Epilogue
Anton
Seven months.
Seven months since a positive pregnancy test on our bedroom floor turned me into a man I don't fully recognize. Seven months since I felt the last wall I'd ever built come down.
Seven months, and my wife is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
She doesn't believe me when I tell her. She stands sideways in front of the bathroom mirror, one hand on the swell of her belly, and frowns at her reflection like it's arguing with her.
"I'm enormous," she says.
"You're pregnant."
"I'm a planet. I have my own gravitational pull. Darya had to help me put my shoes on yesterday."
I lean against the doorframe and watch her. She's wearing one of my shirts because half her clothes don't fit anymore, and it stretches across her belly and hangs loose off one shoulder. Her hair is down, messy, the kind of undone she only lets me see. Her skin has that glow everyone talks about but I didn't believe in until I saw it on her. She looks like something out of a renaissance painting. Something sacred.
"You're staring," she says.
"I'm looking."
"You're staring and it's making me self-conscious,” she grumbles. She turns from the mirror and gives me a look. The look. The one she's been giving me more and more in the last few weeks, half exasperation, half something hotter. Something hungry.
The doctor warned us about this. Well, she warned Kira, who told me about it later with pink cheeks and a tone of clinical detachment that lasted about four seconds before she started laughing. Apparently, the hormones in the third trimester can make some women feel... heightened.
Heightened is an understatement.
My wife wants me constantly. Not in the soft, simple way of our wedding night, or the desperate, angry way of the kitchen argument. She wants me with a shameless, unfiltered need that hits at random. While I'm reading. While I'm cooking. While I'm on the phone with Artem and she walks past in nothing but a towel and gives me a look that makes me lose the thread of a sentence I was halfway through.
Artem hung up on me. He knew. The bastard laughed first, then hung up.
I can't keep my hands off her either. The belly does something to me I wasn't prepared for. The sight of her, round and full with my child, trips a wire in my brain that bypasses every rational thought and goes straight to something primal. Possessive. Mine. I made that. She's carrying what I put inside her, and every time I see the evidence of it, something territorial and fierce locks into place behind my ribs.
She knows it too. She's figured out exactly what her body does to me, and she uses it.
Last Tuesday she bent over the kitchen counter to reach something on the back shelf, and the shirt rode up over the curve of her belly and the small of her back, and I was behind her with my hands on her hips before either of us said a word.
We didn't make it out of the kitchen that time either.
Now she stands in the bathroom in my shirt with the morning light on her skin and that look on her face, and I know where this is going before she opens her mouth.
"Come here," she says.
"You just told me to stop staring."
"I changed my mind. Come here."
I push off the doorframe. Cross the bathroom. Stand in front of her. She tilts her head back to look up at me, and the belly presses against me, warm and firm between us. My hand goes to it automatically. Palm flat, fingers spread. I feel the baby shift under my hand, a slow roll, an elbow or a knee pushing against my palm.
"Active this morning," I say.
"Active every morning. Your child doesn't sleep."
"My child?"
"When it kicks my bladder at three a.m., it's your child. When it does something cute on the ultrasound, it's mine. Those are the rules."
