He has not come to check if I need anything.
I have not been waiting for him to come because I needed anything.
We both know this.
He steps into the room and closes the door behind him, and I set the book on the nightstand, and the lamp throws its warm light across the room, and outside the windows, the city glitters sixty-two floors below, and neither of us says a single word.
22
ROMAN
She looksup from her book when I close the door, and she looks at me the way she has been looking at me all evening, like she’s waiting for me to do something she hasn’t decided yet whether she wants me to do.
“What are you doing here?” she says.
Not a challenge. Not quite a question either. Just the words, placed between us, asking me to account for myself in a way that I’m not accustomed to being asked to account for myself, and that I find, standing here in her doorway at eleven o’clock at night, I do not have a clean answer for.
I cross the room, and I sit on the edge of the bed.
She watches me do this. She closes the book and sets it on the nightstand and she sits with her knees drawn up and her back against the headboard. She is watching me with the full attention she brings to things she is trying to understand, and I sit on the edge of the mattress and I look at my hands and I think about everything I know how to do in rooms like this and the fact that none of it is the right thing here.
I look at her.
“How are you feeling?” I say. “The pregnancy. You haven’t mentioned it.”
Something shifts in her expression. She did not expect that to be the first thing I said, and neither did I, entirely, but it is the thing that has been sitting at the back of everything since the ceremony yesterday, since I stood in that room and saidI vow to protect this child with my lifeand meant it in a way that surprised even me.
“I’m fine,” she says. “Tired sometimes. The nausea was worse a few weeks ago.”
“Is there anything you need?”
“I have everything I need.” She pauses. “Roman.”
“I want to know,” I say. “When something is not right. When you need something. I want to know.”
She looks at me for a moment. “Alright,” she says quietly.
I look at my hands again. Outside the windows the city does its late-night thing, lower and slower than the daytime version, and the lamp on the nightstand throws a warm circle of light across the bed. I sit in the edge of it and I think about a child that is going to arrive in approximately seven months. I think about the fact that I have spent thirty years building something I always told myself I was building for its own sake, because the building was the point, because there was no other point, and I am sitting on the edge of this bed right now and I know that is not true anymore.
“I’m glad,” I say.
She waits.
“About the child.” I look up at her. “I did not expect to be. I want you to know that I am.”
The room is very quiet.
She looks at me with something in her face that is open in a way her face almost never is in my presence. All the composure is still there, but something else underneath it that she has decided, in this room at this hour, not to put away. Her eyes are very dark in the lamplight, and she’s looking at me like she’s seeing something she didn’t know was there and is deciding what to do with it.
She reaches up and touches my face. Her fingers rest against my jaw, light and certain. I catch her hand and pull her toward me.
I kiss her slowly, deeply, tasting the quiet surprise on her lips. She shifts forward until she’s straddling my lap while I sit on the edge of the bed. Her knees press into the mattress on either side of my hips.
I slide my hands under the hem of her shirt and lift it off. The bra follows. I unhook it and let it fall away, then run my palms up her bare back and down again, feeling the warmth of her skin and the new softness at her waist and lower belly.
“You are beautiful like this,” I murmur against her mouth. “So soft already. I can feel the change.”
She reaches for my shirt. Her fingers work the buttons open one by one. When she pushes the fabric off my shoulders, I help her, then stand just long enough to step out of my pants and underwear. We are both naked now, her body pressed against mine in the warm circle of lamplight.
