Page 50 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

19

LUNA

I don’t sitdown when he offers.

He gestures toward the couch, the usual offer, and I register the gesture and stay on my feet. That’s how I know I mean it, actually. I planned to sit, practiced the full version in the bathroom mirror this morning, did it three times in descending order of drama until I had something bearable.

Then I walked into his penthouse, and my legs made a different call. Standing is honest. Standing says I might need to move, in any direction, when this news settles, and I need the option.

Not to run away. But to move. Movement feels like freedom, and I’m quickly running out of that.

“I’m pregnant.”

The words are smaller than the weeks I spent trying to find them. That’s always how it goes with the true ones—they arrive already worn smooth.

Ivan pauses. Not a long pause. Then he goes to the kitchen. He doesn’t rush.

He comes back with a glass of water, full, cold, on a coaster. He sets it in front of me, on the coffee table, right at the edge closest to where my hands are hanging at my sides.

Then he sits down across from me. “Tell me what you need.”

I have to look away for a moment because the inside of my eyes is doing something I don’t have authorization for and can’t stop anyway.

“I wish I knew. I’ve been working on it this whole time—asking the people who know me best, sitting with the question, doing every responsible thing I know how to do… And I keep arriving at yes, a clear yes, and then doubting the clarity the moment it forms. I’ve never wanted something and been this scared of the wanting, and I know that doesn’t make any sense, but here we are.”

Ivan is looking at me. “You’ve known for weeks.”

“I know. I know I should have?—”

“No.” He stops me. “You needed the time. You took the time. That’s smart.”

It’s the permission I didn’t know I needed from the one person I didn’t know I needed it from.

My throat does the thing again, and I let it, because he isn’t looking away and I’m not looking away and we are both, apparently, adults who can be in the same room with something this large without managing it to death.

“What I want right now,” I say, when I trust my voice again, “is for you to hold me. If you don’t hate me for this, I mean.”

He crosses the room, and his big arms come around me without a word.

I put my face in his chest, and I can breathe for the first time since I found out. The ground, which has been moving under me for these weeks, goes still.

It all just stops.

We stand in the middle of his living room for a while. The city does its business outside the window. Ivan’s hand moves over my hair in long slow passes, and he says it into the top of my head, the way he says the things he means the most.

“You’re not doing this alone.”

I take a breath, and the words tumble out without my permission. “Tell me what that means to you. What do you want it to mean?”

He tilts his head to look down at me. “I want to be here. I want to be the person you call first when you have big news. I don’t want to hear about it after it’s gone through the committee.”

I giggle at that. “Oh.”

“And I want whatever it is you’re building to have room in it for me.” A pause. “That’s what it means. I’m not qualified to draw the blueprint. You are the lead. You lead, and I will follow. This is happening to you. In you. There will be ups, and there will be downs, and most of them will be outside of your control. I’m not that.” His words settle something in me I didn’t know I needed to settle. “I’m yours. If you will have me.”

I stay very still, looking up at the dark ceiling of his room. He’s tendering it as his application for something permanent. Thecommittee doesn’t need to deliberate. The verdict was in before he finished the sentence.

I know he’s serious about this. About me. Us. With Ivan, the question isn’t whether. It’s only when and how, once he’s made a decision.