19. Luna
LUNA
I don’t sit down 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. The committee 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.
I draw a deep breath, thanks to him. “I’ll have you, then.”
I expect a smile, but instead, he kisses me with the thoroughness of a man who has been restraining himself for weeks and has just been told there’s no more restraint required.
He pulls me into his lap on the couch, and I go, because I’m done pretending I don’t want to be there. His arms close around me, and I feel it the way I always feel it—that specific exhale my body does when he holds me, like it’s been waiting.
I press my face into his neck. He smells like cedar and something warmer underneath, and his pulse is steady against my cheek, and I think, absurdly, that I’ve never felt safer in my life.
“Luna.”
“I know.” I do know. I don’t need him to finish it.
His hand moves up my back, his mouth finds my temple, and it’s that—something that small—that undoes me, because it’s so careful.
Ivan Fedorov, careful with me. I turn my face up to his, and he kisses me like he has all the time in the world, like there is nothing outside this room, like I’m not terrifying him as much as he’s terrifying me.
We make it to the bedroom eventually. I’m not entirely sure how. I remember the drag of the hallway wall against my shoulder blades and his hands framing my face, his thumbs brushing my jaw like I’m something he’s afraid to drop.
In his bedroom, he reaches over and clicks on the lamp on the nightstand, and I blink at him in the warm low light. He gazes at me for a few beats longer than normal.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing.” He brushes the white streak back from my face. “Come here.”
He undresses me slowly. His scarred hands moving over my skin leave trails of warmth I feel long after he’s moved on. When he finally lays me back against his sheets, I feel the cool linen against my spine and his eyes on my face, and I’m not self-conscious, which is new.
He takes his time.
He’s always attentive, but tonight there is something different in it.
His mouth moves down my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my breast. I’m apparently more sensitive than I was a month ago, because everything registers at a higher volume—his lips, the faint scratch of stubble, the weight of his palm against my ribs.
I exhale at the ceiling and feel him smile against my skin.
“You’re okay?” he murmurs.
“Very,” I manage.
His body over mine is heavy in all the right ways. All that mass, all that damage, and he uses none of it to overwhelm. He braces himself. He watches my face. He is, somehow, gentle, and it strikes me every time, like it’s the first time, that this man who could simply take instead gives.
When he moves into me, and I make a sound I don’t recognize.
He stills for a moment, forehead dropped to mine, and just breathes.
I feel the full weight of where we are, what we’ve said tonight, and the fact that his child is a secret we are keeping together inside my body right now.
It’s enormous and terrifying and I am, underneath all of it, so happy I can barely stand it.
We move together slowly. His cock thrusts deep inside of me, and my body opens for more. His hand finds mine against the pillow. He laces our fingers together. One more place for us to connect. To feel each other.
I hadn’t expected that, and somehow, I can hardly breathe.
The slow turns less slow. My free hand finds his back, the terrain of it familiar now, and pulls.
He reads it immediately and gives me more, and the warmth that has been building low in my body crests and breaks.
I gasp his name into his shoulder right when I feel him swell inside of me.
He follows a breath later, and the sound he makes is just as ragged as my own.
After, he pulls me into him. His hand rests over my stomach, and I don’t know if he means to or if it’s instinct, but I decide it doesn’t matter. I press my hand over his.
Outside, the city goes on being the city.
In here, something has changed, and we both know it, though neither of us says so. No words are needed.
“Ask me something,” I say.
“What would you name her?”
I go very still. “Her?”
“A guess. I could be wrong.”
“Could you?” I look up at him. “Could you actually be wrong, or are you humoring me?”
“I could be wrong,” he says, with the face of a man who most definitely does not think he is wrong.
“I don’t have a name yet. Not for any gender. I’ll know it when I know it.”
“It would be nice to be consulted,” he says, which is Ivan for ‘I care about this and I’m asking nicely.’
I smirk in the darkness. “Noted.”