Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [25]
Seven years later, in our bedroom in the house we’d bought, a room with high ceilings and bare floors and no furniture besides a mattress and the Tupperware bins where we kept our clothes, it was just as thrilling, just as sweet. I knew the place on the small of his back where he liked me to brush my fingertips, and he knew to put his mouth right up against my ear so I could hear his breathing change as his hips sped up, then stuttered to a stop. His sounds, his taste, the feel of his forearms in my hands, his head tucked into the hollow between my neck and shoulders, every inch of him was so familiar and so dear.
When we were done, he fell asleep almost instantly, sprawled facedown, naked on the bed. He had a better body than any of the movie stars in People, a muscular back that narrowed to a slender waist, a gorgeously curved bottom. Curled against him, breathing in the scent of his sweat and skin. I let myself doze for a few minutes. Then I settled the comforter over his back and collected my panties and nightshirt from the floor. Frank was so tired these days. He’d work an eight-hour shift at the scanner, examining the X-rays of carry-ons or beckoning travelers through the metal detectors, dealing with people who screamed and cursed and even spat at him, taking out their frustration with the nightmare air travel had become on the most convenient target. After work three days a week, he’d spend three hours more in a classroom, where he was training to do airplane maintenance. Those were union jobs; the pay started at thirty dollars an hour, plus benefits and three weeks of paid vacation. We’d agreed that the time and money he spent was worth it. By the time he graduated the airlines would be hiring again, but it meant that he left the house before seven most mornings, and on nights he had classes he rarely came home before ten.
I crept into the kitchen to empty the dishwasher and surf the Internet, looking at surrogates’ stories, pricing home renovations and wall-to-wall carpet and new couches, trying to figure out how to continue the process I’d started upstairs, the marital magic of not only getting Frank to agree to let me be a surrogate but also making him believe the whole thing was his idea.
I thought about it while I drove Spencer to nursery school, while I swept the floors or weeded the garden or folded a load of laundry, imagining the feeling of being someone who could give instead of someone who was taking. I would picture the look of gratitude on the new mother’s face as I placed the baby in her arms. Oh, thank you, Annie, we can never thank you enough. It would be so different from the look I saw on our pastor’s face when I was rummaging through the church swap bins for winter boots or the one I imagined the credit-card representative wearing when I called to explain that our payment would be late again.
For weeks, I’d been working on Frank, but carefully, the way I’d learned to do it. Instead of bombarding him with requests or giving speeches, I’d casually slip something into a conversation: “Did I tell you Dana Swede from Vacation Bible School had a miscarriage? It’s her third, poor thing.” He’d give me a look and I’d ladle another scoop of tuna casserole onto his plate and tell him I was baking Dana a pie. When the actress from his favorite TV show was on the cover of People magazine with her baby twin girls—they’d been carried by a surrogate in Minnesota—I snuck the magazine out of the pediatrician’s office and onto our coffee table, where I could be sure he’d see it. When Good Morning America did a piece on military wives making extra money carrying babies, I inched the volume up. When