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They've been doing this every week for the past sixteen years, so tonight shouldn't be any different.
Sixteen. He thinks about the number as he waits for Nahla in the campus courtyard, sputtering out in her absence. Sixteen years. The amount of years they had known each other when the triplets were conceived, so long ago. Too long. They had been walking down this same path when Nahla told him---he'd been asking about Lanthanite literature for a cultural project he was doing with Professor Illa, rattling on and on with question after question---do you ever write love poems? Do you ever run out of ideas? When you live that long, I imagine you never run out of people to love?---and Nahla had to let it slip between Fun Lanthanite Facts that she was, in fact, carrying his children, and she was, in fact, going to carry them to term.
Her knee had brushed against his on this very bench. He remembers it vivid: Nahla burying her head in her hands, unable to meet his eyes; the warmth in Nahla's palms when he held her and told her they'd figure it out together the way she'd cried with him and for him, bucking out her sobs in his lap. All it took was one mistake---one stupid, post-summer-break I miss you mistake---to tether them together for eternity, as if he was ever going to leave even before they had sex. Sometimes he wonders if she did it on purpose.
He tries not to think about it as a mistake; that mistake gave him five beautiful gifts, five children gift-wrapped in purpose and adoration. He was floating before the triplets were born, drifting far from shelter on mere traces of oxygen; they gave him purpose, filled his lungs right up with air, shocked his body back into homeostasis. They became his reason.
It was never a mistake. If destiny existed, he would call their bond fated; it doesn't, though, so instead he calls it natural. It was only natural, that they would find one another.
Nahla still isn't here. She hasn't missed one of their walks in years. He supposes it makes sense---they have a big day tomorrow---but something within still sinks at the thought of her leaving him behind. God. He still isn't over that? The Doctor at one point had told him that the pains of his past means he will always be afflicted in some way by a haunting, that he can never truly outrun it. He's not over it yet, that fear of losing everything beautiful he has? How could he ever forget, even for one split-down second, how lucky he is to have all of this?
How could anyone ever let go of that fear?
He slinks back to Nahla's quarters, giving Atlee and the rest of the night bridge shift a respectful nod as he passes. No one says anything, but they all know. When he was still a student he put more effort into hiding their relationship; now it is the Academy’s most beloved secret. Now no one blinks an eye at Caleb’s night visits to the Chancellor’s office. The arrangement works. It works for him; there is nowhere else he would rather be, nowhere else he has been that could ever compare. Even when his sentence expired he stayed by her side; the girls were about to start kindergarten. It just works. His mother still calls it complacency under her breath.
He finds Nahla sprawled out on her chaise, still in the day’s clothing, books of physical photographs spread across her lap. She has her head buried in Zefera’s album, her fingertips stroking a curly blonde lock of hair that had been captured still and beautiful and printed out for Lanthanite eternity. A smile, inexplicably, spreads across his face at the sight.
“Hey,” he says, catching her attention. “Didn’t see you in the courtyard.”
Nahla stiffens, then sighs. She rubs her forehead. “I’m sorry, Caleb. I was cleaning out some old files and found these… With Ashani starting school tomorrow, I needed to… reminisce.”
Caleb takes a seat next to her. "One moment she's losing teeth and calling me dad on accident in front of the Doctor, and the next she's joining my class as a medical engineering student. It's weird, huh?"
He picks up Ashani's album from Nahla's side, flips through each picture—their first birthday, Ashani stuffing cake in Neeomahh's face as Amna glared into the camera—their first grade halloween costumes, three superheroes with their hair done up in buns, curls looped with colorful barettes and beads, the outfits replicated to contest winning perfection—their last day of high school several months ago, Ashani's face still boasting an unbreakable childlike wonder despite her age now. A sentimental pull begins to drain his stomach downward from within; he sinks into himself, then anchors himself back, throws his head above water, and begins to rub Nahla's legs.
"I want a baby," Nahla says.
Caleb sighs. It took years for her to give up any information about her first son; his birthday is soon, and she's always despondent this time of year. He can sense it on her when no one else can; her outward fluttering carelessness is merely a glamour. If only they knew, if only everyone else could see Nahla as he does. He has seen her and loved her at her worst and he has seen her and loved her at her best; she can hide nothing from him.
"I know you miss him," Caleb says, continuing to massage her. "I'm sorry, Nahla. I know it's hard."
Nahla looks up at him. She closes Zefera's album and sets it to the side, then presses a kiss to Caleb's forehead. "No," she breathes. "You're sweet, but no, Caleb. I want another baby with you."
He blinks, leans into her touch. "Like. On purpose?"
"That is the idea, yes."
He looks away . "You're just saying that because tomorrow—"
"No. I—I miss when Zefera and Jami were little. I miss it."
He sighs, but his sigh fades into a laugh as her fingers entwine with his. "You're going to have me pump kids into you until I'm, like, eighty, aren't you?" He pauses. "God, I know I said I wasn't going to get a vasectomy because it would be weird for the Doctor to do it, but…"
She pauses, moves to stroke his back. "You're right. It's a bad idea. Let's forget—-"
"I didn't say that," Caleb interrupts. "We just… I miss it too. You know that they're… everything to me. I'm… not 22 anymore, though, and I'm teaching your students. I have things that need—"
"I understand. You're just… such a good father, Caleb. I love that about you."
Nahla continues to rub Caleb's back through the fabric of his night shirt, and Caleb feels warmth spread over his body like rays of San Francisco summer sun. He wants to tell her I love you, those three forbidden demonic words. Another beloved and unspoken secret. He doesn't have to say it; his actions wail it out when he gives in. And he always gives in—every single time. Instead of saying I love you to her for the first time in his life, he looks her in the eye and asks, "You got any names in mind?"
"I was thinking I'd let you pick this time," Nahla shrugs.
Caleb smiles, nods. When Nahla stands up to follow him to her bed, he spins on his heel and lifts her into the air. She grunts with surprise and intrigue as he curls his arms around her back and her knees, carrying her like his bride across the room, over the threshold and over the moon and stars and over sanity. He places her into her mattress with porcelain-handling care, wraps her legs around his waist, gazes into her eyes. It's just a little bit too romantic for people with a story like theirs.
He still can't say it. Instead, he kisses her, whispers into her ear you're so good at this, Nahla. You're a good mother. Even as she tries to shake her head, to deny it, even as tears start to infect at the compliment: You're a good mother, Nahla. You are. I mean it.
"You're—kind, but—"
"You were to me," Caleb whispers—the ambiguity of their dynamic has always added a certain thrill to it for both of them, Nahla as his caretaker and his lover, his guide and his safety, older and wiser. It, somehow, is what she needs to hear. "You have been to our kids, and you will be one again."
He tells her what she wants to be told until he believes it, and he hears his own mother's tears echo on cerebral playback as Nahla pulls him in for a kiss and whispers then give me a baby. A guttural growl into him, two hands against the buckle of his belt, never a mistake, never a mistake—
