Chapter 23 Jamie
The last time I was at the cabin, I wasn't seeing much of anything clearly. The heat had me half-delirious within hours of arriving, and everything from those days exists in my memory as fragments, mostly Carter's hands, Carter's voice, the desperate relief of his body inside mine.
I remember the fight.
"I haven’t had time to get it aired out," Carter says from behind me. He's carrying our bags, plural, because he refused to let me lift anything heavier than a water bottle. "Everything has happened so fast."
“That’s fine. I can open windows. Are you going to let me do that? Or are those too heavy too?”
“Funny.” He sets the bags down by the couch.
I smile. “It’s perfect. We needed time. Away from everything."
He moves past me toward the kitchen. "Are you hungry? I can make something."
He's pulling out a cutting board, a knife, vegetables from one of the bags. His movements are easy, confident. This is familiar territory for him. "Any requests? Dietary restrictions I should know about?"
"The baby hates tomatoes. Which is inconvenient, because I used to love them." I rest my hand on my stomach, feeling the now-familiar pressure of her body against my palm. "Other than that, I'll eat anything that doesn't make me nauseous."
"What makes you nauseous?"
"Lately? Eggs. The smell of coffee. Anything too sweet." I watch him select an onion and start peeling it. "The first trimester was worse. I couldn't keep anything down for weeks."
Carter's hands still on the cutting board. "I wish I'd been there."
"I know."
"I would have—" He stops. Shakes his head. "I don't know what I would have done. But I would have been there."
The silence stretches between us. He missed the first ultrasound, the first kick, the nights I lay awake terrified and alone, wondering if I was making the biggest mistake of my life.
"You're here now," I say finally.
He nods, not looking at me, and starts chopping the onion with more focus than the task requires.
I watch him cook. It's strange, sitting in this cabin where everything changed, doing something as mundane as watching a man prepare dinner.
We've had sex. We've had screaming arguments.
We've declared our relationship on national television.
But we've not spent much time together that involved actual conversation.
"What is it?" Carter asks, glancing up.
"Nothing. Just... this is weird."
"Good weird or bad weird?"
"I don't know yet." I shift on the stool, trying to find a comfortable position. There isn't one anymore. "We're doing everything backwards."
"Are we?"
"Baby first. Moving in together second. Actually getting to know each other..." I gesture at the kitchen, at him, at the whole situation. "Third. Maybe fourth."
Carter sets down his knife and wipes his hands on a towel. He comes around the island to stand in front of me, close enough that I have to tilt my head back to meet his eyes.
"What do you want to know?" he asks.
"Everything." The word comes out before I can stop it. "I'm having a baby with you. I'm supposedly building a life with you. And I don't know your favorite color, or what music you listen to, or whether you were happy as a kid."
"Blue. Classical, mostly, but I have a weakness for eighties rock that Kate would mock me relentlessly for if she knew. And..." He pauses. "I don't know if I was happy. I was busy. I was achieving. I'm not sure I knew the difference."
"That's sad."
"Maybe." He leans against the counter, arms crossed. "What about you?"
"Green. Anything I can sing along to, which drives Akari insane. And I was happy but it was hard." I look down at my hands, spread across the curve of my belly.
He pushes off from the counter and comes over to me, kissing my forehead. "Dinner will be ready in about forty minutes. Do you want to rest? The couch is comfortable."
"I've been sitting in a car for two hours. If I rest any more, I'll turn into furniture." I slide off the stool, one hand braced on the counter for balance. "You could take a bath. I seem to remember you liked the tub.”
I grin. “I did, but later. For now, I’m going to watch you cook.”
“Just watch?”
“Yup. I remember your cooking. I don’t think I should intervene.”
He grins and starts chopping again.
We eat at the small table by the window, candles lit against the darkness outside.
It feels like a date. It might actually be a date, our first real one, if you don't count screaming at each other on national television or fucking desperately through a heat or any of the other insane things we've done together.
"We should talk about practical things," Carter says, setting down his fork. "Where we're going to live. How we're going to handle the next few months."
"Your penthouse. That's what we decided, right?"
"For now. It has security, a doorman—things we need while everything is still chaotic." He pauses. "But it's not a home. It's a place I sleep. I don't want to raise a child there."
"What do you want?"
"Something that's ours. Not Crane property, not your apartment. Let’s choose something together." He's watching my face carefully. "If you want that."
"I don't know what I want." The honesty feels dangerous, but I'm tired of pretending. "This is all happening so fast. A week ago, I was packing a bag to run away. Now I'm having dinner with you talking about buying a house."
"We don't have to decide anything tonight."
"I know. But we do have to decide eventually." I push a piece of chicken around my plate. "What happens when the baby comes? Am I staying home? Are you? Do we hire someone?"
"What do you want to do?"
"I want to work. I just got the job of my dreams. I'm not ready to give it up." I look up at him. "But I also want to be there. For her. I don't want to miss everything because I'm chasing a story."
"We’ll figure out a balance. You work, I work, we hire help when we need it." Carter reaches across the table, covers my hand with his. "This isn't a zero-sum game, Jamie. We can both have what we want."
"Can we? Because from where I'm sitting, it feels like we're making it up as we go."
"We are." His thumb strokes across my knuckles. "Everyone is. No one knows what they’re doing."
I laugh despite myself. "That's either comforting or terrifying."
"Why not both?"
We finish dinner and move to the couch, Carter building a fire while I watch.
"What are you thinking?" he asks, settling beside me.
"Still that I don't really know you." I pull my feet up, tucking them under a blanket he produced from somewhere.
"Then ask me things. Anything."
"Were you ever in love? Before me, I mean." The question comes out more vulnerable than I intended.
Carter is quiet for a moment, staring at the fire. "No," he says finally. "I thought I was once. There was a girl in college—smart, ambitious, exactly the kind of person I was supposed to end up with. But looking back, I think I was in love with the idea of her. With what she represented."
"What about Georgia?"
"Oh, I love Georgia, but I’m not in love with her. There’s affection, respect and all of those good things, but she’s more of a friend than anything else. It’s not the kind of love that makes you do stupid things." He turns to look at me.
"I've never been in love," I admit. "I told myself I was too busy.
Too focused on my career. But really, I think I was scared.
My mom loved my father, and he left us with nothing.
I watched what that did to her." I pick at a thread on the blanket.
"I decided I'd never let anyone have that power over me. "
"And now?"
"Now I'm terrified." I meet his eyes. "Because you already do."
Carter reaches over, takes my hand. He doesn't say anything, just holds it while the fire crackles and pops.
"Tell me about your mom," he says eventually. "What was she like?"
So I tell him. About how she worked double shifts as a nurse and still found time to help me with homework and how she read to me every night until I was old enough to read to her.
I tell him how she died of cancer when I was twenty-two, leaving me alone in the world.
Carter listens without interrupting.
"She would have hated you," I say into his shoulder. "Rich politician's son."
"Would she have?"
"At first. I think you’d have grown on her." I stop. Swallow.
Later, we wash the dishes together, another slice of domesticity that feels surreal in its ordinariness. His shoulder brushes mine as we work, a casual intimacy that sends warmth spreading through my chest.
"This is like an arranged marriage," I say, handing him the last plate.
He glances at me. "What do you mean?"
"We didn't choose each other. Not really. The prime match, the heat, all of it. And now we're stuck together, trying to build something out of it." I set down the dish towel. "My grandmother had an arranged marriage. She used to say the love came later, if you were lucky. If you did the work."
"Are we lucky?"
"I don't know yet." I turn to face him fully. "But I think I want to find out."
Carter is very still. The kitchen is quiet around us, just the tick of the cooling stove and the wind outside.
He kisses me then, gentle and slow. When we break apart, he's smiling. "Are you ready for bed?"
I answer by taking his hand and pulling him toward the bedroom door. "We've already made a baby together. I think we can handle sharing a mattress."
The bedroom is warm, the bed softer than I remember. We undress in the lamplight. My body has changed so much since the last time we were here. I'm self-conscious about it, about the rounded belly and swollen everything, but Carter looks at me like I'm something precious.
"You're beautiful," he says.
"I'm huge."
"You're carrying our daughter." He sits on the edge of the bed, pulls me to stand between his knees. His hands span my belly, warm and reverent. "You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."
I want to argue. I want to deflect with a joke or a sharp comment. Instead, I thread my fingers through his hair and let myself believe him.
We don't have sex. We're both exhausted, and my body isn't particularly interested in anything athletic right now. But we lie tangled together in the dark, Carter's front pressed to my back, his hand resting over the baby.
"We should talk about names," I murmur.
"Not tonight."
"Soon, though. She's going to be here in three months. We can't keep calling her 'the baby.'"
"She'll have a name when she needs one." He presses a kiss to my shoulder. "Right now, I just want this. You and me and her, together. Everything else can wait."
I close my eyes. The baby kicks against Carter's palm, and I feel him smile against my skin.
"Carter?"
"Mm?"
"I'm glad it was you too."
His arm tightens around me. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to.
I fall asleep with his heartbeat against my back and his hand over our daughter, and for the first time in months, I don't dream about anything at all.