36. Ivan
IVAN
She is visibly pregnant now, and I cannot stop noticing it.
Not dramatically—she’s not enormous, not yet, but there is a curve to her now where there wasn’t one a month ago, a roundness she carries low and unhurried.
There’s no tactical reason to notice the way she moves differently now, slightly slower, one hand sometimes resting against the curve of it without her seeming to know she’s doing it.
I notice anyway. I notice constantly. It’s become a category of attention I didn’t have before her, and I don’t know what to call.
The nightmares are fewer now. They were nightly for the first two weeks after the basement, and I learned the geography of them quickly—the sharp inhale before the scream, the way her hands go out in front of her like she’s still bound and trying to free them, the four or five seconds it takes her to surface fully into the room and into me.
I’ve gotten good at being there for those four or five seconds.
I keep tea ready some nights without telling her why, just have the kettle filled and the mug set out before either of us has gone to sleep.
It’s a small piece of preparation that asks nothing of her and costs me almost nothing and has, more than once, been the difference between a bad ten minutes and a bad hour.
Lately, the nights pass without incident more often than not, and I feel something every time that I would call relief if relief were a strong enough word for it, which it isn’t. It is closer to gratitude—an odd thing to feel about the absence of something, but there it is.
I watch her now, across the kitchen, reaching up into a cabinet for a glass, the curve of her stomach visible against the fabric of her shirt, and something in me does the thing it does several times a day now, which is simply stop and look.
She’s creating a person inside her own body.
I’ve moved through this world for years, handling things that are dangerous, complicated, and require enormous control.
But none of it compares to what her body is doing right now without any effort of will, without any of the architecture on which I build my own competence.
She is doing the most extraordinary thing I have ever witnessed, and she does it while complaining mildly that her back hurts and asking if we have more of the crackers she likes.
I now keep cases of them in stock.
I find her more attractive every single day.
This was not a thing I expected. The world I grew up in had certain assumptions about this stage of a woman’s life, assumptions I absorbed without ever examining them closely enough to know they were wrong, and all of it turned out to be exactly that. Wrong, every part of it.
What I feel, watching Luna move through our kitchen with her new shape and new gravity, is not diminished interest. It’s the opposite, and it does not seem to be slowing down.
I cannot keep my hands off her. I have stopped trying to pretend to her or to myself.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she says, without turning around, glass in hand.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re going to do something about it.”
“I’m considering it.”
She turns around. She has flour on one hand from something she was doing earlier, and her hair is loose, and the curve of her is right there under her shirt. “Seriously? I’m a mess.”
“You’re my mess.” I cross the kitchen and put my hands on her hips, and she lets the glass settle on the counter and tips her head back against my shoulder.
“You’re a fiend. A pervert. A rapscallion.”
“Your rapscallion.”
She laughs and that laugh turns into moan when I reach into her pants. We end up at the counter, which is not where we planned to end up but is where we are.
She bends forward with her hands braced against the edge, and there’s enough room left for the curve of her stomach. She makes that low sound against her own forearm that I feel everywhere at once, raw and unguarded, the kind of sound she has stopped trying to hold back around me.
The counter is solid under her hands, and I keep one arm braced near hers, steady, watching the line of her spine, the way her hair has fallen forward over one shoulder, the small movements she makes that tell me exactly where she is and what she needs.
It ends with both of us breathing hard in the middle of the afternoon, her laughing softly into her own arm, me with my forehead against the back of her shoulder, and I think, not for the first time, that I did not know a body could become more compelling to me with time rather than less.
Hers has. I suspect it will keep doing that for the rest of my life.
Her phone buzzes on the counter while she’s catching her breath. She reaches for it, reads it, and laughs. “Cherry,” she says, by way of explanation. “Mike finally asked her to dinner. A real date, not a friend thing. He brought flowers. Real ones. He researched what kind she likes.”
“Good man.” I consider this. “Does he know she’s trans?”
“He should. She doesn’t hide it.”
“What happens if it doesn’t work out?”
She shrugs, still looking at her phone, thumb moving over another incoming message. “They’re both adults?—”
“She’s ten years older than him. And they couldn’t have children naturally—” I stop myself. “I dislike that phrase.”
“Yeah, me too.” She looks up. “But I know what you mean. I don’t think Mike is looking for anything but her, though. He’s had a thing for her for a long time.”
“Then good for him.” I mean it. “And good for her, if it goes the way he’s hoping.”
Luna glances up from her phone. “You’re getting soft.”
“I’m not getting soft.”
“You just expressed genuine concern for the romantic well-being of two people you barely know.”
“I expressed an opinion. There’s a difference.”
“There really isn’t,” she says, smiling, and goes back to her phone. She yawns, and I take this as my cue. I walk her to the bedroom with one hand at the small of her back, and she goes without argument, which tells me how tired she actually is.
“We should get Hairy a bigger tank,” I say, while she’s settling into the pillows. “And a companion. Goldfish do better with company.”
“Mm,” she says, eyes already closing. “Yeah. Get him a girlfriend.”
“Or a boyfriend. I’ll look into compatible species.”
“You’re very invested in this,” she murmurs, smiling without opening her eyes.
“I am,” I admit, and I mean it more than the lightness of the conversation suggests. The fish matters to her, which means the fish matters, and I have already spent more time than I will admit researching tank sizes and water chemistry.
She’s asleep within a minute. The baby takes more out of her these days than she’s used to. I’ve learned not to comment on it, just to let her rest when rest arrives.
I go to the window. I stand with my hands in my pockets and think about Hugo, which is not where I expected my mind to go, but it goes there anyway.
No one wants to marry you.
have thought about that sentence at odd moments without choosing to. I think about it now, standing at this window with Luna asleep behind me and a fish living a much better life than he started with, and I feel nothing.
Not anger. Not vindication, which would at least be something. Just the absence of a thing that used to have weight, clean and total, like a tooth that finally stopped aching one day, and you only notice because you go looking for the pain out of habit.
Those were his old words. He doesn’t say things like that anymore.
We talked the other day, and he congratulated me on everything with Luna with what sounded like genuine warmth. “Can’t say I’m not a little jealous. She’s going to be a wonderful wife and mother.”
“You and Olga?—”
“Remains to be seen.” A pause, and something in his voice that wasn’t there before, something closer to hope than he usually allows himself. “I’m working on it.”
I’m still at the window, still thinking about all of it, when I hear her voice from the bedroom. Sleepy. Unguarded. Saying my name like it’s the most natural thing in the world to want, which, from her, lately, it apparently is.
I go to her.
She has shifted onto her side, pillows arranged the way she likes them now—one between her knees, one supporting her stomach, the arrangement she’s worked out over the past weeks through trial and complaint and several increasingly detailed instructions to me about pillow placement that I have followed without comment because they work.
She reaches for me without fully opening her eyes, and I get into bed beside her, and she pulls me close with unselfconscious ease.
When she whispers, “I want you inside me,” I could lose it right then.
This time, I move with her rather than against her, watching her face, adjusting when she shifts, and she keeps her eyes mostly closed and makes small, contented sounds against the pillow that tell me everything I need to know.
It’s unhurried in the way the morning can be unhurried—no urgency, just warmth, closeness, and the quiet satisfaction of two people who know exactly how to be good to each other now.
When she breaks on me, I lose myself in her. Every sound, smell, touch, taste.
Luna unravels me, and I never knew I needed a good unravelling.