Chapter 36
Secrets.
That’s what I think without any hesitation the instant that Damiano and Benicio step out of the examination room into the hallway. After receiving the good news that the baby’s growing perfectly and my subchorionic bleed has seemed to subside, I expected them to seem relieved, but that isn’t the case. Right now, it feels like the opposite. The air has been tense, the conversation professional, and the visit has been brief.
If anything, Benicio seems more stressed than usual.
He hasn’t joked around.
Calmly, I push myself off the examination table. Once my feet touch the floor, I make my way to the door to see if I can catch any part of a conversation, but I don’t hear anything.
A smirk spreads on my face despite the slight disappointment I feel that they weren’t stupid enough to talk right outside the door. That clearly means whatever they are talking about is either important, and they can’t take the chance of anybody else hearing it, or Benicio is showing Damiano something.
Either way, it’s annoying.
My eyes roll on their own, and I move to sit in the chair that’s next to the counter, my eyes taking in the room's interior design. I’ve never noticed how simple Benicio’s office is or that, aside from equipment, he has very little around. I know he predominately works with the families that are expecting, but even for all the impersonal patients that he must have, he could at least have a plant in here.
Even a fake one would work.
My thoughts are interrupted by the door handle jiggling before Damiano walks back into the room. His frame crowds the small doorway, but he smiles when his eyes fall on me. “Ready, Bellissima?”
I nod, stand up, and walk towards Damiano until I notice him staring at me hard– Too hard to be normal.
I stop walking. “What?”
Uncertainty filters through me for a second as I watch him take me in a slow, leisurely way. He smiles after a second and shakes his head. “Nothing, I’m just happy to see you are showing.”
I look down at my rounded belly, and I stop myself from rolling my eyes again. I’m barely showing, but the shirt I’m wearing is a fitted one that seems to accentuate the small swell I’m sporting. “It’s bloat.”
I start to walk by Damiano again, and he halts my actions by taking my hand in his. I look up at him. “You are glowing and glorious.”
His hand falls over my lower stomach, and he leans in. His mouth hovers over the shell of my ear, and it takes everything in me not to grab him by his collar and fuck him into oblivion. “This is our baby. Yours and mine. No matter what happens, we’re bound by this baby.”
My lips urge to tell him that we are going to be bound regardless, but I don’t. Instead, I angle my head to face him. “You sure have a way with words.”
I tease him. “Now feed me.”
“Of course. We have to make a stop first.”
He chuckles, then ushers me out of the room with a hand on my lower back. Quickly, we leave the office and get in the car, where Gio and Vlad are already inside.
Without hesitation, Damiano pulls the sonogram that we got out of his pocket and shows it to Gio. Gio examines it from the front seat before a smile spreads on his face, and he shows Vlad. The big man doesn’t say anything but nods his head as a brief smile graces his face, then disappears when Gio returns it to Damiano. The car starts up a moment later, and we start driving.
Damiano and Gio start talking in Italian, and while I catch bits and pieces of their conversation, I don’t find myself interested enough to try and listen. I’m trying to figure out what I’m feeling about Damiano being proud of my pregnancy when I still have barely come to terms with it. I’m fully aware I’m pregnant. I’m living through the symptoms every day, but at the same time, I don’t want to allow my emotions to consume me.
I want to be excited about a baby. I want to love this baby. Yet, like the first time I was pregnant, I have an odd intuition that things aren’t going to go the way I plan. I don’t know why I feel that way and can’t explain it, but Benicio mentioned that it’s probably because the loss of the baby before was traumatic, and I didn’t get a chance to get closure.
The man should be a therapist as well as a doctor.
Yet, it also feels like something deeper, and I know that if I start to love this baby, then something happens during this civil war between the families, I will die myself.
And that’s my problem.
Even when I had lost everything all those years ago, I hadn’t been given time to succumb to my depression or any emotions. In my current life, all that I’m able to do is sit with my feelings and thoughts all day long.
In all honesty, though I hate what my life was like before, I miss the simplicity of it. I miss that I knew day to day what I would be up against. I miss the way that Gaia was always the sweetest part of my day, no matter how much she irritated me. I miss my friends that I had then and how they made everything feel effortless.
I miss everything feeling easy.
Versus the perpetual cycle of doom, I feel like I’m on.
At the same time, a part of me enjoys this cycle only because it gives me a high that consumes me entirely.
A hand on my knee jars me from my thoughts, and I look up at Damiano in question. “We’re here.”
“Here?”
I look out the window, my eyes stopping on the baby store that is undoubtedly closed.
All of my appointments are always early in the morning before any other people go to Benicio’s office, and the majority of the world wakes up. So, this store has to be no different. Or it would be if there weren’t two ladies standing in the doorway waiting for us.
A deep breath rushes out of me, and I nod, unbuckling myself. Before my hand can even touch my door handle, it’s opened by Vlad, and he extends his hand to help me out. Damiano is by my side in a second to take my hand in his, and we all make our way inside the store.
The ladies standing at the door produce beaming smiles that are purely customer service based, and usher us in, then lock the doors behind us. Apprehension snakes down my spine, and I look around nervously.
“It’s okay, Bellissima.”
Damiano comforts me in a low, husky voice, though it does nothing to calm me. “Not everything is an ambush.”
I would beg to differ, but don’t because it wouldn’t get me anywhere right now. I look at Damiano to say something when I see an older woman coming towards us. The enormous smile on her face seems spread too far to be natural, then I notice she has a wide mouth on a thin framed face.
“Damiano Bianchi, whatever are you doing here?”
Damiano’s face seems to blanch, and he turns and smiles at the lady. His body facing our assailant, he doesn’t release my hand. Instead, he takes me with him. A soft look is on his face that I recognize as resignation. “Signora Eleonora.”
With familiarity, the woman engulfs him in a friendly hug, then takes his face in her hands and kisses his cheeks. “Don’t you, Signora Eleonora, me. Where have you been?”
She runs her hands over his suited shoulders in a motherly way.
I watch my stoic husband become youthful beneath this woman’s touch. He seems to transform from a confident, solid man to an awkward teenager who’s too big for his frame. “I have been working.”
He says in his usual sturdy voice that trumps what I’ve just witnessed. “I’ve been busy.”
“Too busy to see me? I won’t have it.”
Damiano smiles, his eyes angle towards me. Immediately, her eyes cut to me, and before I can do anything, she grabs me in an embrace that emits a surprised squeak from me. She hugs me longer than she hugged Damiano, her hands running smoothly up and down my back until I relax into her touch– Until I’m forced to relax into her touch. She pulls away from me, tears in her eyes, then hugs me again briefly.
“You are so gorgeous, my dear.”
She looks at Damiano, then back at me. “Domenico told me, and I thought he was joking when he said that he couldn’t define your beauty in words.”
The right thing to do would be to act demure, as if I don’t know what I look like, but I’ve given that act up years ago. I am, after all, the product of my mother and father. They were both people that should have been models and weren’t. But the attention that she’s giving me is making me uncomfortable. “Thank you.” I manage.
In response, she squeezes my hands before releasing them. When she steps back, she seems to have a somber expression on her face but turns to look at Damiano again. “You two get whatever you need. Don’t worry about the price. Anything for Bambino Bianchi is on us.”
Bambino Bianchi?
Though I don’t want to, I like the idea of the crotch goblin growing inside being referred to as that. It makes this pregnancy feel more real, at least more real than it has since I discovered it. Somehow, not even the bloated swell has convinced me.
With a final kiss on our cheeks and a promise that she will see us once we are done, Eleanora leaves us to shop around. Quizzically, I turn to Damiano and look up at him. “Do you want to lead the way?”
He wants to lead everything else?
“Okay.”
With ease, he takes my hand and starts to walk around the big store.
We silently take everything in, stopping occasionally to look at something, then keep moving. It feels overwhelming. Ten years ago, when I had bought a few onesies with Aldo, I had balked at the prices of the items. It shocked me something so small could be so pricey. Now things are way more expensive. I don’t have the need for money, and Damiano is definitely not struggling, but still, the prices make my eyes hurt.
“So, who is Signora Eleanora?”
Next to me, Damiano chuckles to himself. “She’s my aunt’s best friend. Or she was when my aunt was alive.”
I nod absentmindedly. “You’ve known her your whole life?”
My eyes cut to Damiano, who seems intent on not divulging too much. “Yes. She also dated my father for a few years, apparently.”
With my extensive knowledge of his father’s history, I look at him. “An amicable split, I’m sure.”
Damiano shrugs at my sarcastic tone. “I wouldn’t know. I was in Italy with my mother at the time.”
My free hand runs along a custom crib set, and I stop to look at the price. “Twenty-four hundred dollars for this crib set?”
I shake my head. “How does anybody have a baby?”
Next to me, Damiano looks down at the tag but hides his surprise better than me. “Signora Eleanora makes custom things. Those that can afford it buy it, and others buy things from other places.”
I force my expression to remain neutral at the mention of other places. I don’t know what those places are supposed to be to Damiano, but we can afford the extravagant prices. Clearly, we don’t care what it costs so long as Bambino Bianchi wears it, throws up, or shits in it.
“I can buy baby things online for a lot less and get a lot more,” I argue.
My eyes fall on a onesie, and I look at the price tag. The tag states that it’s an organic material, which makes me think of food, and glares twenty-five dollars for it. The material does feel softer than what I recall ever shopping for in the past, but the price trumps that for me.
Impatient, I stop Damiano from walking more by pulling on his hand. He faces me, then moves towards me. “Yes?”
Uncertain where to start, I shrug. “I don’t want to buy anything here.”
My eyes scan the store. “I don’t like anything here.”
In front of me, Damiano looks around the store, too. He doesn’t give away what he’s thinking, but I see for a brief moment that he’s only here because it’s what everybody else has done. He was referred here, or he knows Signora Eleanora.
His other hand takes mine, and his thumb caresses the top of my hands. “Where do you want to go, Bellissima?”
“Home.”
I start. “I want tacos, then I want to go home.”
I step closer to him for his cologne to waft into my nostrils and make me feel like a ravenous beast. “Then I want to fuck all day and night.”
The hunger I’m feeling reflects in his eyes. “All day and night, Bellissima?”
The closer he gets, the more I want to climb him like a tree. The last few weeks have forced us to become more intimate in ways I wasn’t expecting, but now I want him beneath me, filling me in every position possible. A part of me wants to make the transition into sex again cautiously, but I know we have been anything but cautious throughout this relationship.
Why stop now?
At any other time, we would feel like we are by ourselves, but right now, we technically are. The store doesn’t open for another few hours, and everybody has made themselves scarce.
Damiano leans down to place a kiss on the side of my mouth. “As much as I want to, I regret to inform you that I have committed us to prior engagements this evening.”
I do roll my eyes this time. My hands try to disentangle from Damiano’s grasp, but he holds my hands tightly, even intertwining our fingers together. “Not shopping again, I hope.”
My tone is light, but I make my unhappiness with the situation apparent.
“No.”
Damiano chuckles. He releases one of my hands and starts to walk more casually. “Ilya and his wife invited us over to their house.”
That’s not what I was expecting to hear, but keep that to myself. This will be my first time meeting anybody from the families or anyone that Damiano is acquainted with outside of his family and Vlad. I’ve seen Ilya before at Luca’s funeral, then our wedding, but he didn’t stay long or linger because his wife was due any day, then had just had the baby by the time we got married.
“Why?”
Surprise from my question grips Damiano, and he turns to look at me. “Why what?”
I shrug. “Why are we going to their house? No offense, but I’ve never met his wife and I doubt that we have anything in common.”
This time, Damiano allows me to pull my hand free of his, but I don’t move far. Instead, I make my way to a display of plush animals. “You won’t know if you have anything in common until you meet her.”
He sidles up beside me. “There is one thing that you two share.”
I scoff. “That we both are bound to this life? That we’re having babies? We are wives of dangerous men?”
My sarcastic tone is ignored. “No, Echo. You have both fought to get where you are. Anya comes with a past of her own that Ilya had to accept. She’s not as ferocious as you but nearly as cunning.”
Being called ferocious somehow makes it okay that he’s made plans for me to meet someone’s wife. “Ferocious, huh?”
My fingers that are passing over an animal stop, and I look at Damiano. He reaches out and grabs the animal that I stopped over, and I see that it’s a lion. “We have to buy something, or else Signora Eleanora won’t let us leave.”
A smile tugs at my lips. “I guess we have to take Leonel home then.”
“Leonel?”
He glances down at the plush lion, a soft expression on his face that reminds of the youthful look he had earlier. “Leonel, the lion.”
I shrug. “Unless you want to name him something else.”
“No.”
Damiano shakes his head, then takes my hand. “Leonel, it is. Let’s go home.”