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"I'm glad."
And then she throws him again. "It scares me a little," she says.
"Why? It's just me. And Simon."
After a few minutes of quiet, she says, "I'm working on it. The why."
"Okay. You'll let me know?"
She nods, and then they hear Simon cry out from his crib through the monitor, and life moves on.
* * *
At the end of June,Colleen has a series of meetings in the Hilsburr area and decides to forgo getting a hotel room, something that the Colleen from their competitive days would never do, and makes Belinda and Pippa's house her home base for the week.
Dustin gets a series of adorable photos and videos of Colleen and Pippa, or Pippa on her own, all of which makes him smile. While it's obvious, she's happy to spend time with her sister and niece. There are moments when they're talking on the phone as they catch each other up on their days, where she sounds detached when talking about Pippa. Sometimes, she's reciting facts about the baby, things that would generally make her laugh or smile, but rather than hearing the delight or exhaustion in her voice in those moments, he hears a lack of connection.
When Colleen's finally back at his house the next week, after Simon has been bathed (and gotten water all over the master bathroom floor) and put to bed, she shows him more pictures of Pippa smiling her gummy drool-filled smile after Colleen gave her a warm bath earlier in the week. Dustin then realizes that what he had read over the phone as an absence of something was a remarkably mournful ache.
"Oh my god. She looks so much like Belinda," he says, amazed at how much the baby's face has changed and started to look like an actual human in the last two months. "She looks like you, too."
"Yeah," Colleen replies. "She does."
There's something so sad and broken in the way she says that.
"You sound sad about that." He offers his observation, not knowing how to ask for more; just hoping against hope that she'll finally give it. She loves her nieces so much, but with Jane and Pippa, her joy, love, and excitement when talking about them is always so tinged with melancholy, and it's killing him that she hasn't felt comfortable telling him why up to now. He isn't stupid; he understands why she hasn't trusted him with this, why she's been reluctant to give him anything extra, but he wants it only so he can offer comfort.
"Yeah," she agrees, resting her head against the couch cushions and staring at the ceiling.
"You ever going to tell me why?"
"There is a lot to tell," she says, still not looking at him.
"I'm not going anywhere, kid."
At this, she does turn to him, reaches out her hand and squeezes his shoulder, and says, "I don't want to make you sad."
"If your truth makes me sad, we'll work through it," he encourages her.
Where she starts is different from what he expects.
"Do you remember how I had surgery?"
"To help with the pain you'd been having during that time of the month?" he asks to clarify.
"Yeah," she says. "Although I was in pain all the time, it was just worse when I had my period. Do you remember a conversation we had a few weeks after the surgery? You'd come over to mine to watch a movie and keep me company since I was still healing and my mom was out of town. We rarely ever just hung out back then, especially that year. You made me dinner and got into the wine and we were talking about our plans, punting around ideas for the comeback. You were a little drunk and started talking about having kids soon?"
He shrugs because there isn't all that much about that time that he remembers. He wasn't quite as perpetually sauced as he was for the back half of the year before, but he was still drinking a lot. He had a lot of hopeful dreams then, things he wanted for his future, but the urge to go back to competition, to be dancing with Colleen full time again, was starting to build and build, and by July, getting back to competition was his primary goal. All thoughts of starting a family have receded into the background.
"After the Championships a lot of people started asking when I was going to settle down, didn't I want to have kids soon, and I was so pissed off because it wasn't any of their business and I was so sick of the question, especially since I was fairly sure I couldn't have biological children. You called out the crap, because you never got asked that question, and you went on a tipsy rant for like five minutes about sexism and people minding their own business." She pauses and swallows, so he squeezes her hand lightly in encouragement. "You got distracted from that particular rant because you did want kids. You sort of went on for another five minutes about how much you loved being able to see the Martin genes in your nieces and that you couldn't wait to see it in your own kids. You got very stoked about the idea of having a daughter with your nose and eyes, but maybe their mom's smile. You really liked Cathy's smile" She sounds so dreamy that he can't help but reach out and cup her cheek, doing what he can to ground her in the here and now. He is still confused about where she's going with this, even as his gut churns as he starts to put the pieces together.
How she looks back at him as if she's searching his face, trying to decide what to say next, has him holding his breath. She still manages to throw him for a loop when she starts speaking again.
"There was a moment, you know? A few years after that, where I almost let myself fall in love with you. We were working on the music for our second dance for that final season, and the last year and a half you'd been so attentive and so caring - you got even better at knowing when I needed space and when I needed to hold onto you. For the first time, you truly were my best friend and I was sure I was yours. I'd been thinking' What if, that whole day, through practice and physio and we had a late session at the studio and you kept singing to me, and it felt different. I let it feel different. And then we were getting ready to leave and you were crouched down next to Tay who was telling you some wild story; you were just completely enraptured by her and she was eating up the attention, too. Coach was with you two and he was watching with that fond expression he gets when he looks at her...My stomach dropped and I knew that I couldn't do that to you."
"Do what, exactly Colleen?"
He watches her face crumple and then knows she's teetering on the edge of a sob. But then she shakes her head, swallows the visible heartbreak, and continues.
