Over the course of the ten minutes that she was outside, Rae's mind found a thousand different places. Questions she'd never know the answer to, memories that were, even now, becoming more vague as time ticked by... and what ifs. God, so many what ifs. What if he hadn't died, what would they be doing now? Probably putting the finishing touches on the nursery, was the short answer to that. Among other things, baby planning things; deciding and redeciding all the things they'd come to conclusions on in the past months... The what ifs were decidedly the worst part.
Shaking them off, she turned her head when she heard the door swing the rest of the way open. "Oh... yeah," she said, though she sounded like she was trying to convince herself more than him. "I woke up, had a nightmare," she practically had to bite her tongue to keep from telling him what it was about, but she figured he could probably figure it out, since, if she recalled, she'd told him once before. "But I didn't want to disturb you," she gave him a weak half-smile. "So much for that... sorry."
Nights like this, nights that he came over and stayed, and they didn't have sex, were strange. Not a bad strange, but strange. Unexpected. Not part of the deal they'd talked about, but not altogether bad. They still managed to have a good time when they did this; that particular night, they'd watched and made fun of a couple of movies, and ended up just falling asleep at the end of the second one. It was... both nice and terrifying.
Everything Rae cared about left her. And she cared about him more every time they did things like this.
You should let him go, for that reason, she told herself, the side of her mind that disagreed causing her to subconsciously hug his jacket tighter around her. She looked up at him. "This jacket's pretty warm," she said with a little smile that didn't quite reach her eyes.