Emmeline's lips twisted into a smile that touched down somewhere along the border between wry and rueful as she pulled off the county road and onto the short dirt track heading up to the house in the woods she and her husband called home. A good half-dozen trucks stood parked just off either side of the driveway under the canopy of trees, thankfully far enough away to allow her to navigate her own battered sedan without issue, and she knew exactly what that meant even before she heard the sounds of loud music echoing from the open windows. Of course Hank had decided to invite the boys over again while she was off working the night shift. And of course they were still here when she got home.
It wasn't even like she could be mad. Hank wasn't like a lot of men when it came to throwing parties; he and his friends always made sure to tidy up their own messes, and to be honest the place was usually cleaner when they were done than it was when they got there. And it wasn't like Emmeline didn't enjoy seeing their friends and neighbors. But she'd just put in a double in the emergency room, and even though it was a quiet night with only a few patients and nothing more severe than Old Man Johnson whanging his head on the underside of his car and getting a nasty cut, she was still brutally exhausted. She needed to sleep, and that meant having to go in and be the party pooper for seven or eight guys who probably hadn't even gotten to their hangovers yet.
Emmeline didn't want to do it. She wanted to sleepwalk straight through the living room to her cozy little bed, snuggle up to Hank for about twenty minutes until her husband's comforting presence dropped her into slumber the way it always did, and not wake up for about sixteen hours or so. She wanted the first day of her four-day weekend to be blissfully untroubled by thought, and that wasn't likely to happen with the boys over no matter how sweet they were. But it was either go in and break up the fun or sleep in the car, and Emmeline had taken too many naps in her car during long shifts at the hospital to want to do it when her own bed was only a few dozen yards away. With a sigh, she levered herself up and out of the sedan and headed for the door.
She didn't expect anyone to notice her entrance, but Hank was waiting for her just inside with a sheepish smile on his face and a loving embrace that almost made up for the gaggle of men in the living room. "Now I know you're tired, sweetie," he said, his tone immediately so placating that Emmeline found the muscles in her shoulders unknotting almost before he finished his first sentence. "It's been an awful long night, and we both know you're not used to working those graveyard shifts. I promise you, me and the boys are going to do everything we can to make sure you get plenty of sleep, sleep, sleep."
Emmeline felt herself sag limply into her husband's arms, and she had just enough time to register something warm and familiar not just about the words themselves but about the calm, soothing way Hank said them before her eyes rolled back until only the whites showed and her eyelids fluttered shut and her entire head flopped forward onto Hank's shoulder in boneless relaxation. She heard her husband's friends saying something enthusiastic to each other, but the conversation didn't really register in her mind and she soon lost track of everything except Hank's comforting presence. He always made her feel so... so cozy like that.
It reminded Emmeline so much of curling up in bed with Hank at the end of a long day that she almost felt like she was falling dead asleep on her feet, and it was something of a minor miracle that he managed to get her all the way into the living room and over onto the big soft rug in front of the fireplace before her legs gave out completely and she sank to her knees with a long, drowsy sigh. She couldn't even imagine trying to rise again, not with the weight of so much exhaustion pressing down on her, and the only reason her head stayed up at all was because her husband lifted it up and balanced it so it didn't topple forward or back.
