Page 86 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

Olga comes too, looking like she still hasn’t fully adjusted to being invited places just for fun, hovering near the edge of the group until Cherry physically pulls her a chair.

“You’ve got good instincts,” Cherry tells her, raising her glass, “for someone who married the wrong man.”

Olga laughs. “I’m working on that.”

I sit there with my club soda and look around the table—Olga laughing at something Cherry said, the two of them an unlikely pair who somehow work. My employees are still buzzing about the photo of themselves in a real magazine. All of it exists because of something I built out of nothing with my own two hands, in a shop that almost didn’t survive a broken window. I did this.

My phone buzzes.

I saw the piece. Congratulations.

Thirty seconds later, another:Darya cried.

I laugh so hard I have to sit down before I embarrass myself, because the baby has decided my bladder is now permanent real estate.

36

IVAN

She is visibly pregnant now,and I cannot stop noticing it.

Not dramatically—she’s not enormous, not yet, but there is a curve to her now where there wasn’t one a month ago, a roundness she carries low and unhurried. There’s no tactical reason to notice the way she moves differently now, slightly slower, one hand sometimes resting against the curve of it without her seeming to know she’s doing it.

I notice anyway. I notice constantly. It’s become a category of attention I didn’t have before her, and I don’t know what to call.

The nightmares are fewer now. They were nightly for the first two weeks after the basement, and I learned the geography of them quickly—the sharp inhale before the scream, the way her hands go out in front of her like she’s still bound and trying to free them, the four or five seconds it takes her to surface fully into the room and into me.

I’ve gotten good at being there for those four or five seconds. I keep tea ready some nights without telling her why, just have the kettle filled and the mug set out before either of us has gone tosleep. It’s a small piece of preparation that asks nothing of her and costs me almost nothing and has, more than once, been the difference between a bad ten minutes and a bad hour.

Lately, the nights pass without incident more often than not, and I feel something every time that I would call relief if relief were a strong enough word for it, which it isn’t. It is closer to gratitude—an odd thing to feel about the absence of something, but there it is.

I watch her now, across the kitchen, reaching up into a cabinet for a glass, the curve of her stomach visible against the fabric of her shirt, and something in me does the thing it does several times a day now, which is simply stop and look.

She’s creating a person inside her own body. I’ve moved through this world for years, handling things that are dangerous, complicated, and require enormous control. But none of it compares to what her body is doing right now without any effort of will, without any of the architecture on which I build my own competence. She is doing the most extraordinary thing I have ever witnessed, and she does it while complaining mildly that her back hurts and asking if we have more of the crackers she likes.

I now keep cases of them in stock.

I find her more attractive every single day. This was not a thing I expected. The world I grew up in had certain assumptions about this stage of a woman’s life, assumptions I absorbed without ever examining them closely enough to know they were wrong, and all of it turned out to be exactly that. Wrong, every part of it.

What I feel, watching Luna move through our kitchen with her new shape and new gravity, is not diminished interest. It’s the opposite, and it does not seem to be slowing down.

I cannot keep my hands off her. I have stopped trying to pretend to her or to myself.

“Stop looking at me like that,” she says, without turning around, glass in hand.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re going to do something about it.”

“I’m considering it.”

She turns around. She has flour on one hand from something she was doing earlier, and her hair is loose, and the curve of her is right there under her shirt. “Seriously? I’m a mess.”

“You’re my mess.” I cross the kitchen and put my hands on her hips, and she lets the glass settle on the counter and tips her head back against my shoulder.

“You’re a fiend. A pervert. A rapscallion.”

“Your rapscallion.”