Lila
Iwoke up feeling like something had gone wrong in the night and neglected to tell me what.
The nausea hit before I even sat up, that low rolling kind that sits at the back of your throat and dares you to move too quickly.
I made it to the kitchen, put the kettle on, and stood in front of the coffee maker staring at the carafe with the particular misery of someone whose entire morning routine had just been made inaccessible.
The smell alone was enough to send me two steps backward.
I made toast instead. I stood at the counter looking at it and could not make myself take a bite.
Azrael appeared in the kitchen doorway with dirt on his hands and a small trowel, which told me he had been in my flowerbeds again, which he did without asking and which I had stopped objecting to somewhere around the third week.
He looked at me and then the untouched toast. Slowly he dragged his hazel eyes back to my face. You're pale."
"Again with the pale," I said.
He frowned, setting the trowel on the porch railing outside before coming in. "You're usually hungry by now."
"I'll eat later."
"You said that yesterday."
I smiled despite myself. "Are you keeping notes?"
He paused but only briefly. "Possibly."
He made me tea without being asked, chamomile with honey the way I had mentioned once in passing three weeks ago.
I apparently never needed to mention again how I liked my tea, and set it in front of me and went back to the flowerbeds without making a production of it.
I wrapped my hands around the mug and felt the warmth work its way through my palms and thought, not for the first time, that I had absolutely no idea what I had done to deserve him showing up across the street.
Work was long and relentless and I couldn’t wait to get home and crawl into bed. I drove home with the windows down and sat in the driveway for a moment longer than necessary before getting out.
Azrael was on the porch and fixing something attached to it, which had become one of those facts about my life that I had stopped noticing the way you stop noticing that the sky is blue.
Today he was crouched at the far end of the railing with a wrench, doing something to a support post that had been loose since I moved in.
I dropped my purse just inside the door and walked back out without really thinking about it, and I wrapped my arms around him from behind and put my chin against his shoulder blade and closed my eyes.
He went completely still, the kind where he was processing something unexpected and giving it the same focused attention he gave everything. Then, slowly, he relaxed.
"Long day," I said.
He frowned a little, “I noticed."
"How?"
He shrugged, “You sighed before you got out of the car."
I laughed into his shoulder. He reached up with one hand and covered both of mine where they were linked across his chest, and then he turned back to the porch railing and finished tightening the support post one-handed because I had no intention of letting go and he had apparently decided that was fine.
He cooked dinner, and I had learned that attempting to help resulted in being redirected to the counter with a glass of water. Demon bae had been doing things on his own for a century, like developing his cooking skills and didn’t need me in the way.
“You're impossible," I told him from my position on the counter, stealing cherry tomatoes from the cutting board.
"I've been told," he said, without looking up.
The kitchen smelled like garlic and herbs and something warm and savory that had been simmering since before I got home, and for the first twenty minutes it was lovely.
Then he moved the pan and the smell of the meat hit me directly, and my stomach lurched with a violence that surprised me completely.
I was at the sink before I had made a conscious decision to move. Nothing happened, just the nausea cresting and receding and leaving me gripping the edge of the counter with my eyes closed and my forehead tipped forward.
"I'm okay," I said.
"You aren't."
"I'm just." I stopped. I genuinely did not have an ending for that sentence. "I don't know what's wrong with me."
He didn't answer right away. He turned off the burner and came to stand beside me, and he rubbed slow circles against my back with one hand, steady and unhurried, not pushing, not asking, not making me explain something I couldn't explain. Just there.
After a moment the nausea eased back enough that I could breathe normally, and I straightened up and let him steer me gently toward the back door.
We ended up on the porch swing with the untouched dinner inside and the mountains going purple in the fading light and fireflies beginning their slow drift across the yard.
I had my legs across his lap and my head against his shoulder and neither of us said anything for a long time, which was one of my favorite things about being with him, the way silence between us had stopped being something that needed filling.
The yard was warm and soft and entirely still. Somewhere in the tree line a bird called once and went quiet.
"You know," I said eventually.
"Hm?"
"I don't think this place feels haunted anymore."
He was quiet for a moment. "No?"
"No." I looked up at him. "I think you scared away all the ghosts."
He looked down at me with something in his expression that I still did not entirely have a word for, warm and steady and a little bit like the way people look at things they cannot quite believe are real.
"Only the ones I could," he said quietly.
I kissed him, slow and easy, the kind of kiss that had nowhere it needed to be, and he kissed me back the same way, and the swing moved gently and the fireflies drifted and for one long suspended moment everything in my world was exactly right.
Then he stopped.
It was sudden enough that I felt it before I understood it, his arms loosening, his breath catching, his whole body going still in a way that was different from his usual stillness.
He pulled back just enough to look at me, and the expression on his face was one I had never seen before, something stripped of all the careful control he usually kept in place.
"Lila."
I frowned. "What?"
He didn't answer right away. He looked at me the way he looked at the ward line when something had shifted in it, reading something I couldn't see, his eyes moving over my face slowly.
"Lila," he said again, very quietly.
"You're scaring me a little."
He took one slow step back, just enough space to look at me fully, and when his eyes met mine they had the quality of someone standing at the edge of something enormous.
"You're pregnant," he said.
I laughed automatically, the kind of laugh that comes out when something catches you completely off guard. "No I'm not."
Azrael didn’t smile but he also did’nt look away. He simply looked at me, steady and certain and completely serious, like a man watching the world rearrange itself into a shape he had not dared to imagine.
Wait a damn minute, I thought as the world came crashing down around me.