeks he’s thought about the significance of this more and more. How most lives are marked with family at birth. People gain younger siblings, cousins, inlaws, but how few people can remember the precise moment they sketched an entirely new family tree.
17 birthdays with the Cohens, 16 with the Atwoods. There’s something about the scale finally tipping on balance that makes him more reflective than normal, or at all, on his birthday.
After 17 years he still usually calls them Kirsten and Sandy, but he slips sometimes, forgets to hold himself back, and hears mom or dad (or more often my mom or my dad said to someone else) escape from his mouth as though he’s watching from outside his body.
At one point does it become true? Not just real, but true.
He hasn’t shared these thoughts with anyone, not even Taylor. He’s not really sure the point. The Cohens are his family and he’s never been big on birthdays anyways. Maybe he’ll never truly be a Cohen in his own head. Perhaps that wall is just too much to breakdown brick-by-brick.
Still, he finds himself unable to fall back asleep and heads downstairs to his small office, just off the kitchen.
--
“Hey,” he hears her say softly from behind. “Ryan?”
Ryan turns his head to the right, catching her silhouette lit against the cased opening. At work he mostly focuses on clean lines and modern aesthetics. While Taylor has an affinity for Parisian intricacies and ornate sculptural work. They settled on an old craftsman with cleaner lines but plenty of dental molding and inlaid floors, and without the price tag of the old Victorians.
“Yeah, just had some work pop into my head that I wanted to finish.”
A small white lie.
“Happy birthday!” She comes over, gingerly, each step he knows (from her constant dialogue) is a balancing act.
“Oh, thanks. I hadn’t really noticed.”
He knows this is another lie. And he hates lying to her, he does. It makes him anxious and he feels his chest tighten a bit as he does it. But he feels he gets to give himself the birthday gift of self preservation. Today he’ll hear stories of high school and college Ryan, because no one he sees will remember a Ryan younger than 16. He’ll have two moms cry, one over the phone as he feels the weight of her love fading further and further. There will be cake and comments about the last birthday he’ll ever get to enjoy for himself.
In a matter of weeks a new life will come into the world, already an Atwood-Cohen. He knows he has no right to be jealous of a baby, but he can’t help but wonder sometimes what it would be like to not have a life cleaved in half.
“Pretty big one, huh?”
“That’s what they say,” he pauses. “I guess no one really gets to choose how they celebrate their birthday once they have kids. Though not really sure I’ve had a lot of say in this category ever.”
“Yeah, sure.” She’s now pulled a chair over next to him, and with a hand on her belly props both ankles on his knee. Instinctively he starts massaging them, loving the relaxed half smile that creeps on her lips.
“But I was more thinking about how since you were 16 when the Cohens came into your life you’ve now spent more birthdays with them than without them.
And I don’t know, maybe that’s not a big deal to you. But I know sometimes I think about that first birthday party you threw me and all the birthdays I’ve had since have at least been lived in a life which includes you in some way. Even if we weren’t together. Even if I didn’t see you, though I always heard from you, that birthday marked something different in my life.
BR, before Ryan. And hey yours is even BC, before Cohen. Anno domani doesn’t totally work, but I can rework the Latin.
Anyways, of course some of it is that you told me you loved me that birthday so it’s obviously not one I forget but today you’ve been a Cohen for more than half your life and I think that’s pretty special.”
She finishes out of breath, their child lodged nearly up her ribcage from this position, and gives him a look. Daring him to argue.
For the remainder of his life Ryan Atwood-Cohen will never understand how she does it. He thinks, sheepishly and a tad irrationally, maybe the thing that keeps bringing him and Taylor back together is magic. Because somehow she has once again managed to divine what he’s thinking and given the gift of his own feelings back to him in an admittedly larger, wordier package.
“I know you have stalking abilities, but I genuinely wonder sometimes how you read my mind.”
He glimpses a sharp angle jab out of her stomach, reminding him of Seth once describing his own unborn child’s visible flips like the scene from Spaceballs, and tries not to laugh and she loudly groans “ooof!”
Rubbing the same, now still spot, she looks back at him, “Because Ryan, as much as you think you are a deeply complicated, brooding man of solitude, you’re also the love of my life and I am very, very good at research.”
Placing her feet back toward the ground, he lifts himself gently so as to be standing over her, catches her eye, and kisses her like they’re 19 again. Her lips wet against his hungry mouth, wanting to document this moment, this feeling of genuine love so strong it almost hurts him and caging his heart in an embrace.
Her eyes flutter open as he pulls back, a goofy, content smile mirroring each other.
“And you also talk in your sleep.”