The tears in his eyes are like the mist from their first date as an official couple – their first night out when they could hold each other’s hands and not feel guilty. But now he’s squeezing her so tightly in his arms that he can swear his heartbeat is hers and they are deep within themselves, within a new self. For a moment too long his mind drifts to their past and how, at one point, he never would have imagined, even during the longest of early morning dreams, that he would be lucky enough to hold her like this and feel like this.

Instead of screaming, or jumping, or doing cartwheels down the hallway, he pulls her closer and presses his lips against her neck, into her hair, on her forehead. He almost wants to ask if it’s true, if this is actually happening, but he knows it is. It was bound to happen eventually. He just never expected it to be here, in this foreign place, with this beautiful girl, and with the overwhelmingly consuming feeling of I love her and our life more than anything ever, ever, ever.

“I can’t believe – you? Me?” his excitement is a slur, like when he saw her eyes on a certain Sunday morning with a certain sunrise and a certain explosion in her eyes.

“Yes,” she breathes, her skin flushed, glossy.

He hesitates for a moment, and then regrets leaving the room, but he decides to call Dwight; “Send in the subs!”

He starts to hyperventilate for a moment and then the tears threaten to give way, so he rushes back to his love – his life – and cries sweet, sweet tears into her auburn locks.

He tries not to touch her or hold her too tightly because she’s not only the most beautiful blessing he’s ever had the honor to call his own, but also the cocoon to their precious lives combined into one.

They spend a blissful evening together, the hazy ultrasound tucked in his pocket or pinned to the refrigerator. They cannot quite stop smiling, and there isn’t much of a reason to, anyway. They make love, but he is very gentle. He treats her as if she is a gorgeous glass vase, speckled in pastel hues and glossy contours. After they bask in the love they make, he leaves to retrieve water for both of them.

He comes back in to their bedroom, matches his hand with hers and says, “You’re going to be as cute as the baby.”

“It’s because I am the baby. We are the baby,” she replies, giddy.

He holds her fingers to his lips so she can feel his whisper and says, “It is us.”

The next morning, after hours of discussing plans for the nursery, names, joyous phone calls to the grandparents, debates on who it will look like and the general excitement, excitement, excitement, Pam goes outside to bring in the newspaper. Because she is believes that she is still under some sort of illusion, she thinks that the fresh sun and life around her will be convincing.

She walks back inside, each stride deliberately slow so she can spend time with it alone. The pavement beneath her cleanly manicured toes is warm from the heat of the sleepy sun. With each step the heat seems to trickle away into the cracks of the asphalt, to the depths of the earth that carries her and her dreams. A blank numbness travels through her legs, waist, shoulders, fingertips as the heat dissipates, disintegrating further away from her until she feels nothing but a pulse and another that is almost too faint to mention. She slowly places her hand across her abdomen, her fingertips lightly grazing the gradually growing shelter. She presses her eyelashes together and for a sharp moment she sees a flicker of the future: a small hand and ten tiny toes, a mother’s day with violets and daisies, the back of a yellow school bus in early autumn, the man that is the father. And she knows, right then and there, between the Tuesday morning sun and the warmth of the asphalt outside of their small yet expanding home, that her child’s eyes are going to reflect everything they were, are, and will be.

For weeks they lived in days of unknowing. Days without inevitable celebration. Weeks without hope for a future with a blessed more than what they were planning. But now that they know, there is nothing that could stop the feelings that consume their every thought – “our first!”