Chapter 28 Declan
Declan
She is making breakfast and getting egg shells in the pan.
She taught herself to crack one-handed from a YouTube video three weeks ago and she has committed to this technique with the focused stubbornness she brings to everything she decides matters.
She misses about one in four. She picks the shell out.
She does not switch to two hands. She will master this or die trying and I have very quietly started buying extra eggs.
She's showing now. Not slightly. Actually showing, the curve of her visible in profile when she reaches for the pan, and she moves through my kitchen with the specific ease of a woman who stopped thinking of it as his kitchen approximately two weeks ago.
There are no tentative objects left in this house.
Everything she owns has settled. Her shampoo displaced mine.
Her gaming chair is in the living room. The Celsius has its own shelf.
This is just how we live.
I'm at the table with coffee, watching her cook, because that's also just how we live.
She cooks. I watch. She's aware I'm watching and she doesn't mind and this fact — the not-minding, the ease of it, the complete absence of performance — is something I still notice every morning.
I suspect I'll notice it every morning for the rest of my life.
"You're staring again," she says, without turning around.
"Yes."
"Has anyone ever told you it's weird to watch someone cook eggs with that level of intensity?"
"No."
"That's because no one else has been subjected to it." She flips the eggs. Successfully. No shell. She makes a small triumphant sound. "Did you see that? Clean flip. No debris."
"I saw it."
"You could say something supportive."
"That was a very good flip."
"Thank you. I've been practicing while you do your thing where you sit there looking like a cologne ad and don't help."
I drink my coffee.
Sunday dinner was three days ago. The first one back. Ronan poured me wine and said things that needed saying and shook my hand at the door. It wasn't fixed. It was a start.
***
That evening, she falls asleep on the couch at eight thirty because she's growing a human being and her body has opinions about that. I let her sleep for an hour. Then I pick her up.
"Put me down," she says, not opening her eyes.
"No."
"I can walk."
"I know."
"This is unnecessary."
"Yes."
She opens one eye. "You like this."
"Yes."
"Carrying me around like I'm a sack of something."
"A very opinionated sack."
She makes a sound that is trying to be annoyed and isn't. She puts her face against my neck. I feel her smile against my skin. Her hand finds the collar of my shirt and holds on.
I set her on the bed. She looks up at me. Her face in the lamplight. The freckles. The eyes — brown with gold in them that I noticed the first week and have never mentioned because some things are mine.
"You're going to do the thing where you look at me for a really long time before you do anything, aren't you."
"Probably."
"Could you possibly do it faster? I was having a good dream."
"What was the dream about?"
"You, doing things instead of staring."
I sit on the edge of the bed. She reaches up and puts her hand on my jaw, her thumb against my cheekbone, and pulls me down and kisses me. Not slow. Not tentative. The kiss of a woman who knows what she wants and has learned that she can just take it.
"I'm awake now. Off."
I take my shirt off. She runs her hands across my chest and my stomach with the focused attention of someone conducting an assessment she's conducted a hundred times and that still interests her. Her fingers trace the lines of my ribs. She tugs at my belt.
"You too," I say.
"Help me. I'm pregnant and I can't reach the—" She gestures at her back. I reach around and unhook her bra and she makes a sound of relief that is entirely about the bra and nothing else. "God. Thank you. That thing is a war crime."
I laugh. Barely. Just the edge of it. She looks at me.
"Did you just laugh?"
"No."
I pull back and look at her. All of her. The lamplight on her skin. She's changed in the months since the first night and I have been watching every change the way I watch everything about her and tonight I want to do more than watch.
Her breasts are fuller than they were. Heavier, the skin there faintly mapped with new veins I can see in the warm light.
I put my mouth on the curve of one and she inhales and her hand comes up to the back of my head.
I take my time. Slow, careful, tasting the skin that's warmer than it used to be, that seems to carry its own heat now.
My mouth on the underside where she's most sensitive, and her back arches and her fingers tighten in my hair and she makes a sound that is surprised and wanting.
"I'm bigger than I was," she says. Self-conscious in a way that's rare for her.
I pull back enough to look at her face. "I know."
"It's weird. Everything's different and I feel like—"
"You're the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
" I say it plainly because that's how I say things and because it's true.
"You have been the most beautiful thing I've ever seen since the first night and you are more so now and I am going to show you that if you'll stop talking long enough to let me. "
She looks at me. Something shifts in her expression. The self-consciousness giving way to something warmer.
"Okay," she says. "Showing me. Go ahead."
I put my mouth back on her breast, then lower.
Then her stomach. The roundness of it, the taut warmth of her skin stretched over the life we made.
I press my cheek there and I can feel her breathing and underneath it, deeper, the faint fluttering that might be movement or might be my imagination and that I am not going to examine too closely because either way it is the most extraordinary thing I have ever felt against my face.
I put my mouth on the curve of her stomach.
Not a quick kiss. I stay there. My lips tracing the arc of her, the new geography of a body I thought I knew completely and that keeps teaching me how much I don't know.
The stretch marks starting at her hips, faint and new, and I put my mouth on those too and her hand tightens in my hair.
"Declan, you don't have to—"
"I'm not doing anything I have to." I press my mouth to the stretch mark on her left hip. "I'm doing what I want."
She's quiet for a moment. Her hand in my hair, her breathing uneven. I can feel her watching me the way I watch her and it occurs to me that this is what she's been giving me since the beginning. The watching goes both ways. It always has.
I move lower. The inside of her thigh, where the skin is softest, and she shivers. My mouth on her hip bone, which is harder to find now under the new softness and which I locate by memory and by the sound she makes when I get there. Then I settle between her thighs and put my mouth on her.
She makes a sound that fills the room.
I take my time because this body deserves my time, every version of it, and this version — the one carrying our daughter, the one that's rounder and warmer and more sensitive than it's ever been — this version I want to know the way I know every other version.
Thoroughly. Completely. With my full attention.
My tongue on her clit, slow and deliberate, and she is so sensitive now that her hips jerk on the first pass.
I hold her steady with my hands on her thighs and I work her with my mouth and she grips the sheets with one hand and my hair with the other and the sounds she's making are louder than she means them to be and she doesn't try to manage them.
I make a sound against her that vibrates and she gasps and says something that isn't a word.
I bring her to the edge with my mouth and keep her there, not rushing, because I want her to feel all of it — the attention, the reverence, the specific devotion of a man who is worshipping the body that is carrying his child and who intends to take as long as this requires.
"This is embarrassing," she says, her voice wrecked, her hips moving against my mouth. "I'm going to — the hormones are doing something and I can't. Declan!"
She comes against my mouth with her thighs shaking and both hands in my hair and a sound that is loud and surprised and real. I hold her through it, my mouth still on her, drawing it out, and she pulses against my tongue and I feel every second of it.
She lies there breathing. Her hand still in my hair. I rest my cheek against her thigh and look up at her and she looks down at me and her face is flushed and wrecked and she is smiling.
"Smug," she says.
"A little."
I move up her body. I take my time with it — her stomach again, because I'm not done with her stomach, and her breasts again, and her throat, and her jaw — and by the time I reach her mouth she is pulling me down with both hands and her thighs are parting around me.
"Daddy," she says against my mouth. Murmured. Easy. The most ordinary word in the world. Not a stage or a scene or a dare or a question. Just how she talks to me now.
That's the arrival.
I push into her slowly and the warmth of her around me is something I will never get used to.
I don't want to get used to it. She wraps her legs around me and pulls me deep and I move inside her carefully, attentively, watching her face for what feels good and what feels different, because her body is different now and I'm learning the new version of it the way I've learned everything about her — by paying attention.
She wraps her arms around my neck. Close, as close as we can get, and I move inside her and she moves with me and there is nowhere either of us needs to be.
"You know what I was thinking about," she says. Conversational. While I'm inside her.
"No."
"The eggs. I think I've figured out the wrist angle."
I stop moving. I look at her. She looks at me with her face completely straight for approximately two seconds and then she breaks out into a laugh.
I start moving again. She's still laughing and the laugh becomes a different sound as I shift the angle and find the place she likes. Her hands tighten in my hair and the laughter dissolves into something lower, something urgent, and her hips start moving with mine.
I find the rhythm that works for both of us, slow and deep, her body meeting mine on every stroke. Her breathing changes and mine changes with it and we are moving together in the way that only comes from months of learning each other, the way that feels less like sex and more like conversation.
She comes with her face against my neck and a quiet sound that belongs to me, her body tightening around my cock in waves. I come right after.
I stay there. My weight on her, carefully. Her breathing against my ear. Her hand moving slow against the back of my neck.
"I've been watching you for a long time, Billie Callaghan," I say.
She puts her hand on my face. Her thumb against my cheekbone. Her eyes on mine.
"I know," she says. "I was counting on it."
THE END