Her lips pressed together and she turned around to look at him, her heart beating a little too fast, her face a little too red, her stomach tumbling a little too much — nerves or morning sickness? nerves or morning sickness? — and she looked him in the eye. “...I would only do this again if it was with you, too,” she agreed. “Otherwise, fuck all this noise,” she said and she was only half-joking as her nose wrinkled to show her distaste and the lack of gravity in the statement itself. She didn’t want it to sound like she regretted the fact that she was giving Arva a child, because she didn’t. ...she just regretted that she had quite clearly made the wrong choice for a partner for the journey.
Isaac could hear that Lydia’s heart was starting to beat a little faster and it was putting him on edge, because he wasn’t sure whether it was due to the discomfort from his admission or because she had wanted to hear it. Either way, all he could do was wait for her to respond if she was even going to do that at all, and as he waited he continued to comb her hair. It was all he could do, because if he didn’t then it would seem like he was waiting for a response, and by doing that she could have perceived him as forcing her to have a conversation that she didn’t want to have. She didn’t have to answer if she didn’t want to. But he wanted her to. He wanted to know that she would be willing to do it again, if it was with him. Not because he was planning on it, that wasn’t even a thought in his mind, if he was being honest. He wanted the confirmation that Lydia could see him in that way, in a way that made him worth going through something because she trusted him enough to know that he would go through that journey with her. That he would go out of his way to make it something they would do together, instead of something she would be going through alone or he would be stumbling through blindly.
She had turned suddenly and Isaac almost dropped the comb, his eyes wide in surprise when she responded, and she looked directly at him when she said exactly what he had wanted to hear. It was another moment of not thinking too deep. It was another instance where he didn’t want to question why that made him feel so complete, or why it made his stomach flip a little and his head feel light. It just did, and Isaac liked it. He didn’t want to think about it any deeper than that.
He managed to huff a laugh that sounded like it was on the verge of amusement and disbelief, and in that second, that fleeting, split second moment, Isaac wanted to reach out for her and pull her closer to him. He wanted to drag her in and hold her - don’t think about it, not something to think about - but instead he reached out to brush her hair behind her ear, placing the comb aside for now since she had turned around so completely to face him. “Then that’s what we’ll do,” he decided aloud for both of them, his heart skipping a beat. “When we decide that we’re never going to do this again, and then maybe in the future down the road realize that maybe we might actually do it again for some unexplainable fucking reason… we’ll do it with each other. Because yeah, with anybody else, fuck that noise.” Another pause that seemed to stretch on for too long. “...You know that if you - I mean, I’m here. I’m going to be here for you whether you like it or not, so if you ever need anything beyond what I do, if you’re feeling unwanted… I’m here. I’m not going to say that I’m great at a lot of this stuff.” He wet his lips nervously as he held her gaze. “But I might be alright at making you feel wanted.” Because she was. “I mean, that’s all I really wanted to do in the first place.”