The first wave of our smorgasbord arrives. I take a sip of ginger ale and a cautious nibble of toast. It’s plain, boring, and perfect.The wheat is dry enough to absorb whatever new rebellion my stomach’s planning, and for the first time in hours, the nausea retreats to a manageable simmer. My belly immediately sighs in relief.
“Stop staring at me,” I snap between careful nibbles.
“You can’t blame me. I just want to know if I’m gonna get puked on.”
Despite myself—despite everything, really—my mouth twitches. The bastard still makes me want to laugh even when I should be throwing things at his head.
The waitress returns with the rice, setting it down with a loud clink that makes me flinch. “Chicken broth’s coming, too,” she announces as she turns to leave again.
“Eat the rice,” Bastian coaxes. “Little bites.”
I want to tell him which orifice he can shove his dietary advice into, but he’s been right about everything else so far, so I pick up the spoon and follow instructions.
“I’m surprised you’re even willing to step foot in here,” I remark as I chew. “Shouldn’t you be morally opposed to establishments like this?”
“Safe to say it’s not my first choice,” he admits wryly. “But you need simple right now. Straightforward, familiar, safe. Nothing complicated.”
It doesn’t take a genius to realize he’s talking about more than food.
I force down another bite of rice to avoid responding, but it tastes like sawdust now. Everything does when he looks at melike that—or, well, when I imagine he’s looking at me like that. That’s one curse of my blindness: I’ll never know if his eyes still go soft when he’s trying not to care. If they’re blue or black right now.
“Can I ask how you’re feeling?” Bastian asks. “With the pregnancy, I mean.”
“Tired,” I admit, setting down my spoon. “Also nauseous and scared shitless. Usually one of those three things on a rotation. Sometimes a few at once.”
“That sounds about right.” He wriggles in the booth. “Ayesha—one of my line cooks at Coruscant—she worked straight through to basically the day she popped. Used to prop herself against the prep station between orders, and she’d rip my head off every time I even considered telling her to take a break. Kara at Quail’s Egg was seven months along and still hauling fifty-pound sacks of flour like they were nothing.”
“I feel like I’ve got a fifty-pound sack of flour strapped to my stomach,” I mutter. “How do women do this? And this isn’t even the hard part! I’m still a party of one right now. Once this baby comes… Christ, life is gonna get real hard real fast.”
He bobs his head in acknowledgment. “Yeah, that part isn’t easy. Sage was so little when he came to me. I had no fucking clue what I was doing, even though I read every baby book I could get my hands on and watched YouTube videos at two in the morning while he screamed bloody murder. I remember—fuck, I remember when I tried to change his diaper for the first time.” A laugh escapes him, almost as if it took him by surprise. “I thought I had it all figured out—wipes ready, clean diaper underneath, very professional setup. The second I got the dirtyone off, he peed. Straight up like a fountain. Got me right in the face, in my mouth, everything.”
I snort with laughter.
“So I’m standing there, dripping with baby piss, and Sage just stops crying. Looks at me with these huge eyes like he’s thinking, ‘Yeah, that’s what you get for being a damn amateur.’” Bastian sighs. “I started draping a towel over him like a tent after that.”
“Smart,” I manage between giggles.
My laugh seems to embolden him, because Bastian’s voice drops to that old, familiar pitch, back when it was just us nestled in the cozy darkness of his penthouse. “I missed that sound,” he murmurs.
“Bastian—”
“I know. I know you hate me. I know I don’t deserve anything from you. But I’m allowed to miss your laugh. That’s all I want to say.”
I have to grip the edge of the table to keep myself steady. My body responds to that low rumble like a tuning fork, vibrating at a frequency I thought I’d forgotten.
“You don’t get to do that.”
“Do what?”
“Say things like that. Use that voice.” I push the rice away, my appetite gone. “You don’t get to sit there and behuman. Not after everything.”
“Would you prefer I be a monster full-time? Because I can do that if it makes this easier.”
“Yes,” I lie, then immediately shake my head. “No. I don’t know.”
The truth is, I don’t know which version of him is worse: the one covered in blood in that alley, or this one who cares.
At least with the monster, I know where I stand.ThisBastian makes me want things I can’t afford to want.
