Chapter 22
ROMAN
She looks up from her book when I close the door, and she looks at me the way she has been looking at me all evening, like she’s waiting for me to do something she hasn’t decided yet whether she wants me to do.
“What are you doing here?” she says.
Not a challenge. Not quite a question either. Just the words, placed between us, asking me to account for myself in a way that I’m not accustomed to being asked to account for myself, and that I find, standing here in her doorway at eleven o’clock at night, I do not have a clean answer for.
I cross the room, and I sit on the edge of the bed.
She watches me do this. She closes the book and sets it on the nightstand and she sits with her knees drawn up and her back against the headboard.
She is watching me with the full attention she brings to things she is trying to understand, and I sit on the edge of the mattress and I look at my hands and I think about everything I know how to do in rooms like this and the fact that none of it is the right thing here.
I look at her.
“How are you feeling?” I say. “The pregnancy. You haven’t mentioned it.”
Something shifts in her expression. She did not expect that to be the first thing I said, and neither did I, entirely, but it is the thing that has been sitting at the back of everything since the ceremony yesterday, since I stood in that room and said I vow to protect this child with my life and meant it in a way that surprised even me.
“I’m fine,” she says. “Tired sometimes. The nausea was worse a few weeks ago.”
“Is there anything you need?”
“I have everything I need.” She pauses. “Roman.”
“I want to know,” I say. “When something is not right. When you need something. I want to know.”
She looks at me for a moment. “Alright,” she says quietly.
I look at my hands again. Outside the windows the city does its late-night thing, lower and slower than the daytime version, and the lamp on the nightstand throws a warm circle of light across the bed.
I sit in the edge of it and I think about a child that is going to arrive in approximately seven months.
I think about the fact that I have spent thirty years building something I always told myself I was building for its own sake, because the building was the point, because there was no other point, and I am sitting on the edge of this bed right now and I know that is not true anymore.
“I’m glad,” I say.
She waits.
“About the child.” I look up at her. “I did not expect to be. I want you to know that I am.”
The room is very quiet.
She looks at me with something in her face that is open in a way her face almost never is in my presence.
All the composure is still there, but something else underneath it that she has decided, in this room at this hour, not to put away.
Her eyes are very dark in the lamplight, and she’s looking at me like she’s seeing something she didn’t know was there and is deciding what to do with it.
She reaches up and touches my face. Her fingers rest against my jaw, light and certain. I catch her hand and pull her toward me.
I kiss her slowly, deeply, tasting the quiet surprise on her lips. She shifts forward until she’s straddling my lap while I sit on the edge of the bed. Her knees press into the mattress on either side of my hips.
I slide my hands under the hem of her shirt and lift it off. The bra follows. I unhook it and let it fall away, then run my palms up her bare back and down again, feeling the warmth of her skin and the new softness at her waist and lower belly.
“You are beautiful like this,” I murmur against her mouth. “So soft already. I can feel the change.”
She reaches for my shirt. Her fingers work the buttons open one by one. When she pushes the fabric off my shoulders, I help her, then stand just long enough to step out of my pants and underwear. We are both naked now, her body pressed against mine in the warm circle of lamplight.
I kiss down her neck and across her collarbone. Her breasts are fuller, heavier. I take one nipple into my mouth and suck gently, then the other, listening to the soft sound she makes.
My hand moves between her thighs. She is already wet. I slide two fingers through her folds, circling her clit slowly before pushing inside.
“Feel how ready you are for me,” I whisper against her skin. “So wet. So perfect.”
She rocks against my hand, her forehead resting against mine, eyes open and dark.
I guide her hips up, then down. She sinks onto me inch by inch until I am buried completely inside her.
The feeling is tight and hot and perfect.
She stays upright at first, hands on my shoulders.
I hold her waist and help her move in slow rolling motions.
“Like that,” I tell her quietly. “Ride me slowly. Let me feel all of you.”
She moves with me, taking me deep. I watch her face the entire time, the way her lips part and her eyes flutter when I hit the right spot. My forehead stays pressed to hers. We breathe the same air.
“God, Elena,” I murmur. “You feel incredible. So tight around me. I could stay inside you all night.”
After a while, I turn her gently onto her side.
I curl up behind her, chest to her back, one arm wrapped around her, my hand resting just below the curve of her stomach.
I lift her top leg slightly and slide back inside her from behind.
The position lets me hold her close and move deep and slow without any pressure on her belly.
I thrust steadily, pressing my mouth to the back of her neck. “Is this good?” I ask, voice low. “Tell me if it is too much.”
“It’s perfect,” she breathes.
I keep one hand between her legs, fingers finding her clit and rubbing in tight circles while I thrust. My other hand stays protective on her lower belly, thumb brushing lightly over the soft skin.
“You are carrying my child,” I whisper against her ear. “And you still feel this good. So warm. So wet for me.”
She pushes back against me, meeting every thrust. Her breathing grows ragged. She reaches back and grips my thigh, nails digging in. I press my mouth to her shoulder and keep the rhythm deep and steady.
She tightens around me, her body trembling. A soft, broken sound leaves her throat as she comes, pulsing in waves that pull me over the edge right after her. I bury myself deep and stay there, groaning her name against her skin as pleasure rolls through both of us.
We stay locked together like that for a long moment, my arm still wrapped around her, my chest pressed to her back. Our breathing slowly evens out. The lamp is still on. The city glitters beyond the windows. Neither of us moves to turn the light off.
She turns her head and looks back at me.
The lamp throws its light across her face.
The city glitters beyond the windows. I think about two years of her sitting outside my office, what it cost her, what I did not see.
A masquerade. A beautiful dress. A woman who wanted one night where she was not my secretary, took it, paid for it quietly, and ever since.
I reach over and turn the lamp off.
In the dark, she’s still there beside me, her breathing even and close, and I lie on my back and look at the ceiling I cannot see, and I say nothing because there is nothing I know how to say yet that is equal to what she just told me.
But I do not move away.
And neither does she.