The Nerve Interpreter, Chapter 1

Just as we’re about to exit the house, I lose control of my head for the third time: it drops to my chest, I lose contact with my headswitch, and my wheelchair slows to a stop halfway over the threshold of the door.

I let out a long breath, staring down at my lap as my head lolls, and feeling the pressure of anger building in my chest. “Joel,” I say, “can you go and get the neck brace, please?”

“Okay,” he says, but before he goes, I see his square fingertips approaching my chin, to help me tip my head up again.

“No,” I say, before he can make contact, “I’ll try myself.”

His fingers withdraw, he says “Okay” again, and I hear his footsteps receding toward my bedroom.

I stare down at my hands, one palm up and knocking its back against my thigh, the other palm down and shaking from side to side, fingers and thumb stiffly extended downward. My head bobs on my bent neck, immune to my internal litany: Up. Pick it up. Pick it up. Pick it up. It’s 8:30 in the morning, on a day that I’ve been waiting for for months, and I already feel defeated.

Joel’s footsteps approach again, just as I finally recover control of my neck and heavily lift my head back into position against the cradling headrest. In my lap, my hands twitch and tap. I swallow and watch out of the corner of my eye as Joel approaches with the padded beige brace, fits it into place around my neck and velcros it shut. His weathered face is neutral, workmanlike; he’s let a couple days’ worth of pale gray stubble grow in.

“Yup,” I say when he looks at me to check comfort. He nods, I press my head back against the center switch again, and we move off. I hate how secure the brace makes me feel.

We make it onto the 8:45 commuter rail train without further incident. Once we’re situated, Joel tucks my right arm back onto my lap – sometime in the past five minutes, it had made its way over the armrest to flop against the side of my chair – snaps my phone into its mount on my armrest, and fits my wireless earbuds into my ears. He taps the phone screen into life for me to check music selection. Currently on the display is Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues.

“Kind of on the nose, don’t you think?” I say to him, and am surprised by how much better it makes me feel to smile, even sardonically.

He snorts, smiling back briefly.

I address my phone: “Sam, please play Fiona Apple.” I watch as the display registers the command, blinks over to Fiona. Meanwhile, Joel settles back for the ride. He’s by far my favorite aide because he is so capable of silence – although my mom worries that it “exaggerates my tendencies.” What “tendencies”? I shoot back at her, whenever she tries to bring it up. It’s too convenient, how much my sharpness can still take her aback, send her retreating into hurt silence. We’re both sensitive, finely attuned to each other’s moods and motivations; but I’m the only one hard enough, self-interested enough, to use it against the other.

I know, for example, that when she goes silent in moments like that, she’s thinking: At least he’s still seeing his therapist. And I know that she’s blaming herself for not being able to make me better, happier, herself.

I register the fact that the thirty-something, pencil-skirted woman in the seat across from Joel and me has been staring at me for the past few minutes. I move my gaze to her and stare back evenly; she immediately drops her eyes away, turning red and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. I shift my chin against the neckbrace to look out the window, and watch as the fields, sparse woods, and occasional suburban houses slide by outside. Whenever I feel anticipation lifting in my chest at the thought of what might happen next, I force my breaths to stay smooth, deliberate, pressing back against anything like excitement, optimism.

Sometime later, I’ll say to Paul, or dream of saying it: What I want is a sense of containment.

We arrive at the university campus. I like it here, the luxuriously wide paths cutting smoothly through well-tended lawns, the elms and oaks rustling overhead. It’s especially nice during the summer, when students are sparse – just occasional figures glimpsed in the distance – and the columned brick buildings seem temple-like, reserved, calm. I can’t help but relax as I cruise down the slope towards the neuroscience institute; in moments like these, with the warm, humid air rushing by, the random motions of my arms and hands feel more expressive, as if they’re moving with me, not against me.

It’s a space that I inhabit only briefly, and when the sense, the impression of integrity, passes, I don’t like thinking about it.

I function in spite of my body, I told my therapist once; I planted a flag there, then, and have yet to shift it, despite her best efforts, and my mother’s, otherwise.

Spite is a sharp word, a strong word.

The neuro building is at the bottom of the hill; a pair of women drinking coffee on a bench outside watch curiously as I skim by and Joel hits the handicapped button by the glass doors for me. Despite my best efforts, my heartbeat is rising in my chest, and the motions of my hands accelerate. The back of my right hand slaps repeatedly against the base of the armrest, until Joel moves it for me so that I can hold it captive, at least temporarily, in between my thighs. I thank him with my eyes. As he hits the up button on the lobby elevator, even my feet start pawing against the footplates, my upper body slumps inwards against my chest strap, and, regretfully, I know I was right to ask Joel to get the neckbrace for me.

We ride up to the fourth floor, take a left – even with the neckbrace, it takes me a moment to roll my head enough to press against the left headswitch – and find the doctors waiting for us outside of the Field lab.

Dr. Dani Field, Ph.D., is a mechanical engineer by training, who shifted into biomechanics during her graduate degree, with a further detour into machine learning during her postdoc. I have read all of this on her lab website, over and over again, clicked on each of her academic publications, even read each of her three students’ bios, examined their photos, too; she has a small lab, a young lab, I’ve inferred. She’s a little older than me, in her mid-30’s: a small, wiry woman with a small, square face, large dark brown eyes, sparse freckles, crinkly light-brown hair pulled back into a little tuft of a ponytail.

Dr. Paul Zhou is the neurologist; as an undergraduate, he stumbled into taking, and later returned to TA, a class on assistive technology, an experience that his online bio describes as “formative.” He’s a bit older than Dr. Field, maybe early 40’s at the most, a trim Asian man with an angular, tapering face, very thick dark brows, thick hair swept back. His gaze, and his posture, are intensely still. I feel a sudden sense of gravity when I see him.

“Matthew? Good morning!” Dr. Field says, giving a little wave; I recognize her pleasantly raspy voice from the couple of phone calls we’ve had. “It’s so exciting to finally meet you.”

“Good morning,” Dr. Zhou echoes, almost in a murmur.

“Good morning, Dr. Field, Dr. Zhou,” I return after a moment of struggle; if I didn’t have the neck brace, my head would be on my chest again, and my speech is more slurred than usual, my tongue thick and uncooperative. “This is my aide, Joel.” From my peripheral vision, I can see Joel nodding a hello to them. I am almost overwhelmingly nervous now. I want to say something more about how excited I am, something gracious and encouraging, but all I can do is smile back as my body flails around me; my right hand has escaped from between my legs and is now waving in large arcs in front of my face.

“Come on, let’s go into the lab,” Dr. Field says, her smile small but bright; she steps back to open the door for me. I lean back against my headswitch.

Inside is a midsize room brightly lit with fluorescent lights, the walls lined with black-topped workbenches cluttered with tools, wiring, clear plastic bins of small electrical components; textbooks and notebooks sprawl on overhead shelving. Directly facing us is a workstation with two massive-screened Apple computers and steel arms holding aloft a couple of video cameras at different angles; the cameras’ lenses point at a smaller table whose surface is covered with large-gridded graph paper. Another woman, plump, with large quantities of curly black hair, is sitting with her back to us at one of the Apple computers, setting up an array of software windows. As we come in, she glances over her shoulder, and I recognize her as Priyanka, one of Dr. Field’s three grad students. “Hi!” she says abruptly, her eyes widening, almost as if we caught her doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing.

Dr. Field puts a hand on her shoulder briefly, giving her an encouraging smile. “Matthew, this is my student Priya Chopra; she did most of the coding on the machine-learning side of things for this project, so she’s really excited to be working with you today.” Priya bobs her head, still looking nervous; I can’t tell if she’s worked up about the trial or just uncomfortable to be watching my body flail – both of my arms are waving back and forth now, at full extension – but the sense that it could genuinely just be the former puts me, relatively speaking, at ease. I remind myself that, at this point, Priya should have worked with a fair number of people who look like me.

Dr. Zhou goes to sit at the workstation with Priya, asking her a question in his almost-murmur; my gaze follows him, although Dr. Field is speaking to me now.

“Soooo…” she says, and when I look back at her hurriedly, I can tell she’s going through a mental checklist. “Let’s see. We have all of your paperwork in electronically. Great. I’m going to have to give you a bit of an orientation spiel, and I might end up repeating a lot of things we’ve already talked about, but it’s easiest for us if we know that everyone who comes in for their first trial is starting from the same page.” She looks to me for confirmation.

“Sounds good,” I say, and try to smile again through the nervousness, uncomfortably aware of the constant rustling and creaking as my body shakes my wheelchair, the occasional slaps as my hands or arms make contact with an armrest or my own body.

“So today,” she continues, “we’re going to trial your left arm. That –“ she points at the small graph-paper-covered table in front of the computers, “- is going to be your ‘landing pad.’ Can I ask you to move to a position where think you’d be able to rest your arm there reasonably comfortably, and then take off your shirt so we can get you prepped?”

I appreciate that she asks me instead of Joel. After I’ve maneuvered my chair into position alongside the table, I give him a nod, and he approaches, removes my neck brace, undoes my chest strap, gently captures my flailing arms to thread them behind him as best as can be managed. He leans me forward against his chest until he can reach behind me to grasp the bottom of my t-shirt and pull it up over my head. My arms are so nuts that I almost want to laugh as he patiently extracts them from the sleeves, but I can’t because I’m oppressed by my awareness of how politely Priya, and Dr. Zhou, are not-watching all of this happen.

Finally Joel lays me back against the seat, straps me in again, and I try to compose myself, think about a bigger picture than my exposed self, my thin, slumping torso. For science, Matthew, I think, only a little ironically.

Joel moves his hand to the neck brace that he’s set aside and looks at me questioningly. I ask Dr. Field, “Is it okay to have my neck brace on, or will it get in the way?”

“Hmmm… let’s start with it on and see how far we can get. Sounds good?”

“Sounds good.” Joel puts it back on for me, I thank him, and he moves back to sit in a chair that Dr. Field pulls out for him.

“Dr. Zhou will prep your arm, now. And I’ll give you the spiel.”

“Great.” I fight to take deep breaths. I think about what might or might not happen next. I think about whether my life might change, or not; and if so, how much, how soon. I think about whether it would be enough.

Continue to Chapter 2
Continue to Chapter 3 (end)

Conclusion to Santa Crush

So I'm posting the final chapter of Santa Crush, for those of you who didn't/couldn't purchase the full version online.  Thank you SO much for all the comments, supports, and reviews!  You guys are amazing, and I'm so thrilled you liked my little story.  So here is:

Chapter 7

Next Sunday, I'm going to start posting a brand new story!  Woo! 

Sorry for the delay in posting the end of "Christmas Crush"

I first want to say I'm so sorry I haven't posted the final chapter for "Christmas Crush".  I've been really sick for the past week, pretty much stuck in bed with a fever and headaches.  I thought I was getting better a few days ago, but then I overdid it during a family visit (someone I hadn't seen in a long time) and I ended up back in bed for a couple of days.

I'm getting better and I really wanted to get the chapter posted today, but a friend and I are hosting a New Years Eve party together tomorrow and don't have time to sit down and write until that's over with.  Right now I'm just immensely relieved that I'm feeling good enough to do that and help my friend with the preparations.

So, Happy New Year - and see you in 2018 for the conclusion of "Christmas Crush".

-Mille

PS! I have plans for a sequel, but before start writing that I want to finish my unfinished stories here, "The Outsiders" and "Unexpected".

The Nerve Interpreter, Chapter 2

Dr. Zhou moves towards me with a bin of materials, glancing down to sort through them with one hand. He sits on a wheeled stool on the other side of the small table from me, puts on a pair of latex gloves, and looks for my permission before leaning forward to grasp my left wrist gently with one gloved hand. I try not to be too obvious about letting out a shaky breath as he coaxes my left arm into position on the table, easily containing its flailing. “Please let me know if I do anything that makes you uncomfortable,” he says in his soft voice, making direct eye contact with me for the first time since greeting me. I blink in confirmation, and he starts pulling materials out from the bin, setting them in order.

“So you,” Dr. Field says, “are going to be our first trial with a subject whose impairment is more on the severe end of the spectrum.” Her voice is matter-of-fact, yet warm. “We’ve seen great results, really exciting ones, with folks who came to us with lower levels of impairment, and those trials in turn gave us loads of data for improving Priya’s software.”

“Is it all people with athetoid?” I ask. I had been curious about this ever since I’d first submitted my answers to the detailed questionnaire about my mix of symptoms, range of movement, range of control.

“It’s a mix,” she says after a pause to think. “Mainly we’re looking for people without fixed contractures, because that really limits our ability to see short-term improvement, unfortunately – although obviously it’s something we’d be excited to work on in the longer term, restoring function…

“So, relative to the general population of people with cerebral palsy, people with athetosis, even ataxia, are probably going to end up overrepresented among our subjects,” she concludes, “since spasticity goes along with contractures so much more.”

Joel lets out a “hm” of interest.

Dr. Zhou signals to catch my attention, and shows an alcohol-soaked gauze pad to me in warning – I catch its sharp smell – before he starts briskly wiping down my whole arm, even my shoulder, with it. I blow out a puff of air when the chill of the evaporating alcohol hits and watch as the hairs on my arm stand up; my arm jerks back and forth weakly at the elbow, the only motion available since Dr. Zhou is still firmly anchoring my wrist.

“We can turn on a space heater for you if you need it,” he says, motioning to indicate one tucked under the table.

“That might be nice at some point,” I admit.

He nods and picks up a black Sharpie and a small plastic instrument, about the size of an electric razor, with two metal prongs: “I’m going to be locating major innervation sites now.” I nod against my neck brace, and as Dr. Field asks me about my physical condition today, and tells me about the data they’ll be collecting – video, nerve conduction, qualitative reports from me – Dr. Zhou proceeds to press the pronged instrument along my collarbone, shoulder, and arm, marking occasional sites of contact with Sharpie dots. Some places, he follows up by attaching a little electrode. Others, some even on my hand, he marks with round, bright blue stickers – “That’s for motion analysis of the videos later,” Priya surprises me by putting in. She’s finished up at the computer, and has scooted over on another stool to watch the preparations.

I’m surprised by the realization that at this point, my self-consciousness has drained away. I feel centered and expectant. Dr. Zhou’s methodical work, Dr. Field’s questions and descriptions have been absorbing; the underlying excitement and anticipation in the room is palpable, and infectious. As if aware that it’s not in the spotlight, my right arm has calmed and lies limply in my lap, shaking only occasionally.

“Priya,” Dr. Field says, “while Dr. Zhou is getting the device in place, do you want to give Matthew a rundown of how your program works?”

Priya’s face lights up; “Sure,” she says.

“So you can think of it as two parts, or two functions,” she begins, scooting forward on her stool till she’s more comfortably in my field of view; I give a small smile of appreciation. “One is subtractive, a filter. It looks at the nerve impulses that your brain is trying to send, and kind of cleans up –“ she makes a brisk sweeping gesture “— all the things that are confusing or off-base.”

“Okay,” I say, glancing down to my left arm, which Dr. Zhou has temporarily released; it flops and twists at random against the tabletop. There’s a lot of confusing things going on there.

Priya’s eyes have remained on my face. “So the filter part does its best to make sure the confusing signals don’t actually get executed. If you know how noise-cancelling headphones work, it’s actually kind of similar…”

“Destructive interference?” I guess, reaching for high school physics – wave forms colliding and cancelling each other out.

“Oh, yes, exactly!” She looks delighted, and I get to feel good about myself. She adds, “Well, it’s a bit different with nerve signals instead of sound waves – and it’s called ‘collision annihilation,’ which I think sounds much more exciting.”

I smile; it does sound like something that would happen in outer space.

“Okay,” Priya says, visibly pulling herself back on-track when it’s clear she’d love to dive more into the details. “The second part of the program is additive – it strengthens. After the filter has done its work, it takes what’s there, it identifies your intent, basically – “ she sets one fist out to symbolize “intent” – “and reinforces it.” Now she clasps her other hand over the fist, building on it. “And that’s based on all the data we’ve collected from subjects with no impairment. So,” she sums up with a shy grin, “ideally, no more bad signal, all good signal. And the best part is that with Dr. Field and Dr. Zhou’s hardware, we can do it all noninvasively.”

I swallow thickly, pause for a moment. “I’m getting so excited that I don’t really know what to say,” I say finally, with a level of honesty that I would usually avoid. That gets a chuckle from most everyone in the room; Dr. Zhou gives me a surprisingly broad smile as he leans forward and begins strapping a set of small black devices to my shoulder, one just beneath the end of my collarbone, the other in a corresponding position on the back of my shoulder. They’re unexpectedly heavy, and I feel a chill as an array of blunt metal prongs in their surfaces make contact with my skin. I imagine that I feel a tingle of electrical current.

“This is a weaker version of what we would be able to do,” he puts in, “if we actually implanted electrodes. But, obviously, there are trade-offs there.”

Do it to me, I want to say. Give me implants. Fix me. But I say nothing.

I can just barely see over the edge of my neck brace that, to finish arranging the devices, Dr. Zhou will have to harness them around my chest, too. He looks to me. “Do you mind if I unstrap you, or would you prefer if Joel…?”

“You can do it,” I say boldly, making eye contact. He looks at me for a moment, during which I can’t read his expression, before he carefully opens my chest strap, leans me forward to secure the devices’ black harness around my back, and then redoes the strap, settling me back in place.

“Okay,” he says, extending a couple of long leads from each of the devices and handing them to Priya, who eagerly plugs them into what looks like a hard drive; the leads from the white electrodes scattered across my arm, he plugs into yet another device. I’d feel nervous about the assortment of trailing wires if it weren’t clear that they’re long enough that even I wouldn’t be able to yank them out.

“Okay, one more thing.” Dr. Zhou turns back, fixes his dark gaze on me. “Matthew, we’re going to be asking you to try a lot of movement with your left arm. Would it be more comfortable, less distracting for you, if we secured your right arm?”

I grimace. “Probably, yeah.”

“Okay. We have a cuff, here –” he shows me a broad Velcro strap.

“That should be fine,” I say shortly, and he moves around the table to cuff my right arm to its armrest at the wrist.

Having my arms strapped is actually something that I’ve gone back and forth on, in my life; for the past couple of years, I’ve been going without, in a concession to the ongoing campaign to convince me to act like I don’t entirely resent my body.

“I think,” Dr. Zhou says, “we’re ready to go.”

“Oh, my,” Dr. Field says, and she actually clasps her hands together with excitement; I kind of think that I might do that too, if I could. Joel leans forward in his seat, resting his elbows on his knees.

“Everything’s ready to record,” Priya says, the shy grin back on her face.

“Okay, okay,” says Dr. Field, pushing back tendrils of her hair excitedly, and stepping forward to stand next to Dr. Zhou across the table from me. “Matthew, we’re going to start with some baseline recordings of your natural movement.” It’s not natural, I want to say, but again don’t. “You’ll see a line of large black dots on the graph paper on that table. Can you please do your best to line your arm up with those dots? Whatever you can do; there’s no ‘wrong’ here, we’re just collecting information.”

I take a deep breath. Once more, my heart is pounding. While finishing up with the devices, Dr. Zhou had moved my thin left arm – now spotted with white electrodes and blue stickers – back to my lap. Let’s go, I say to myself, and seize the fraction of control available to me to lift that arm towards the table.

It arrives above the table and gets stuck there, flailing back and forth horizontally about a dozen times before I can convince it to flop to the table’s surface, where it continues shaking back and forth, at least roughly centered above the axis marked out by the black dots. “Is this what you’re looking for?” I say, trying not to sound too sarcastic.

“Yes,” Dr. Field says, “that’s great, thank you. Now I’m going to ask you to try to touch each of the large red dots that you see at the corners of the table.”

Again I try, and manage to sort of swipe the back of my hand over the first dot, but get stuck there, and can’t for the life of me coax my hand, or arm, to shift to the other corner; at this point my arm might as well not belong to me. “Not happening,” I say tensely, watching my arm thump against the first dot.

“That’s fine,” Dr. Field says, her voice soft and neutral. “We’ll do a few more of these –“ and she leads me through about a half a dozen more exercises, while Dr. Zhou explains that they’re isolating horizontal motion, vertical motion, motions of the hand, elbow, etc. “Isolating” seems like a more than generous way of characterizing it when my body is involved; it can’t have been more than five minutes, but I’m straining both my concentration and my meager physical endurance to the limit trying to accomplish anything resembling what they’re asking for. The more they ask of me, the sloppier and sloppier my motions grow, increasingly random; even my right arm strains and twists against its Velcro cuff.

“Whew,” says Dr. Field finally, “do you need a break?”

“Yes,” I admit, relaxing back against my chair.

“Would you like the space heater on?” Dr. Zhou adds, and I look at him gratefully, suddenly aware that I’m in an uncomfortable state of being both chilled and sweaty with tension and exertion, and conscious of the strange sensation of the devices pressing into my shoulder heavily from both sides.

“Yes, please.”

I hear him flick the switch on with his foot, and I relax further as the heat washes over me, drying the sweat on my exposed chest.

“You’re doing great,” he says, something that I would normally bristle at – I hate being praised for things that shouldn’t be difficult – but here, from him, I can’t be irritated about it.

“Thanks,” I say. “Would you mind moving my arm back to my lap for me?”

He stands up and shifts it carefully for me, and before I realize it I’ve closed my eyes. Just for half a minute, I tell myself; I need to compose myself.

“Okay,” I say, and open my eyes again. “Thanks. What’s next?”

“Next,” Dr. Field says, “we try the device.”

My heart skips. Externally, all I do is nod a little bit against my neck brace.

“We’re going to take a staged approach,” she says, looking to Priya to continue.

Priya explains, her hands already moving to the computer’s keyboard, “It’ll help you acclimate, and it’ll tell us how well each part of the program is working for you. So, we’re going to start by switching on just the first part, the filter.”

“The clean-up crew?” I suggest.

“Right.” She smiles. “We’ll need your arm on the table again. Would you like…” she looks to Dr. Zhou, as if he’s the only one who has permission to touch me.

“Yes please,” I say, and he leans over again to lift my arm to the tabletop. By my standards, it’s basically still now, from exhaustion, just lifting once in a while to knock limply against the table.

“Okay,” says Priya, “ready? You’re going to feel –”

“What will I feel?” I say hurriedly, at the same time.

After a nervous chuckle, she regroups and says, looking embarrassed, “Actually we’ve been told it’s hard to explain. The range of descriptions we’ve heard has gone from, um, ‘very quiet’ to ‘alive.’” She pauses to let me think about it. “But you will definitely feel a bit of electrical current, and the units –” she points at the devices on my shoulder “— will heat up a little.”

“Uhhh… well, okay. Shoot, then, I guess.”

She clicks her mouse, and I brace myself.

There’s a little electrical zing on both sides of my shoulder, and a sensation like a trickle of cold water running down the inside of my arm, all the way down to each of my fingertips. “Huh,” I can’t help saying, and then I feel something I’ve never felt before.

For the first time in my waking life, I feel my left arm go still. This is not just a pause, a breath in between one random gesture and another; it’s really still.

It’s as if someone has been constantly been playing, during every waking moment of my life, an annoying radio talk show somewhere in the background, sometimes loud, sometimes quiet, sometimes even silent for five or ten or fifteen seconds, but the chattering voices are always, always ready to cut in again, shatter the silence.

I wait. And I wait. I hear a full minute tick by on the clock on the wall. And my arm doesn’t move. It doesn’t move.

For the first time in my life, I feel a sense of control.

When I realize that, when the thought crystallizes, a bright surge of adrenaline, endorphins, something, goes straight to my head, and my vision almost fades out white. I have to catch my breath.

“Matthew?” Dr. Zhou is saying softly. “What are you feeling?”

I take another breath. “Control,” I say finally, and blink until I can focus on their faces again.

They’re all watching me, Dr. Zhou, Dr. Field, Priya, and Joel. Most of them have one hand pressed to their mouth, and I have to laugh, embarrassed, giddy.

“You can put another check in the ‘quiet’ adjective box for me, too,” I add. I take slow breaths through my nose. I just sit there, feeling, feeding every ounce of attention into my left arm. It feels calm, ready; I repeat that impression out loud, too.

After another moment, it’s as if everyone in the room lets out a collective breath; we’re ready for what will come next. Dr. Field shifts from foot to foot, links her hands and stretches them out in front of her. Her eyes glint with excitement. Dr. Zhou watches me gravely, the side of one hand still pressed against his mouth. He leans forward slightly.

This time, Dr. Zhou takes me through the same series of exercises that Dr. Field first asked of me, to see what I can do under my own power, minus the effects of my athetoid. Though adrenaline has sent a new jolt of energy through me, my movements are weak, tentative, uncoordinated. My arm moves limply and mostly from the shoulder. I’ve never had more occasion to appreciate exactly how little muscle mass I have, or how unused I am to using my elbow or wrist.

And my fingers remain loosely curled; I still can’t control them, open or close them; my brain just can’t see a way to do it. (Can even the second part of Priya’s program fix that?)

But I can move. I can move – of my own volition. Most of the targets, I hit after only a couple of tries. And for the first time in my life, every reminder of what I can’t do – it expands, explodes into a hope of what I could do, if I had the device, if I had time, if I had practice and physical therapy...

“That was great,” Dr. Zhou says at the end, and he sits back and runs both of his hands through his hair, the most spontaneous gesture I’ve seen him make so far. He’s not exactly smiling, but, like Dr. Field, there’s a light in his eyes.

I say nothing, still just feeling. I feel flushed, and my pulse runs quickly and lightly inside of me. I want more.

It can’t be soon enough that Priya says, “Ready for Phase 2?”

I say something that people find funny, because they laugh, but I’ve forgotten it as soon as I say it, because my mind is so bent on what must come next.

Priya turns back to the computer. I watch her as she types a couple of brief lines into some kind of terminal window, hits enter a couple of times. That’s all she does. But she tells me that it’s running, the second part of the program.

I sit and stare down at my arm, extended palm-up on the tabletop, looking pale and profoundly unnatural with all of the circles marking it, the thin trailing white and blue wires. My fingers are loosely curled inwards.

I don’t feel any different; the devices, heavy and heated on my shoulder, don’t feel any different. There’s no new jolt of electrical sensation; my arm doesn’t quiver with new energy.

But I sit and think about what it would be like to open my hand. I think about the thousand, thousand times that I’ve watched other people do it – gesturing, reaching, waving, stretching, patting, resting – and I think about what it might feel like to do it.

And then I do: I do open my hand. I watch as my fingers stretch out, all together, coordinated, smooth. I let them stay like that for a few seconds, feeling the subtle tension running up from the tendons in my wrist out through the core of each finger.

I watch as they – I – close my fingers again, bring them in slowly to make a fist. I watch as my thumb pulls in alongside those fingers, wraps around them, because I want it to.

I’ve been holding it back for what must be the past hour now, but that, finally, is when I start crying.

Back to Chapter 1

Forward to Chapter 3 (end)

The Nerve Interpreter, Chapter 3 (end)

“People love telling you that cerebral palsy isn’t progressive,” I tell Dr. Zhou. “What is progressive is having a shitty, weak body.” We’re sitting at the edge of a shingle beach, at a table for two, under a sky burgeoning with soft grey clouds. The green-grey sea moves with fitful cross-currents from the wind. I hold the stem of my wineglass precisely between thumb and fingertip, rolling it back and forth slowly.

“That’s true, if to varying extents, for all of us,” Dr. Zhou – Paul – says. His eyes are as serious as always, but there’s a hint of a smile on his lips. “I still remember what the page of my high school biology textbook looked like, where I first had it pointed out to me that we start dying as soon as we start living.”

None of this is real. This is what I imagine for myself, somewhere between sleeping and waking. This is what I do for myself.

“Some of us less slowly than others,” I remind him.

He watches me as the wind moves his hair, and I continue. “I didn’t used to need a chest strap. Or the neck brace.” Since this is a dream, I don’t need to say these things to him as if I need to prove myself; except there is still a piece of that of that in there.

“Two years ago, I got some kind of viral infection. On top of the headaches and fever and shit, I started having trouble swallowing. I should have gotten more scared than I did, because within a couple of days I had to be intubated, the works.

“Like two days after getting out of the hospital for the first time, I aspirated food and ended up with pneumonia. Back into the hospital. Altogether I was basically in the hospital for seven months. I lost like twenty, twenty-five pounds. By the end of the year, I’d lost – of course – all of the clients I was doing freelance work for.

“When I finally got clear of it, I had to learn how to swallow again.

“After all of that, I guess I should have been glad that all I lost, physically, was some trunk stability, but I couldn’t be. I just felt – feel – so fucking done with optimism, with the idea of gratitude. It takes a shitton of energy, it honestly takes discipline, and I literally didn’t have it in me anymore. When you’re not even thirty, you’ve never been able to move yourself in your life, and you’ve just spent a quarter of a year with a tube down your throat, it’s just… why, you know?“

Paul is watching me gravely, his face very still. His silence feels heavy. I imagine the salt air moving across my skin, with a nervous briskness that suggests a rainstorm coming soon.

After I stop talking, I watch as Paul’s eyes move over my face, in a way that people’s eyes almost never do: normally I get either panicked glances away or the horrified/fascinated stare. He’s looking me over slowly, intently, a slight furrow – concern? curiosity? – between his brows; I have the sense that he’s looking not at me, but for something in me.

“Why haven’t you stopped?” Paul says, finally.

“What?”

“Why haven’t you given up?”

I pretend like I didn’t know what he meant the first time he asked the question, like I’m not staging all of this as a way to hold myself and my coward’s tenets up against someone whom I imagine on the thinnest of evidence to be a better person than me, a brighter person, a deeper and stronger person.

“Oh. Inertia,” I say; it’s something I’ve said to myself over and over, a talismanic word, but one I’ve never dared to voice for fear of the questions it would raise. Saying it out loud, even in a dream, carries a sense of release, of daring, that is almost sensual. “I’m just waiting until I run out of momentum.” My voice rises at the end, an involuntary questioning note.

Paul responds to the implicit doubt. “But now you have hope,” he says, with exactly the right shading of skeptical humor.

“The h-word. Tell me again what you told me yesterday when I asked you about the device.”

“After the trial, you asked me,” he says obediently, but with a challenging glint in his eye, “when it would be commercially available.”

“And?” I watch as the wind lifts his hair again.

“And I said we weren’t sure. Five years, maybe six.”

“Five years,” I say, “is a long time.” And I imagine releasing my wine glass to gesture demonstratively at myself.

“For someone like you,” he says, voicing my implication.

“For someone like me. It’s perfect now. Why won’t you let me have it?” I could have said us, pretended I was asking on behalf of everyone like me, but like optimism, generosity is beyond me.

“The device? It’s not perfect. Maybe in your memory it is.” He’s diverging from the script

“It was,” I insist. I show him: again I extend my arm in a single smooth gesture, extend my fingers elegantly at the end of the arc. “I remember what every moment of that feels like. You wouldn’t goddamn understanding what perfect is.”

My brain is spinning its wheels; it doesn’t know where to go with this anymore. I feel the pull of anxiety, and for a sudden sick moment I’m back in myself, awake, and I feel it with horror as my limbs wake up, too. One of my arms flops across my chest, writhing. I inhale deeply and force myself to relax, I reach again for the slightly woozy sense of drifting that I know will take me back to that early-morning state of half-dream. I relax away from my body.

I’m back; I slip again into the grey day, the sound of the wind and the ocean, the way that I want Paul to look at me.

“But you’ll do it,” Paul is saying, as if our conversation has continued in my absence.

“I’ll do what?” I put all the spite that I can into the question. I don’t want to make this easy for him.

“You’ll come back. You’ll do another trial, and another one.” His brown eyes are fixed on mine. “As many as you can come back for, you will. Even though…”

“Even though.” Again, I load it with spite.

“Even though it breaks everything, every way that you think about yourself.”

“By?”

“By giving you what you thought you always wanted.”

“Yes.” I could wake up now, if I chose to, I could see if it’s time to call Joel in.

“But you’ll come back.”

His eyes are like a physical weight on me. Again, outside, I feel my body start to writhe around me, the calm burning center of me, but I stay here.

“You’ll come back,” he says a final time. And I say, “Yes.”

“This can’t hold,” I say, as he finally, finally moves his hand across the table to place it on mine.

“But you’ll come back,” he says. And I let myself edge toward wakefulness.

***

Back to Chapter 1

Back to Chapter 2

New story! Lobster, with a straw

Hi everyone,
I'm back with a new story: Lobster, with a straw! It's a novella about a quad CP guy and I hope you'll all enjoy it. Special thanks to Annabelle for her great advice!
I plan to post regularly, probably on Saturdays as soon as it is free again (?). I can't promise to be able to post next week, though, but I'll give my best. With that... here's Chapter 1. Let me know what you think!
Cheers,
Lovis

Chapter 4 of Christmas Crush is up!

Here's the penultimate chapter of this little story.  I'll try to have the final chapter ready Saturday, but no promises as I'll be pretty busy tomorrow and most of Saturday.  But Sunday will be quiet, so if I don't manage to publish it Saturday you'll get it Christmas Day.🎅🏻🎄  (Since Devo Girl announced taking a short hiatus I assume it'll be okay for me to publish Monday.  If not I'll wait 'til Tuesday.)

Christmas Crush - Chapter 4

New Devo Diary

Hey everyone, new Devo Diary here!

Devo Diary Chapter 37: Warren

In this chapter, I go on a date with another AB guy my friends have been trying to set me up with for a while. But don't worry, there is still more Mantis in this chapter too.

I'm sorry to say that with this chapter I have now posted everything I've written so far and with the holidays I might not have much writing time. So after this week, Devo Diary is going on hiatus, hopefully not for too long. It's been great building up so much momentum, and I've really appreciated all your kind comments. There is so much more to this story, and I'm looking forward to sharing it with you in the new year.

Table of Contents

Santa Crush update

A new update of Santa Crush!

Chapter 6

Table of Contents

Chapter 3 of "Christmas Crush" is up!

So sorry for the delay.  I thought the "just-before-Christmas" days wouldn't be very busy this year. I was wrong and I've been struggling to juggle to write between work, family, Christmas shopping and a couple of pre-Christmas parties this past week.

Here's chapter 3 of Christmas Crush.  There will be one or two more chapters, depending on what my schedule permits.  I will do my best to finish at December 23rd as intended.

No "Christmas Crush" today - stay tuned Saturday!

I had intended to post a new chapter of "Christmas Crush" today, but life has been crazy this past week and today has been, unexpectedly, packed from I woke up until well into the afternoon and tonight I've been out with friends, a pre-Christmas dinner that was planned months ago. I've had not time to work the chapter that I thought I would have between work and the dinner.

At the moment it's getting close to 3:30 am here in Norway and I'm tired and just want to get some sleep.  So sleep is the plan for right now since I have to get up by 7 am... Ugh!

The chapter is outlined and 80+% written.  It just needs a couple of more paragraphs and some editing to be ready for posting.  I have tomorrow afternoon off and I promise to get that done so I can it for you Saturday.

So sorry for the delay!

The Consolation Prize—Epilogue

The house rose up in front of them as Will squeezed the accelerator to push the car the last bit of the way up the hill. The front door flew open just as Will put the Volvo in park and turned off the engine. Glancing at his wife, her wild hair the same as it had been the day he met her at Cory’s wedding—pre-hair and makeup—and her freckled face glowing, he took a moment to appreciate everything that had happened between them. Noticing his gaze, she shifted her face sideways and chuckled, reaching for his finally free hand and squeezing. Slowly she rubbed her thumb over his knuckles.

“Ready?” she asked, voice gentle, cocking her head slightly.

“Ready,” he replied with confidence, squeezing her hand back.

Ari stood wrapped in a thick white sweater, skinny blue jeans, and black boots. Her dark hair was pulled up and away from her face and she was all white teeth and smile. Scottie remembered the first time she met this woman—this woman who had become a surrogate mother to her in the past few years—and felt a shiver of that old anxiety. It was stale and foreign, and she swept it away as she swept her hair off her face. Ari waved from the doorway as John bounded down the steps to help with the bags.

Scottie opened the passenger door and John took her into a tight hug.

“How are ya, sweetheart?” he asked gruffly, pulling away from her and running a hand over his face, scratching at the few days of stubble there.

“We had a quiet ride,” she replied, smirking and glancing behind her at the two sleeping forms in the back seat, heads lolling to the sides, faces wiped and peaceful. She saw traces of Will in both of their tiny faces, and it made her heart flutter every time she looked at them. His smile on Leo. His blue eyes on Tucker. She was fairly certain her freckles would make an appearance on at least one of them, and she’d slowly grown to accept that. They were oddly growing on her. It only took a little over three decades.

“Bags first then?” John asked.

“Will actually need’s his chair,” Scottie replied, remembering that it now, most of the time, had to be stashed in the trunk rather than the back seat.

“Trunk?” John asked without hesitation. Scottie nodded, smilingly at his willingness, thankful for the shift in attitude.This wasn’t the same John she’d met all those years ago.

“We’ve actually got the boys,” Scottie added, walking to the back-seat door. Will had the front door open and was leaning out talking to his dad as John pulled out the pieces, and instead of bringing each part one by one to Will, he began clicking them into place.

“Well, would you look at that,” Scottie commented, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Will, he sent me a MeTube video of how to do this,” John replied, his face crinkled in concentration. Will burst out laughing.

“Youtube, dad, Youtube,” Will chided as John clicked the second wheel in place and arranged the seat cushion on the wheelchair.

“Here you go,” John replied, sliding the now assembled wheelchair over to Will. “Inspect my handy work.” Will did a mock inspection, eying the thing from top to bottom. 

“Well, now I know that MeTube is the way to get through to you,” Will teased as he tilted it sideways to attach something on the bottom before he did his transfer. It was a little gadget—a single motorized wheel—that he’d gotten a few weeks back that had proven to be a game changer—especially when he had one of the boys riding on his lap. Scottie knew one of Will’s biggest fears was dropping one of them when he had to take back his hands to push his wheels forward. Plus, as they’d gotten older, who got to ride on Daddy’s lap had become a full-blown clash of the teeny tiny Titans.

“Glad I asked for the video then!” John exclaimed, “I’m a visual learner, always have been.” He was beaming.

“Glad you asked for the video, too.” Will said quietly. He locked the wheels and lifted himself up, dropped his butt into his chair, and was arranging his feet on the footplate when his dad snaked his arm around his chest, giving him a half hug from behind..

“You look great, kid,” he commented as he gave Will a thorough once over. Will shook his head and rolled his eyes as he pushed back and slammed the driver side door. Scottie came around the front of the car holding a half-asleep Tucker. He was rubbing his half-lidded bright blue eyes with his tiny fat fists and his lips were adorably pouted. He had Scottie’s wild hair and it stuck up in every direction. Will couldn’t believe that Tucker was his son. It blew his mind day in and day out. When they’d told him he was paralyzed, it was one of the first questions he’d had. Please, he’d begged, please tell me that I can still have kids. The doctor had smiled, albeit sadly, and told him that it would be complicated, but there were ways.

When they decided to start trying, Will wanted to be as up front and transparent about everything as he could. Scottie had married him knowing that this would most likely be part of the deal, and as he expected, she was wonderful about everything. Beyond wonderful. It was less about what he had expected, and more about what he had hoped, rather. And Scottie had been nothing short of an angel through the whole invitro process. As Will put it, his sperm had forgotten how to swim, but they still acted the same as sperm. If they could get where they needed to be, they could do what they were supposed to do. And thus, fraternal twins, Tucker and Leo, were born on a blustery morning, two years ago, this past September. And since then, their lives had never been quite the same.

Will remembered the first time he held Leo as he reached in and unbuckled him from his car seat. He was slightly more awake than Tucker and he gave his dad a lazy sleepy smile and reached for him. His eyes were almost brown, but had a greenish tint like Scottie’s. His hair was straighter, but dark like Will’s own. It was so weird seeing tiny versions of themselves right in front of them. And now that they were talking more and more, they were becoming little people.

“Ride wif daddy,” he mumbled as Will pulled him onto his lap and situated him between his legs.

“Remember what we talked about, Leo?” Will asked the toddler who was currently clapping and slapping his hands on Will’s unfeeling thighs.

“Howld on tite, howld on tite,” Leo babbled and giggled as Will kissed the top of his head and let go of his son to push his chair back enough to shut the door.

“You sure you’ve got him?” John asked impulsively, but had the decency to look embarrassed right away when Will shot him a sharp look.

“I’m sure,” Will replied tightly.

“Not that we weren’t sure before,” Scottie slid in smoothly, shifting Tucker’s weight slightly higher on her hip, and gesturing to Will. “But Will got this little gadget that attaches to the bottom of the chair, called a Smart Drive, and with one push of his wheels…” She trailed off as she motioned speed by shooting her hand out in front of her and making a whistling noise.

“Is that so?” John asked curiously, cocking his head. Will was still slightly frustrated that his dad had questioned his parenting abilities—frustrated there was even a reason to do so—but he took a deep breath and nodded, forcing himself to smile. His dad had just assembled his chair perfectly—something Will would trust almost no one outside of Scottie to do, and something he never thought he’d see John do, so he let go of his irritation. His dad was trying—trying hard—and that was one enormous step.

“Watch this,” he said simply, then turned down to check on Leo who was holding onto his dad’s legs with both his rollie pollie arms, which had been stuffed into a blue sweater. Will couldn’t tell how tight his grip was, but it looked tight, and Will wasn’t going to let go of him for long, or even be going that fast. “Ready, Leo?” Leo tilted his head to look up at Will a nodded seriously, his eyes wide as dimes.

“I want to ride wif daddy,” Tucker huffed, burying his face in Scottie’s shoulder.

“See? I’m chop liver over here,” Scottie joked with John, who laughed and shook his head. He remembered there had always been a favorite parent when the kids were little, but it was a shifting pendulum, destined to swing back and forth as long as both parents kept being parents.

“Okay,” Will said as he gave his wheels a strong push. Gliding across the path to the front steps, he lifted his hands off the push rims and wrapped them around Leo. It was a good feeling to be able to move and hold his son at the same time.

“Well would you look at that!” Ari trilled as Will came upon the permanent ramp his parents had installed before Scottie and Will’s reception at the house. It had been one of the wedding gifts they’d given them, and though Will still believed it was many years too late, he was touched that his father finally understood what it meant to him. This ramp was considerably less steep than the metal one, and Will gave himself another push, took the turn smoothly, and pushed again, finding himself on the porch almost seamlessly. 

“Gam gam,” Leo tittered, reaching his arms out for Ari, who swept him up and smothered him with kisses. His giggles were so rich and welcome. Scottie leaned down and gave Will a tender kiss on the cheek before giving Ari a one shouldered hug. Ari then plopped Leo down and he walked, for the most part steadily, toward the open front door. Will had anticipated feeling frustrated when his boys started hitting the milestones for things that he could no longer do. He’d braced himself for it, coaching himself to let it roll off his back—but it never came. There was only joy and awe at seeing them grow, and that might have been the best surprise of all.

Ari turned and pulled Will into a tight warm hug. She smelled vaguely like flour and flowers. It was a comforting smell that made him think of home.

“Hi mom,” Will whispered into her hair.

“Hi you,” she replied, turning to kiss him on the cheek before she righted herself and put her hands on her hips. John tossed Will his keys as he brought the last bag over the threshold.

“You know,” she commented, gesturing toward John with her thumb as he disappeared into the house to find Leo. “He watched that YouTube video over 100 times. He wanted to make sure he got it just right.” Will’s face went scarlet, and when he opened his mouth to speak, nothing came out. He shook his head and shrugged as Ari smiled and tousled his hair. “He loves you, kid.”

“I know,” Will managed with a creaky voice. Scottie knew Will was bowled over and in disbelief about how far his dad had come.

“Who wants some dinner?” Ari asked brightly. “And some red wine,” she continued, shooting a pointed glance at Scottie who laughed and shook her head.

“I’d love a glass.”

“Let’s go inside and eat. Tonight, it’s just you guys, but tomorrow will come quickly, and that means everyone else. So, let’s savor this rarity before the Thanksgiving festivities begin.” Ari reached for Tucker, who was still bleary eyed against Scottie’s shoulder and Scottie gladly surrendered him to his grandma. Ari fussed over him as they made their way to the kitchen. Scottie sighed heavily but happily and squeezed Will’s shoulder before she followed Ari into the house. Will took a moment on the porch, the air chilly but refreshing after hours in the car. This place used to be painful to him, but taking it all in now, the pain seemed to have vanished over the last few years, floating away into the fresh air, diluted with joy so much so that it ceased to exist at all.

<> 

Much to Scottie and Will’s surprise, no one was angry with them about eloping. Surprised, yes, considering the last time Ari had spoken to Will he and Scottie hadn’t been back together. But there was so much joy in Lise’s hospital room that afternoon, between little baby Jack and the newlyweds, that nothing, even a clandestine relationship turned binding legal contract could ruin it.

Five weeks later, in early August, on a balmy but breezy Saturday, Ari and John hosted a much overdue reception at their house. The lake glittered in the late afternoon sun as the couple made their entrance from the kitchen onto the large deck. Will popped a bottle of champagne and pulled his bride onto his lap. She was wearing a short bell sleeve white dress with white flats, her hair wild, and the barest makeup. Will had gotten himself a second custom suit for the occasion—grey this time, and linen, for the warmer weather. He wore a white button-down shirt without a tie, and a cognac-colored belt and matching shoes. They toasted each other and drank the refreshingly cold and crisp bubbles, kissing in between each sip, the rich flavor making the feel of her tongue on his almost surreal—something from another world.

Pete gave his own inebriated toast which included a few slurred sentences, a poor reenactment of a scene from the Godfather Part 2, and the phrase “the best guy I’ve ever known” to which Will mockingly and playfully shouted, “okay, forget the slurring, now we know he’s really drunk.”

Will led Scottie out to the middle of the porch for their first dance. It obviously wasn’t a traditional first dance, but he’d wanted this moment with her, with the people they loved surrounding them. Will didn’t feel self-conscious at the fact that he couldn’t really dance the way he wanted to, and that filled him with hope. This was the beginning of everything—right here—as the three-piece band played Al Green, their sound filling the brilliantly starry night air with words that felt like they were taken out of Will’s own mouth.

“You make me feel so brand new, and I want to spend my life with you.”

<> 

That had been a little over six years ago, and since then, Scottie and Will had found their rhythm. They initially moved into Will’s place for the first year, but later found a place in Red Hook Brooklyn in a newer elevator building. It had been a struggle to find a place they loved in a new building, since they both loved pre-war architecture so much. But with Will’s wheelchair, it was going to be pretty impossible to find what they wanted in a building that didn’t have flights and flights of stairs. But they did the impossible. They found a three bedroom in a newly renovated, but not gutted, pre-war building. And one of the renovations included a brand new pièce de résistance.

Using the money that Scottie had from the sale of her grandparent’s apartment in the West Village, they were able to make it theirs. Now, they just had to fill it with kids. Fill might have been an overstatement, but both Scottie and Will wanted kids, and given Will’s injury, they knew it would take longer and be a bit complicated.

And it was. But they didn’t give up. And about a year and a half later, Scottie got pregnant with twins. It had been a miracle. She carried them almost to full term and delivered them with Will holding her hand, the same way he’d held Lise’s—except this time, when he came into the room and the doctor asked if he was the husband, he could barely get the word “yes” out he was so excited.

They’d been trying for the last two and a half years to get pregnant again, but this time the hormone therapy was more difficult on Scottie. They’d had a harder time getting the sperm from Will, and each of the implantations hadn’t took. They were both older, and the process, which had felt new and relatively exciting the first time around, just felt arduous and demoralizing this time. An endless cycle of ups, downs, hopes, setbacks, and doctor’s appointments. And though they were disappointed it hadn’t worked again, they’d accepted that Leo and Tucker were going to be it for them—and they were pretty damn okay with that. Better than okay. They were over the moon. Against all odds, despite everything stacked against them, Thea Scott and Will Nash had managed to start a family of their very own. They had their own little world that was theirs and theirs alone. It was more than either of them had allowed themselves to hope for during the darker days. 

But finding each other had changed that.

<> 

The next day was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and the house was bustling. Olivia was the first to arrive. She’d had to work late on Tuesday. She was an assistant producer for Nightline on ABC, and though the hours were long and wildly hectic, she fucking loved it. It was the dream career she’d never knew she wanted until she had it. She had moved out about five years ago, forgoing Boston after meeting someone at Scottie and Will’s reception who just happened to live in New York. And that was how, six years later, Olivia came home to see her family on Thanksgiving with a beautiful diamond ring on her finger, courtesy of none other than Will’s friend Parker. At first it had bothered Will—his friend dating his baby sister—but as it had become clearer and clearer that this wasn’t a fleeting thing, Will had finally warmed to the idea. Parker was family now, and Will couldn’t imagine it any other way. Their wedding was in April of next year, and Will, fittingly, was going to be the best man. He’d do his best not to arrive with a black eye to this one.

Wynn and her husband, Derek, arrived next, around lunch time. Sean and Wynn had broken up not long after Scottie and Will had that first time all those years ago, but the difference was, they’d broken up because they weren’t right for each other, not because a mutual friend had done a horrifically fucked up thing. Wynn met Derek at work not long after Sean. She was working as a pediatric nurse at Massachusetts General where Derek was a pediatric attending doctor. A year later they were married, and a year after that they had little Grace. Grace was three years old, and Wynn arrived very pregnant with another baby girl, due in December. Will liked Derek a lot. He was smart and funny, and between Will and Scottie, had quite a bit more to offer than Sean ever did. It was obvious in how happy Wynn was when she was with him that she’d made the right choice.

And then, right before dinner, Pete and Lise rolled in, just as the wine bottles were being uncorked. They’s gotten married about eight months after Jack was born in a quiet ceremony in California where Lise was born and raised.

“Perfect timing,” Scottie whispered to Will who stifled a laugh. They were all sitting around the family room, a roaring fire in the fireplace. Grace, Leo, and Tucker were coloring on the floor while Ari handed out glasses of red and John placed a plate of charcuterie down on the coffee table.

“Well, well, well,” Pete chimed as he walked in, carrying his daughter in his arms. Since Jack, they had had two more kids, and it was unclear whether they were done or not. Lise came from a big family, and Scottie wagered there might be one more on the horizon. Pete had been at both Nico and Wren's births, living by a self imposed travel ban in the third trimester—just in case. 

Wren, the youngest, was a year old and in Scotties opinion, the prettiest little one year old she’d ever seen. She had Lise’s delicate features paired with Pete’s coloring and it was breathtaking. Her brother Nico, who was three was quick at Pete’s heels, followed by Lise and Jack, who was six and half. Scottie smiled at him and he smiled back. They had a special connection, the two of them. Nico raced to climb on Will’s lap when he saw him. 

“Ride, ride, ride, please please Uncle Will,” Nico shouted. Will smirked up at Pete who leaned over to put Wren down. She ran to the kids coloring on the floor.

“Oh please,” Pete scoffed, “you’re just new and exciting. Trust me, he’ll tire of you, too.”

“We will see,” Will teased with raised eyebrows. "I just so happens that I've got a significant advantage." 

“Ride, ride, ride!” Nico yelled and Will, smugly, obliged him. He zoomed back and forth down the hallway, taking the turns quickly and sharply. Nico yelped with glee, which attracted the attention of Will's own kids.

“Daddy!” Tucker whined, “me next, me next.”

“No me, me next,” Leo counted, stomping his little feet.

“Let’s give Uncle Will a break now,” Lise interjected, lifting Nico off his lap as Will arrived back to the group. Tucker huffed but sat back down to color. Leo sniffled a little and climbed in Will’s lap anyway, but Will locked his wheels, which Leo knew meant he wouldn’t be getting a ride just now. Still, he stayed on his dad’s lap. It was his favorite place.

Scottie hugged Jack and commented on how big he’d gotten. Jack—she swore—blushed and wrung his hands. He really liked his Aunt Scottie. She was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. Scottie ruffled his hair and scooted over so he could sit next to her, which he did gladly.

As they sat down to dinner an hour or so later, Scottie didn’t feel so good. She’d only had a half a glass of wine because it had made her feel woozy, which was seriously unlike her. She tried to shake it off, but it only got worse as the food was brought out. Excusing herself quietly, she barely made it to the bathroom before throwing up. She sat back on the tile floor and remembered that morning she’d thrown up in Will’s bathroom in his Williamsburg apartment. It felt like a million years ago. But there had been an explanation then. She’d had too much to drink. This time she….

And then it hit her. 

Rifling through her purse on the bed she found what she was looking for. She’d been carrying them around constantly since they had started trying again, and last month they had decided on one final round, the outcome be what it may.They'd failed so many times that she had pretty much let herself stop hoping. 

She chewed on her thumbnail as she waited for the strip to show one line or two, her nerves fraying her inside out. Her morning sickness with the twins had been terrible, so it would only make sense.

“Scottie?” Will’s voice came through the door, left ajar.

“In here,” she replied slowly. She was so rapt with attention to the test that she didn’t even realize she was crouching on the closed toilet lid. She looked like Tarzan. 

“Everything okay?” Will asked cautiously and curiously as he rolled into the room, gliding smoothly up to her so his knees brushed her toes. She didn’t answer right away, and Will’s gaze followed hers to the pregnancy test on the counter. They saw the lines at the same time.

“Yes, Mr. Nash,” she whispered hoarsely, “everything is very, very, very okay.” Smiling in wonder, she looked up to meet his blue eyes. Blue eyes that brought her home.

Will felt his mouth go dry.

“A baby?” he asked, not daring to let his voice get ahead of his head.

“A baby,” she confirmed, nodding and placing her hand on her stomach. Will put his hand on top of hers for a moment as she adjusted her position, so she was sitting on the toilet in front of him. She pulled her hand off her stomach and took his in both of hers, kissing along his knuckles and squeezing it as she brought it back to her lap. It was such a simple thing, but Will would never take it for granted. 

After all they had been through apart, and then together, the good, and then the bad—Cory’s betrayal, Scottie’s mom’s recent death, her sister’s ongoing struggle with sobriety, the never ending complications of Will’s paralysis, the never ending complications of Scottie’s difficult childhood, round upon round of In Vitro, and now, the difficulties of simply being a good parent—now they were about to bring another baby into the world. Will felt overwhelmed and slightly lost with the kind of rare happiness that only comes from deep within you—the kind that makes you feel giddy and scared and weightless yet heavy with the reality of how truly deep it goes, all at the same time.

Yet right then, he knew they’d find their way. Holding her hand was, and always would be, his North Star.