Chapter 21 #3
“Makayla made you feel as if loving her required you to prove yourself constantly.” Abby looked down at their joined hands. “How do you know you aren’t choosing another life where everyone needs something from you?”
“Because you care whether I have needs too.” Evan’s answer came quietly. “You loved me before the hospital numbers, and you understood why the work mattered when success still looked unlikely. You also tell me when I’m working too much instead of pretending you’re fine until you hate me for it.”
Abby smiled through the tears on her face. “I haven’t had enough time to hate you for it.”
“Give it a few funding rounds.” Evan lifted her hand and kissed her fingers. “I’m sure I can become irritating.”
The humor rested on something true, and Abby let out a damp, unsteady laugh. Then she moved around the table and sat in the chair beside him.
“I want a life with you too,” she said as Evan turned toward her. “But I’m still frightened that we met each other through the worst thing that ever happened to us.”
“We met in college.” Evan brushed a tear from her cheek with his thumb. “We only learned how to see each other after the worst thing happened.”
Abby leaned into his hand. “I don’t want you to become her father because Hudson failed.”
“Then I won’t.” Evan moved closer, leaving Abby enough room to pull away. “If I become important to her, it will be because I keep showing up and she decides I am.”
She kissed him before he could say anything more. Evan drew her carefully against him, one hand at the back of her neck, the other settling just above the curve of her stomach.
She broke the kiss first. Her hands were still at his collar. She pulled back. “I want—” The sentence didn’t finish itself the way she needed it to.
Evan waited, his thumb moving slowly at her nape.
“I don’t know how to ask you,” she said. “I don’t know if you even want—” She stopped again. In the months since her body had begun to change She looked down at herself, embarrased by the obvious and enormous fact of her body, and felt the familiar urge to apologize for it.
Evan put two fingers beneath her chin and lifted it.
“Look at me,” he said quietly.
“I am looking at you.”
“No.” His thumb moved along her jaw. “You’re waiting for me to be polite about this.”
The accuracy of it stung her eyes. She had been. She had been bracing for gentleness deployed like a consolation.
“Abby.” His voice was low and even. “I’m going to need you to finish a sentence.”
“If you still want me,” she said. “Like that.”
Something shifted in his expression. He kissed her once, softly, then drew back just far enough to look at her. Then he stood, and took her hand, and led her down the hall without turning off any of the lights.
What she got was not gentle. He kissed her with a directness that left no room for her to wonder whether he meant it, and when she instinctively turned toward the lamp he caught her hand and held it. Let me, he said against her mouth, and she understood he meant more than the light.
He was slow in a way that felt like attention rather than caution.
She had expected him to navigate around her body; instead he seemed to be learning it, unhurried, as though her changed shape were something he wanted to understand rather than accommodate.
When she tensed he didn’t reassure her with words.
He just stayed, and waited, until she didn’t.
He kissed her again, slower this time, and she felt the deliberateness of it. When he drew back he took her face in both hands and made her stay there, in the light, while he looked at her. She wanted to say something self-deprecating and didn’t. He didn’t give her the room.
He was careful in a way she hadn’t anticipated and unhesitating in ways she hadn’t dared to hope for.
When she moved to accommodate the weight of herself he followed without comment, without adjustment in his expression.
At one point she laughed, embarrassed, and he kissed the laugh out of her mouth.
At another moment she made a sound that embarrassed her.
He lifted his head and looked at her with an expression she had no category for—not tenderness exactly, something more direct than that—and the embarrassment left.
She cried a little, after. Not sadly. “I didn’t know,” she said.
Evan pulled her closer, wrapping her in his arms. “What didn’t you know?”
She thought about it. “That you would want me. Like that.”
He didn’t answer right away. Outside, a car passed. “Never doubt it,” he said finally. “I’ve been waiting for you to be ready.”
She lay against him, one of his hands resting open on her stomach. Her head was on his chest and in the silent darkness they felt the baby move between them, a small interior tide.
“Still worried?” Evan asked against her hair.
“No,” she said. And meant it.
Later the next morning, Abby wrote Evan’s name on the second line of the childbirth form. She did not know whether she would ask him into the delivery room, but she wanted him prepared for the day their lives changed.