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The question arises on a Friday night, when they’re both in bed, worn out by a long week but not quite ready yet to sleep.
The sports psychologist she hired has taken off the kid gloves, to quote Ted. Not that she’d come in with any to begin with, also to quote Ted, and everyone has been off kilter. Jamie has taken to calling her a ‘head witch’ and, as insufferable as he can still be, Rebecca’s inclined to agree. Her mandatory sessions with her leave her more emotionally exhausted than a good number of the fights she had with Rupert.
Ted seems to be the only one handling the sessions well, but being around his team’s and colleagues’ stress and anxiety has taken its toll just the same. He’s flipping the pages in his book much, much slower than his usual speed.
Rebecca’s given up on her own book entirely, mind still preoccupied with that day’s topic -- parents.
Curiosity gnaws at her. For all that Ted likes to talk, there are certain things she's noticed he steers conversation away from - some American condiment called “Old Bay” that Coach Beard loves, ranking Queen songs, and his parents. Besides that offhand comment about his father when he kicked Rupert’s arse at darts, his childhood remains nebulous to her, even after six months dating.
“Tell me about your parents?” She asks, boldly giving in to her desire to know. Hadn’t Ted himself advocated for the wonders of curiosity?
And yet, Ted’s response is unexpected.
Not his verbal response of, “You aimin’ to compete with the doc? Cause that woman doesn’t eat sugar so who knows what she’s capable of. Murder probably.”
It’s his physical response, the slight tensing of his jaw, the fingers that pluck at a corner of a page, like he suddenly doesn’t know what to do with his hands.
He must realize seconds later that she sees right through him, as usual these days, and he closes his book with a sigh, looking away from her.
It’s this uncharacteristic avoidance of eye contact that makes her second guess herself. An apology rests on the tip of her tongue but she bites it down. She’d had a habit of it in the early days of their relationship, always questioning whether she deserved to know all the parts of him (whether she deserved him ), a notion he patiently helped her fight.
(And fight they had, when she’d noticed her apologizing led to a flash of anger in his eyes, almost too quick to catch. She’d confronted what she thought was frustration on his part, and watched his heart break over the misunderstanding;
“I’m not angry at you , Rebecca. I’m angry at the people that made you think you don’t deserve to love or be loved.”)
“We don’t have to talk about it tonight,” She says, and means it.
But Ted reaches out across the bed, takes her hand.
“‘Naw. You deserve to know.”
One day she’ll stop marveling at how well he sees her, when she’s still trying to learn him.
Ted turns so he’s facing her, tucks his other hand underneath his head, looking like Keeley right before she’s about to dish out gossip or ask intrusive questions about Rebecca and Ted’s sex life. The image would bring a smile to Rebecca’s face, if the tension around Ted’s weren’t so poorly concealed.
“Like Lewis Carroll says, I'll begin at the beginnin' and go on 'til I come to the end. That said, they had me young. Drop out of high school young. Weren’t married of course, and I don’t know what the consensus on that around here is, but back home? Big no-no. So they did the proper thing a month before I was born.”
His voice becomes strained, and Rebecca runs her thumb across his knuckles, hoping to ground him.
“My mom started waitressin’ and my dad took up truckin’, which was good money all things considered, but it left my mom and me alone most months. I tried to be easy, y'know? To be good, take care of myself.”
To not be a burden, is what Rebecca hears, painfully loud and clear, keeps it to herself.
“But she was overwhelmed. Sad a lot, moods that’d change like the wind. I imagine she had a whole lotta plans in her head about where she wanted her life to go, and it wasn’t what she ended up with. Couldn’t’ve been easy on her.”
“Did she get help?” Rebecca ventures, trying to be objective, trying not to be angry at a woman she doesn’t know, a woman whose struggles she can’t fathom, not really.
Ted nods. “Had a few stays here and there. Mental health wasn’t really discussed all that well back then. Dad helped when he was around, but he was gone most of the times she had to get away.”
“And where were you?” Rebecca asks, before she can stop herself. She knows well enough by now how brilliantly good Ted is at coming up with understanding and empathy for everyone’s pain but his own.
Ted shrugs, a poor attempt at minimizing the gut punch of his answer, “Relatives mostly. Made my way ‘round my aunt’s places. Spent a whole hoot of a summer at my Aunt Tilly’s, catching crawdads in the lake by her house. She’d make ‘em into the most delicious boil I ever had, poor little critters.” A genuine smile lights up his eyes then and Rebecca files Aunt Tilly away in her memory, to ask about later.
“Just a summer then?”
Ted avoids her eyes. “Had her own brood to look after, alone. Turns out the men in my family are serial abandoners.”
His tone is covered in self-recrimination and Rebecca squeezes his hand, both in comfort and in warning - that’s not you, and that’s not you and Henry.
Ted squeezes back - okay, okay, message received.
“We can stop.” Rebecca offers, because the anguish is more pronounced in his eyes, and he must really be feeling the ache of it if he’s unable to hide it. And selfishly, she’s so sorry she asked, the notion she had of his childhood blown apart in a way that doesn’t leave her unscathed, now that her heart is so tangled up with his.
“It helps when you ask questions,” Ted admits a moment after she’d given him an out. “Helps order my thoughts, helps me remember there’s distance.”
He’s being so brave, doesn’t she owe him the same in return?
So Rebecca asks, afraid of the answer,
“What happened when your parents were away and your relatives couldn’t care for you?”
Ted swallows hard at that. Tries for a reassuring smile that’s nowhere close to landing.
“State stepped in to fill the gaps pretty well. Got to see a lot of Kansas that way. And my dad always came and got me in the end, took me to a football game and let me have all the hot dogs I wanted. And boy did I want a lot of ‘em, let me tell you, it’s a wonder I didn’t go into competitive eating.”
Rebecca wants to scream at the paltry appeasement but she keeps her cool. This is about Ted. Her reaction now can do nothing to change his past.
(Is this how he feels when she talks about what it was like to be with Rupert? This powerful yet futile fury? This rootless pain?)
Ted sees how much this is affecting her and he drops a kiss to her hand, fights all that harder to have his next smile be more real.
“Hey now, it wasn’t all bad. My dad hopped over to construction when I was ten, then he was around every single week. Darts, remember? Never missed a Sunday.”
She does remember. It’s the memory that made her launch them down this path in the first place, but now she has more context, more pieces, and far more questions.
Rebecca hasn’t believed in fairytale endings in a long while, until quite recently perhaps, and she’s sure there’s absolutely no way the problems ended then, not with two people that were forced together by everything but love, each clearly desperately trying to flee, a little boy caught between them.
(She’ll collect more pieces soon,
When she accidentally overhears a conversation between Ted and Jamie, just minutes after Nate had braved her office to get her, with the news that Ted had put himself between Jamie and Jamie’s irate father, defending his player, refusing to step aside. Her heart in her throat as she’d all but run down the stairs, down the hallway, just in time to catch Jamie yelling that he didn’t need Ted’s help. Something breaking. Ted answering back calmly, quietly, that he couldn’t have stayed out of it even if he’d wanted to, having promised himself long ago that he would never again be a coward in that situation. Meeting Jamie’s confusion with raw honesty,
“After my dad passed, my mom put herself back out there. Now, most of the fellows she went out with were nice. Some of ‘em weren’t.”
When Nate is replaced by Roy, interrupting a board meeting, gruffness not quite masking fear as he explains that something is wrong with Ted. The ensuing search and rescue, because the damned man couldn’t allow himself to fall apart in front of others, climbing the bleachers, her taking a seat next to him, helping him steady his breathing, with Roy a dozen seats away, giving them privacy but staying close in case he was needed. Ted pulling a crumpled wedding invitation from his pocket, covered in postage, not for Michelle but for his mother, just out of the blue. He’d called his Aunt Tilly, had learned that his mom and her fiancè had been together for years, with two children between them, a boy and a girl, altogether a happy family.
“I just don't get it,” Ted had confessed, drawl thick with unshed tears, “She wanted them. Why couldn’t she want me?”)
For now, Rebecca keeps her questions. She’s asked enough of him, and herself, tonight. Though she’s starting to suspect that Ted is having an easier time with the psychologist because he’s deflecting, hiding and not talking about these heavy things, something she can’t really blame him for but something she knows will only hurt him in the long run. A necessary conversation that isn’t necessary tonight.
For now, she chases the images in her head (of a young boy being shuttled from house to house to house, alone) with a kiss to Ted's jaw, his neck, his lips, hoping she’s chasing the images away from his head too.
Ted is slow to respond but Rebecca is undeterred, determined to show him how much he is loved, how much he is wanted.
As Ted finally reacts, a hiss after Rebecca whispers something filthy in his ear, sucks on the pulse point right behind it, her determination turns into promise.
He pulls her closer, trails kisses down her neck, nips at that tender place along her collarbone that he knows sets her on fire.
She pulls away from him for just a moment, cradles his face, looks in his eyes, awed at how, even with the weight of all that he carries, he grew up to become the man before her, with so much love to give, so, so freely.
“You are the absolute strongest person I know.”
Ted grins at that, full and bright, mustache twitching in a way that’s part bashful, part content.
“Right back at ya.”
Yes, Rebecca decides. She’ll happily spend the rest of her life showing him.