“So, yes. I want to spend my day off with the other pregnant lady. Does she have a problem with that? Am I going to be sent away?”
Huffing what should’ve been a laugh but had lost its sound behind the lump that was still working its way out of her throat, Lydia shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she teased back when he laid it on thick with the compliments again. Even if he meant them, reiterating them so, she worried, was going to detract from their meaning and those words had meant a lot to her in the absence of the same sentiments from quite literally anyone else in the camp. ...well, that detailed, anyway. Malia, even, had told Lydia that she thought that Lydia was beautiful, unprompted and starkly honest the way that Malia just was when she said things. But so far, Isaac and Malia were alone in it since she’d started to show. ...hell, since she’d made it known to the rest of the camp that she was pregnant at all.
She realized belatedly that she and Isaac were still sort of holding hands and she couldn’t decide if that made her nervous or relaxed her. In the end, she settled on a little bit of both, if for no other reason than his touch was casual and comforting...but it stirred something that felt a little bit forbidden. Therefore, she chose not to acknowledge it.
It wasn’t lost on her what he was trying to say without coming out and saying it. Malia was...abrasive. And she was hogging a lot of Isaac’s time, if not almost all of it, with her pregnancy. Lydia felt a little bit guilty about that since she’d been the one to suggest him to Malia in the first place. She should’ve taken him for herself, instead. Clearly. What Isaac was trying to say, Lydia thought, was that he could just talk to her and she understood, because she’d felt that loss, too. He didn’t have to explain what happened as a preface. He didn’t have to relive the nightmare to someone who didn’t get it and never could. It wasn’t Malia’s fault and there was nothing she could do to change it, but she would never understand like Lydia did, because Lydia felt that exact same loss, quite literally, the night that Allison died.
Everyone seemed to have moved on smoothly. Hell, Scott was here straight after Allison’s death, from the sounds of it; it was a wonder her blood wasn’t still on his hands. Everyone else seemed to be getting along just fine both here and the ones she knew at home. The only one she hadn’t known about was Isaac, because he’d gone and now she knew that he handled it about as well as she did, which was to say not well at all.