"Is everything alright?" he asked. "I mean, with the baby. Did Julian say anything?"
"The baby is perfect." She grinned. "I want to show you. If you want to see, that is." She suddenly sounded uncertain. "If that's not something that interests you, just say the word and the pictures stay in the envelope. I won't be offended."
Esag's heart skipped a beat. He was touched that she wanted to share this with him. After this huge moment, she'd come to him first, and he got caught up in her excitement.
"Of course, I want to see." He took her hand, threading his fingers through hers, and led her to the living room couch. "Please, take a seat. Can I get you something to drink?"
"Water would be nice." Tula sat on the couch, placing the envelope carefully beside her. "I get thirsty when I'm excited."
Esag went to the kitchen and grabbed two tall glasses from the cabinet. He filled them from a reverse osmosis filter system because he didn't have any bottled water. Hopefully, she wouldn't mind.
He had no idea what standard she was used to in the harem. They hadn't gotten to that yet. He was taking things glacier-slow to give Tula every opportunity to go back to the father of her child, not because he wanted her to go back to Tony, but because he didn't want on his conscience the breaking up of a family in addition to everything else.
"Do you want ice?" he asked.
"No, thank you."
He returned to the living room and set the glasses on the coffee table, then sat beside her on the couch.
"Show me," he said, trying for cheerful and encouraging but not quite making it sound the way he wanted. It had come out sounding as if he were short of breath.
Tula cast him a sidelong glance, then opened the envelope and pulled out several black and white images.
Esag had never seen an ultrasound before, but he had heard about them and understood the basic concept, or as much as a layperson could understand about how sound waves could create images of what was inside the body.
The image was grainy, but even with his untrained eye, he could make out the general shape. A tiny head. A body. Limbs curled in that universal fetal position.
A baby. An actual baby, growing inside Tula.
For some inexplicable reason, that black and white grainy image affected him much more than it should.
"Cute," he said, because he felt incapable of being more articulate, because he couldn't understand the tangle of emotions churning through him.
Wonder at the miracle of it.
Jealousy that it wasn't his child she was carrying.
Protectiveness toward both Tula and this tiny life she was carrying.
Fear that he was getting in too deep, too fast, with a woman whose life was about to become infinitely more complicated.
"He is," Tula said. "He's perfect."
Esag frowned at the photo, studying the image more carefully. The baby's legs were crossed, obscuring any definitive anatomy. "How could Julian see enough to determine the sex? I can't see anything that would indicate that."
"He didn't." Tula placed her hand over her heart. "He said we won't know for another month or so. But I know. Right here. A mother knows."
A mother knows.
Tula was about to become a mother. In less than five months, this tiny form on the ultrasound pictures would be a living, breathing baby who would demand constant attention and care. Her life would no longer be her own.
She'd spent five thousand years as a captive. Five thousand years of having her choices stripped away and living according to someone else's rules and demands. And now, just as she'd finally gained her freedom, she was walking into a different kind of captivity.
A baby didn't care about autonomy or personal freedom. A baby needed feeding, changing, soothing, and protecting, and it gave nothing back except the occasional smile and the promise of future gratitude that wasn't guaranteed in this new world where children blamed their parents for everything wrong in their lives, but didn't express gratitude for all the things that were right thanks to the same parents.
Esag looked at Tula's face and the pure joy radiating from her expression, and he realized that she didn't see it that way at all.
She wasn't mourning the loss of her freedom. She was celebrating this new connection, this person she'd created, andshe was looking forward to this role she'd never thought she'd have the chance to fill.
