Chapter 9 Antonio
Antonio
There’s movement against my palm at three in the morning.
I go completely still, keeping my palm pressed flat against Jasmine’s belly in the darkness. We fell asleep with her back to my chest, my hand over where our daughter grows.
I hold my breath, waiting.
Another kick. Stronger this time, unmistakable against my skin.
“Deus,” I whisper into Jasmine’s hair.
For weeks, she’s been telling me about the flutters, the rolls and the hiccups. I’ve felt nothing but the firm swell of her belly under my touch.
But now our daughter is announcing herself, and I can finally feel her.
“Querida.” I shake her shoulder. “Wake up.”
“Mmph.” She stirs but doesn’t open her eyes.
We’re at the lake house for the weekend—our third visit since returning to Winter Bay. It’s become our weekend retreat.
“She’s kicking. Really kicking. I can finally feel her.”
That wakes her up. She places her hand over mine, and we wait together in the darkness of her bedroom.
The baby kicks again.
“There,” I whisper. “Did you feel that?”
“Oh, is that what that is?” She yawns. “I thought I had gas.”
“Very funny.” I kiss her shoulder. “Go back to sleep, minha linda.”
She’s out within seconds, but I stay awake for another hour, my hand on her twenty-four-week belly, feeling our daughter move. Every kick, every flutter, every shift feels like a miracle.
This is my daughter. My family. Real in a way she hadn’t been before, even with the ultrasounds and the heartbeat monitors.
The following Tuesday, I show up at Jasmine’s apartment with takeout and find her crying at her desk. The climax isn’t working, she says. Celeste is being stubborn again.
I sit on her couch and eat lo mein while she talks through the problem out loud while pacing her small living room. Somewhere around the third container of dumplings, she stops mid-sentence.
“The betrayal comes from within,” she says. “Not from Qalingo. From Celeste herself. She must be the one who almost destroys everything.”
Jasmine is back at her laptop before I can respond. I finish dinner alone, clean up her kitchen, and send her a text on my way out.
Proud of you. Call me tomorrow.
She calls the next day and proposes restructuring her writing schedule to mirror my work hours. No more late-night writing binges that leave her exhausted when I’m free. No more missed dinners because she’s lost in a scene.
When I work, she writes. When I am done, she is done.
“That way,” she said, “our time together is actually together. No laptops. No work calls. Just us.”
It was such a simple solution. And it changed everything.
Small victories. But they added up.
In the weeks that followed, I stopped comparing myself to my father every time I made a promise, and stopped waiting for the inevitable failure that never came.
Jasmine started calling me when she needed something instead of trying to handle it alone. She stopped triple-checking my certainty every time I made a plan for our future. We were building a door together, just like Celeste and Qalingo were in her book.
But ordinary life doesn’t pause for personal growth. The week Jasmine hits twenty-six weeks, everything at work goes sideways.
A bad update bricks sixty thousand devices overnight. I spend eighteen hours on calls with engineers, walking back code, deploying patches, and watching recovery numbers tick up one agonizing percent at a time. By the time the last device comes back online, I’ve aged approximately forty years.
Empty coffee cups litter my desk, and my laptop surrounded by scattered notes. The city beyond my windows shifts from afternoon gold to the orange of approaching dusk. I’ve watched the sun rise and now threaten to set again from this same chair.
The door to my office swings open without a knock. Kamal strolls in with a paper bag from the bakery downtown in one hand and two coffees balanced in the other. Jaxon follows, already loosening his tie.
“Bruh.” Kamal stops in the doorway, taking in the sight of me. “Please tell me you ain’t still wearing yesterday’s clothes.”
“What else would I be wearing? Swim trunks?”
“All devices are back online.” Jaxon drops onto the leather couch against the wall, stretching his legs out. He looks as tired as I feel. “Could’ve been worse. PR starts damage control tomorrow, but we contained it.”
“Doesn’t change the fact that sixty thousand users couldn’t access their devices for almost twelve hours because I pushed a bad update.”
“We pushed a bad update.” Jaxon loosens his tie further. “All three of us signed off on that timeline. This isn’t just on you.”
I lean back in my chair. “Yeah, well, I’m the one who wrote the code.”
“And we’re the ones who said ship it.” Kamal sets the coffees on my desk, then drops into the chair across from me. “Stop with the martyr act. It don’t suit you.”
“Everything suits me. I’m extremely attractive.”
“Did you sleep?” Jaxon asks, ignoring this.
“I slept.”
Kamal’s head tilts. “When?”
“Meu Deus. Who are you? The sleep police?”
“Yes. And you under arrest.” He pulls a croissant from the bag and takes a massive bite and crumbs scatter across his shirt. “Also, you look like shit. Eat something.”
He tosses a second croissant at me. I catch it one-handed but don’t eat it.
“Man, I’m still recovering from you impregnating my future wife,” Kamal says through a mouthful of pastry.
“She’s not your future wife.”
But even as I say it, I know Kamal’s exactly the type she’s always dated. Black, good-looking, and intelligent. He’d fit beside her in a way I never would.
“Jasmine will decide that.” Kamal grins, brushing crumbs off his chest. “You won’t be alive to do anything about it, anyway.”
He’s been talking about marrying her when they’re both sixty ever since he found out we slept together in Vegas.
Apparently he’d had a crush on her for years, which I had no idea about, and he wants his fill of women before settling down with her.
I know he only says it to mess with me, and I hate that I can’t just laugh it off the way I would have a year ago.
I shoot him the bird.
Jaxon laughs from the couch. “Kamal, if you keep this up, Antonio might hurt you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look this close to murderous.”
“Since this meeting isn’t going anywhere, get out of my office.”
“Bye, future brother-husband.” Kamal stands, swiping the remaining croissant from the bag. “Eat the pastry and go wash yo’ ass.”
“I hate you.”
“Love you too, man.”
A soft knock interrupts his exit. My assistant pokes her head in. “Mr. Da Rocha? Ms. Haywood is here to see you.”
Jasmine appears in the doorway. She’s wearing an oversized t-shirt and denim shorts. The sight of her makes the tension I’ve been carrying for eighteen hours dissolve.
“Oh.” Jasmine blinks at the room full of people. “I didn’t realize you were in a meeting. I can wait.”
“We were just leaving.” Kamal’s smile widens. “Jasmine. You look lovely.”
She laughs. “Kamal. Always a flatterer, I see.”
“Only when it’s true.” He opens his arms. “Come here. It’s been too long.”
It’s only been three days. We had dinner at Jaxon and Jessa’s on Saturday when they formally invited us to their wedding in the Maldives. The ceremony was meant to make up for the drunken vows they traded during Meesha’s bachelorette weekend in Vegas.
Jasmine steps into the hug without hesitation, and I’m out of my chair before I register moving, crossing the room in three strides.
“All right.” I place my hand on the small of Jasmine’s back, positioning myself between them. “That’s enough of that.”
Kamal’s eyebrows shoot up and he smirks. Jaxon coughs, poorly disguising a laugh.
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” I ask Kamal pointedly.
Kamal’s grin turns absolutely insufferable. “Oh, I see how it is.” He backs toward the door, hands raised in surrender. “My bad, my bad. Didn’t mean to touch your girl.”
“Out.”
“I’m going, I’m going.” He winks at Jasmine. “Good to see you, Jas. Take care of our boy here. He’s been through a lot.”
Jaxon claps me on the shoulder as he passes, still chuckling. “Get some rest. We’ll handle the PR fallout.”
Then they’re gone, the door clicking shut behind them, and I’m acutely aware of Jasmine staring at me.
“What,” she says slowly, “was that about?”
I don’t move my hand from her back. “I don’t like other men touching my girlfriend.”
We haven’t discussed labels or defined what we are beyond pregnant and together and figuring it out.
“Girlfriend?”
“That’s what you are.” I hold her gaze. “Unless you have objections.”
The smile that spreads across her face is genuine. “None.”
Jasmine reaches up, settling her palm against my jaw, and brushing her thumb over the stubble I haven’t shaved.
“But Kamal is your best friend,” she says.
“Kamal is a menace who’s been calling you his future wife since he found out about us.”
Her lips twitch. “And you think I’m interested in Kamal?”
“I think Kamal is your type.”
Jasmine’s quiet for a moment. Then she rises on her toes and presses her mouth to mine. “You’re my type, Antonio” she says after ending the kiss. “I’m exactly where I want to be.”
I pull her closer and breathe in the scent of her hair, letting myself forget the crisis, the sleepless night and Kamal’s ridiculous jokes.
“You came to the office,” I say finally.
“I came to break you out.” She pulls back enough to look at me properly, nose wrinkling. “You’ve been here all night. You need a shower, a meal, and at least eight hours of sleep. In that order.”
“And you’re going to make sure I get all three?”
“Someone has to.” She takes my hand, threading her fingers through mine. “Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”
She came here without being asked, because she knew I needed her. I let her lead me toward the door, leaving behind the coffee and uneaten croissant.
We go to her apartment, not mine. I shower while she orders Thai food.
When I emerge in the gray sweatpants and t-shirt I keep at her apartment, she’s curled on the couch with the takeout containers spread across the coffee table.
“Eat,” she commands, pointing at the cushion beside her. “Then sleep.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
We eat in comfortable silence. A few months ago, this would’ve been impossible. Every conversation was careful, now she steals noodles from my container without asking, and I don’t mind.
“You’ve been working insane hours. I’ve been writing insane hours. We’re both exhausted.” She shifts to face me, tucking her legs beneath her. “We need to do something that isn’t productive. Something completely pointless and fun.”
“What did you have in mind?”
She reaches for the controller on the coffee table. “I want to play your game.”
I blink. “Dragonstrike?”
“Unless you’re scared.”
“Of playing my own game against a romance author? Please.”
Twenty minutes later, I’m staring at the screen in disbelief.
“You’re cheating.”
“I’m not cheating.” Jasmine doesn’t look away from the screen, her fingers flying over the controller. “I’m just better than you.”
“No one is better than me at this game. I developed it.”
“And yet.” She pulls off a combo that shouldn’t be possible, and my character crumples. K.O. flashes across the screen.
I stare at the television in disbelief.
I turn to face her. “Explain. Now.”
She shrugs, reaching for her water bottle. “I grew up in foster care. Video games and reading were my escape.”
“You hustled me.”
“I prefer to think of it as a strategic revelation of skill.” The corner of her mouth twitches. “Are you mad?”
I should be. My pride is in tatters. My crown has been stolen by a pregnant writer who’s beaten me at my own creation.
“Best of three,” I say.
“You’re a glutton for punishment.”
“I’m persistent.”
“Same thing.” But she picks up the controller again. “Your funeral.”
She beats me. Again. And again. And when she finally wins the fifteenth match, she does a victory dance that involves wiggling her shoulders and pumping her fists in a way that should be ridiculous but somehow isn’t.
I grab her hips and pull her onto my lap, silencing her victory dance with my mouth. Her laughter dissolves into a soft hum of pleasure.
“Sore loser,” she murmurs against my lips.
“I’m winning now.”
She pulls back. “That’s not how competition works.”
“I’m rewriting the rules.”
“You can’t just...” But I’m kissing her again, and she stops arguing.
I don’t mind losing. Not if it means her weight in my lap, her fingers in my hair, and her victory temporarily forgotten.
Tomorrow, I’ll demand a rematch. Tonight, I’ll take my consolation prize.