Chapter Five #2
“Perhaps I have not yet mentioned the most salient point about Assumpció,” he said. “She is not only one of my oldest friends. She is also my cousin.” And she could hear the excessive mildness in his voice as he continued. “In case there were any misunderstandings on that score.”
Leontina felt…embarrassed, maybe. Her cheeks were hot and there was a dark, throbbing sort of thread of emotion curling tight inside her—but she couldn’t identify it.
Or she didn’t want to, more like.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she managed to say.
“Of course you don’t,” Pau replied, but she was sure that she could hear the very faintest hint of laughter in that tone of his.
Somehow, that made it worth it. It made that darkness in her settle.
And then, of course, Assumpció was a delight. She was irreverent with Pau, warm and direct with Leontina, and when it was time for the ultrasound, she made it all seem easy and natural and even comfortable.
Lying on that table, her feet in stirrups, Leontina thought that really, this was the point where she ought to have been embarrassed.
There could not be anything more inelegant than lying like this while a stranger bustled around and everyone pretended that Leontina’s most private parts were not on display.
But somehow, that wasn’t how it felt at all.
And as she lay there, she felt a strange sensation inside her. Like a wriggling—and then, in the very same moment she asked herself what it was, she knew the answer.
Without thinking, she reached out and grabbed Pau’s hand, then pressed it to her belly with its little bump.
“The baby is kicking,” she told him excitedly. “Can you feel it?”
She glanced up to find him looking startled, his dark eyes blazing gold. The baby kicked again then, even harder, and both of them seemed to break into the same smile at once.
And for all the wildly hot nights they’d shared, all the positions they’d tried, and the ecstasy they’d eked out of each other’s bodies, Leontina couldn’t help thinking that this was a far greater intimacy than any of them. It was a different, simpler joy.
It was theirs in a way that felt deeply rooted in both of them, and she could feel it in the warmth of his palm against her belly.
“Do you want to know the baby’s sex?” Assumpció asked quietly, somehow not breaking into the moment, but deepening it.
Leontina couldn’t tear her gaze away from Pau’s. She could see his answer there. Slowly, she nodded, too.
“Yes,” Pau said quietly. “We would.”
“It is my pleasure and privilege to tell you that you will be having a little boy,” Assumpció told them. “A perfect little boy, by all current measurements. As happy and healthy as anyone could wish.” She looked at Leontina then. “You are doing beautifully.”
Then the doctor excused herself from the room. It took Leontina long moments to slowly realize that she was lying there in nothing but a hospital gown, with Pau’s hand a blaze of heat, a sweet and heavy weight on her belly.
And it never would have occurred to her that a clinical moment like this could be so many other things as well. That so many emotions could be involved. That the air itself could feel layered with things too dangerous to speak out loud.
There was the heat of his hand and the way her body responded to that, and to him, and that physical connection of theirs that only seemed to deepen—and even more so today. It was like the heat wound its way into her and made her glow.
There was that look in his eyes, somehow tender and arresting at once.
And she could not stop thinking how magical and bizarre it was that a night that had seemed so decadent, so vulnerable, so wicked, could lead to something as pure as the baby she carried and the shivery, delicious complication of this moment they shared together.
They had enjoyed each other so thoroughly that they had left marks on each other’s skin, but they’d also made a whole life.
That made something in her crack wide open.
“Pau,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper, “I have to tell you—”
“I will wait outside while you dress,” he told her, quietly.
And Leontina lay there, awash in something like misery—but sharper—once he left.
Maybe this was the price she had to pay, as simple as that. Maybe she was just going to have to live with this. It was a sort of tax she would have to pay again and again in moments like this, because of how she’d done this. Because of what she’d done and how she’d let it carry on this long.
She told herself that there was no such thing as perfect happiness, and she was a fool to imagine that if she only came clean, she and Pau could achieve it.
And maybe it was nothing more than selfishness in the first place that made her want to tell him the truth. Because what could he do about it anyway? Nothing could change what had happened.
The only thing that could change was that he might make her feel better about it, somehow, and Leontina knew she had to let that go. Because it was also possible that her confession could make things worse, and that wasn’t fair to the baby.
She was going to have to find a way to come to terms with the fact that she’d done what she’d done for the right reasons, no matter if anyone else thought she was right to do it. And if she had any emotional reaction to that, well, that was something she would have to forge through on her own.
It wasn’t that she was unused to figuring things out for herself. It was that these last weeks with Pau had made her realize how much better everything was when she was not left entirely to her own devices.
When she wasn’t alone.
Going back to the way things had been before…hurt.
“Just focus on the baby,” she told herself beneath her breath as she tidied herself up, used the bathroom, and pulled her clothes back on. “On our son.”
And it was like those were magic words. Her son. Their son.
A little boy who she could already, suddenly, envision as if he was standing there before her.
Perhaps he would have the same dark green eyes she and her brother did, maybe even ringed with gold like his father’s.
He was certain to have dark hair, and she wondered if he’d be born with that look of a stamped old coin, like all the generations of Calixtos who’d come before him, as if their history was so intense it showed on their cheeks.
She wondered if she’d see herself in him. Or perhaps she’d see her mother—like the beautiful ghost she sometimes seemed to glimpse out of the corner of her eye when she turned away from a mirror.
A little boy, she thought, letting the joy of that wash through her as she walked out of the exam room. She smiled when she saw Dr. Assumpció in the outer office.
“Pau has gone on ahead,” the other woman told her. “I believe he’s pulling the car around. But I have to tell you, this is like a miracle.”
Leontina laughed. “I assure you it is not. We got pregnant in the very unmiraculous, usual way.”
Though it had felt a bit like a miracle to her, if she was honest. It still did. Every time.
Assumpció laughed, too. “I don’t mean that. Believe me, I know where babies come from. I mean Pau. I’ve never seen him like this.”
There was, of course, nothing on earth Leontina wanted to hear more than stories about how Pau was besotted with her and a changed man in every regard, but she really didn’t think that was the case.
Still, she couldn’t help but smile and lean a little closer. “Like what?” she asked. “Married, you mean?”
“That part, sure,” Assumpció said, laughter in her gaze.
“And his choice of bride is fascinating, of course. I knew that he was friends with your brother at university, but we all thought that he cut Giaco off years ago because of his…” She clearly recalled who she was speaking to and abruptly cut herself off.
“They are very different people, is what I mean to say.”
“Indeed they are,” Leontina agreed.
Pau’s cousin looked faintly flustered, now.
“I seem to be stumbling left and right, and I already have a foot in my mouth. Possibly both feet.” She inclined her head.
“All I want to say is that the only thing I’ve ever known Pau to be intense about, and intently focused on, is the vineyard.
When we were kids, I always thought he would have burned every vine to the ground if he could, but everything changed after my uncle died.
Pau became obsessed with the company. To a concerning degree.
I’m both surprised and delighted that he’s broadened his scope. That’s all I meant.”
“That is how I received it,” Leontina assured her. “Why do you think he changed so dramatically?”
Maybe it was a foolish question to ask his cousin. Or too intimate when she’d only just met the woman. But Assumpció nodded as if it was a reasonable follow-up.
“My mother and I have always believed that it is the only way he can feel close to Bernat now,” she said quietly. “By loving what his father loved, perhaps?” The other woman smiled. “But you know him far better, I think. You would be better equipped to know the truth of this.”
Leontina’s mind was spinning as she left the office and made her way out the old, cobbled street, where Pau stood beside the gleaming SUV he’d driven here.
Because she wasn’t sure that she did know Pau better than his cousin. And she thought that she should. More than that, she wanted—desperately—to know him inside and out, the way she knew his body now.
It felt like a kind of madness to want someone this much.
She felt the moment his gaze landed on her, and all that dark focus of his centered on her alone, as if they were entirely isolated on this Spanish street when she knew they were not.
Just like the first time, just like every time, it was like being struck by lightning.
Leontina smiled, and as she did, had the overwhelming sense that everything was changed now.
That she was walking out of that office a different woman from the one who’d walked in.