Free Here With Me by Beverly Long

light yellow and the white
comforter with small yellow and green flowers looked as thick and
warm as ever. Next to the bed was a sturdy nightstand with a phone
and her old clock radio. Across the room, her cherry wood dresser,
obviously freshly polished, gleamed as the bright afternoon sun
bounced off of it. The thin, white ruffled curtains had been pulled
back and the window was open a few inches, letting in the fresh
spring air.
    It was a girl’s room and George Tyler looked
big and uncertain standing in the middle of it. Still holding the
two suitcases, he turned around, taking it in. His eyes rested on
the Raggedy Ann doll that sat in the corner of the windowsill. It
was missing one leg and someone had taken a scissors to her
hair.
    “It was my mother’s,” she explained, sure he
must think her silly for hanging on to such things. After her
parents’ deaths, her grandmother had given it to her. She had clung
to it night after night and cried. Until it seemed like she just
couldn’t cry anymore.
    He bent his knees and set the suitcases on
the floor. When he straightened, she noticed that his right hand
rested on his camera and his thumb stroked the worn case almost
absently. “I imagine she’d be glad to know that you have it,” he
said, his tone somber.
    His eyes held the look of a man who’d known
loss. “George?” she asked, not wanting to intrude.
    “Where do you want your cases?” he asked
abruptly, letting her know that he didn’t intend to let her get too
close.
    She waved a hand. “On the bed is fine. I’ll
unpack later. But definitely before I. . .we. . .go to bed.” Like a
fool, she felt her face heat up.
    It was one thing to sit at a table and pass
him off as her husband. It was a whole other thing to sleep in the
same bed. She’d been so worried about him meeting her family that
she hadn’t thought the whole thing through. Her grandmother would
expect them to share a room, to share a bed.
    Her legs suddenly feeling weak, she sat down
on the edge of the bed. The mattress squeaked under her weight.
This was perhaps even more awkward than the morning she’d walked
into her friend’s restaurant, smelled bacon cooking, and promptly
thrown up on the straw dispenser.
    “I guess the fair thing to do,” she said,
determined to not make it harder than it needed to be, “is to take
turns sleeping on the floor. It’s no big deal,” she said hurriedly.
“The carpet is clean and thick and I know where my grandmother
keeps the extra blankets. It’ll be like camping.”
    He looked at her as if she’d lost her
mind.
    Her baby, almost like he or she had heard the
comment and liked the idea, did a little flutter kick. She spread
her hand over the roundness. “Jingle here thinks it will be
fun.”
    “Jingle?”
    “I wanted to call him or her something other
than the baby . But I didn’t want to set him or her up for
gender issues later on.”
    “Beg pardon?”
    She’d read that phrase in a book before but
she wasn’t sure she’d actually ever heard anyone use it. It should
have seemed odd, sort of feminine or something, but from George, it
seemed right. Polite. Very gentlemanly.
    “I didn’t want to call him by a girl’s name
if he’s a boy or a boy’s name if she’s a girl. So I came up with
Jingle. You know, ‘Jingle Bells’ and all that. I found out I was
pregnant right before Christmas.”
    She gave her belly a little pat, letting her
child know that she appreciated the acrobatics.
    He rubbed his chin in contemplation. After a
minute, he said, “I imagine Jingle expects his or her mother to
sleep in a bed.” His eyes shifted downward. She realized that it
was the first time that she’d seen him really look at her belly.
Now that he’d started, he couldn’t seem to look away. However, when
he realized that she was watching him, he turned a pretty shade of
rose, starting from his neck to the tip of his ears.
    “I was almost sixteen weeks along before I
started to show,” she