TGS Chapter 93 The Sound of Everything (Patreon)

The hotel room had its curtains drawn at 7:30 in the morning, and Wyatt woke up without an alarm—just as he always had before days that mattered. Though this day didn't matter in the same way game days mattered, but in a completely different way that he still didn't know how to name with precision. The first thing he did wasn't thinking about the playbook, or Fisher's schemes, or any of the things that normally occupied the first few seconds of important days. Instead, he looked toward the side of the bed where Blaire was sleeping on her side, knees slightly bent, hair falling over her face, her bump visible even from the angle of someone thirty seconds awake who hadn't made any decisions about the day yet.

He stayed still for a moment.

It wasn't the first time he had woken up before her and looked at her from that angle, but today had a different quality than all the days before—one that wasn't easy to articulate, though articulating it wasn't necessary anyway, because it was there regardless, and they both knew it without having said it yet.

He gave her a gentle kiss on her head without making a sound. Blaire didn't move on the first, but on the second, her eyes opened.

"Stop," she said without changing position.

"No."

"Wyatt."

"Good morning," Wyatt said with a smile on his face.

Blaire closed her eyes for a second longer, then opened them with the resignation of someone who has processed that sleep isn't coming back—and that the most efficient thing to do is accept it before the situation gets worse. She stared at the ceiling for a moment before turning toward him.

"What time is it?"

"Seven-thirty."

"You don't have practice today."

"I know," Wyatt said.

Blaire looked at him with the expression of someone constructing a hypothesis about the mental state of the person in front of her, where all available data points in the exact same direction.

"You're nervous," she said.

"No."

"Wyatt."

"A little," Wyatt said.

Blaire nodded without surprise, as if that were precisely the answer she had anticipated. She sat up slowly, with the care she had been applying to getting up in the mornings for two months—since her stomach remained unpredictable, even if considerably less so than during the first trimester. She sat on the edge of the bed with her feet on the floor, her hands on her knees, and said softly that she was too. That was all they said about it, because there was nothing more to say, and they both knew it.

They went down to breakfast at 8:15, with the hotel dining room practically empty at that hour on a Tuesday. Wyatt ordered scrambled eggs with toast and coffee, and Blaire ordered fruit with yogurt. When her plate arrived, Blaire inspected the fruit before deciding whether the relationship between her stomach and that particular food was going to be productive that day. Wyatt noted it without making any comment—because there were days it worked and days it didn't, and the days it worked didn't require any additional observation.

"You look nervous," Wyatt said, cutting a piece of toast.

"I said I was excited," Blaire said. "It's not the same thing. Nervous implies anticipation of something that could go wrong. Excited implies anticipation of something that's going to go well. They're distinct states, even if everyday language uses them interchangeably—which is a problem with everyday language, not the states themselves."

"Both make your leg keep moving under the table."

Blaire looked down at her leg and stopped it. Wyatt continued with his breakfast without adding anything else, because the point was made, and adding something would have ruined precisely that kind of point. Blaire didn't say anything either, though the expression she had while cutting her fruit was that of someone who had considered responding and had made the decision not to—which, in her own vocabulary, was a concession not easily won.

They kept eating breakfast without rushing, holding onto the calm of mornings when there is a place to go, but still time before going. That distance between the present moment and the moment to come has its own value that shouldn't be rushed, because once it's consumed, it can't be recovered. That day in particular, Wyatt had the feeling that every part of the day before reaching the clinic deserved the time it deserved, without any part being hurried along by the next.

The Jeep Cherokee was on the third level of the hotel parking garage. Blaire had gotten into the passenger seat with the familiarity of someone who had already spent several days getting around Los Angeles in that specific car, arriving at the conclusion that it was a reasonable car for the city—which, in her vocabulary, was equivalent to an approval that was not easily given. Wyatt had decided that was enough.

Wyatt drove and Blaire put the destination into her phone and set it on the console. Los Angeles began passing outside the windows—palm trees, traffic, mixed architecture from different decades, and a sky that was just as blue and uniform as Blaire had said it would be on the first day she arrived from Clemson, which Wyatt had learned to read the way she read the skies of new places: with the precision of someone automatically cataloging the unusual things about places she'd never been before.

The radio was on low, playing something neither of them was really listening to.

Blaire looked out the window for most of the ride, and Wyatt drove using the logic of Westwood-bound traffic from Woodland Hills that he had been learning over the past few days—which had its own rules that didn't always match what any navigation app suggested, but when understood, produced the forty minutes the journey deserved without unnecessary detours. The silence between them wasn't uncomfortable; it was the silence of two people who have something on their minds and don't need to turn it into words, because the other's presence already communicates what needs to be communicated.

On the highway, Wyatt put his hand on her knee without saying anything, and Blaire put hers on top of his without saying anything. They stayed like that for the rest of the way until the phone app indicated the exit. Wyatt took it, and Westwood appeared outside, with the specific architecture of Los Angeles neighborhoods that have enough money not to look like it too much.

The private clinic had the discreet facade typical of places that cost what that clinic cost. Inside, the receptionist attended to them with the calm efficiency of someone who knows exactly how much distance to keep depending on who is in front of her. Check-in was fast, and they were taken to a waiting room with three armchairs, a table with magazines that no one ever read, and a window overlooking an interior courtyard with a palm tree that Blaire evaluated for the first thirty seconds and dismissed as insufficiently interesting.

They sat down, and Wyatt noticed it before a minute had passed—because it was impossible not to notice if you looked toward Blaire's leg, which wouldn't stop moving, and her hands on her lap with her fingers intertwined with the specific pressure of people who need somewhere to put energy that currently has nowhere else to go. Wyatt didn't say anything; he simply placed his hand over hers without comment or explanation. Blaire didn't say anything either, and her leg gradually slowed down until it stopped. The two of them stayed in that silence that existed between them when words weren't the right tool, which in that specific moment contained everything they both had on their minds since waking up that morning, without either of them having to convert it into words for the other to know.

Until the door at the back opened and the nurse popped her head out with their last name.

"Sterling."

They both stood up at the same time, without having said anything to each other about doing exactly that.

The obstetrician was a man in his fifties with the calm of doctors who have been doing the same thing long enough for that calm to be part of their structure, rather than something they deliberately apply—though without having lost the ability to be present in each specific moment in the office. After greeting them, he gestured toward the exam table for Blaire, and Wyatt took the chair beside it without anyone having to tell him where to sit.

"How has the nausea been these past few weeks?" the doctor asked, looking at his computer screen.

"Better than before," Blaire said. "Still some mornings, but less."

"Sleep?"

"Good."

"Changes in appetite?"

Blaire paused briefly. "Yes."

She didn't go into detail about the pickles with peanut butter, having made the decision that it was information the doctor probably didn't need to do his job effectively. The doctor nodded, kept looking at the screen, and said they were in week 17 and that everything was going as expected—and that today, in addition to reviewing general development, they were going to try to determine the baby's sex if the baby cooperated with its position.

"And if it doesn't cooperate?" Blaire asked.

"We schedule another visit," the doctor said, with the same naturalness as if he had said any other routine thing. "Lift your sweater."

Blaire pulled it up, revealing her stomach, which was already unequivocally visible. In that exam room under the light of medical spaces, it had a different presence than it had in any other context where Wyatt had seen it over the last few months: the presence of something treated there with the precision and seriousness it deserved, rather than the detail that explained why Blaire couldn't fit into some of her jeans anymore or why she inspected fruit in the morning before committing to it.

The doctor picked up the bottle of gel and applied it to her stomach with the motion of someone long accustomed to doing so, then placed the transducer down and turned the screen toward them. The ultrasound image appeared in the grey-and-white definition of clinic equipment, and he began moving it with small, precise movements while reading what the screen showed him.

"Everything looks good," he said. "Expected growth for week seventeen, size within normal range." He kept looking at the screen a moment longer before saying that now they were going to listen to the heartbeat, and activated something on the equipment.

The sound filled the exam room.

Wyatt had not anticipated with enough precision what that sound was going to do when it arrived: filling the air of that room with something that had no precise name, but was the immediate, unmediated certainty of something existing right now in this room, in this moment. That rapid, rhythmic, constant sound, with the specific cadence confirming life without the possibility of any alternative interpretation.

His mind went blank.

Not the blankness of when Goodell said his name in Chicago, nor the blankness of orange confetti falling in Glendale, nor any of the moments over the last few years when he had processed something too big to process in the first second. Because all those blank moments had some point of reference, however distant, and this one had none. It hadn't happened before, and Wyatt had nothing in all his past experience to anchor it to. The sound stayed in the air, being exactly what it was, while he tried without success to find something to compare it to.

Blaire squeezed his hand, and Wyatt looked at her. She was staring at the screen with shining eyes, holding back tears with an effort that was costing her more than anything else he had seen from her in the nearly three years he had known her—and that still wasn't entirely enough to keep the edges from showing. Wyatt said nothing; he simply squeezed her hand back, because words weren't the right tool at that moment either, just as they hadn't been on the highway or in the waiting room. The two of them stayed like that, watching the screen with the sound of the heartbeat still in the air, until the doctor looked at them with a brief smile and went back to the transducer. He moved it with the concentration of someone looking for something specific, adjusted the angle, looked at it, and adjusted it a bit more. Wyatt and Blaire watched the screen without letting go of each other's hand, until the doctor held still.

"Alright," he said, almost to himself.

Another second with the transducer still, the doctor watching the screen with the expression of someone confirming what he already believes he found before saying it out loud. Then he looked up at the two of them with the smile of someone who has information the people in front of him have been waiting months to hear.

"Ah," he said.

Wyatt and Blaire looked.

"It's..."

Author's Note: Boy or girl—if you haven't decided yet, I'll wait. Do you want Wyatt to have a little princess or a little boy to play with?