3. Sabrina
— ? —
Sabrina
Two Years Ago
The way he kissed me made me forget my own name.
We were in our old apartment, the one we’d sold after Ivy was born, and Killian had me pressed against the bedroom door with his hands in my hair and his mouth hot and desperate against mine.
He’d come home from a conference in Seoul early, walked through the door, seen me in my ratty sweats and messy bun, and said “I need you right now” in a voice that made my entire body light up.
“God, you’re gorgeous.” He pulled back just far enough to look at me, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw. “I thought about you every second I was gone. Couldn’t focus on any of the presentations because I kept picturing you in our bed.”
“I’m not in our bed. I’m against a door.”
“I’ll get you to the bed.” He kissed the corner of my mouth. “Eventually.”
“Promises, promises.”
His hands slid down my sides and found the hem of my sweats. He tugged them down over my hips while his mouth moved to my neck, my collarbone, the spot behind my ear that made me gasp.
“I missed you.” The words vibrated against my skin. “I missed your voice and your laugh and the way you roll your eyes when I talk too long about work. I missed the way you smell. I missed the way you taste.”
“You’ve been gone four days.”
“Four days too long.” He lifted me, and I wrapped my legs around his waist. “I’m never leaving again. I’m going to invent teleportation just so I never have to be away from you.”
“That’s not how physics works.”
“I’ll figure it out. For you, I’ll figure anything out.”
He carried me to the bed and laid me down gently, reverently, and then he wasn’t gentle at all. His mouth was everywhere, his hands pulling at my clothes and his own, his voice a constant stream of praise and want against my skin.
“You have no idea what you do to me.” His mouth dragged down my throat. “The whole flight home I couldn’t think about anything but getting you under me and how you sound when you come.”
I pulled him down and kissed him to shut him up. He groaned into my mouth and settled between my thighs, and for a long moment we just breathed each other in. His forehead rested against mine. His eyes were dark and focused, the way they got when I was the only thing in his universe.
“I love you.” He said it quietly, fiercely, and there was no doubt anywhere in it. “I love you so much it scares me sometimes.”
“Then we’re even. Because you terrify me.”
He smiled, and then he started to move, and I stopped thinking about anything at all.
His hips rolled against mine in a rhythm that built slow and deliberate, and I arched up into him, my fingers digging into his shoulders. He was big and solid and everywhere, filling me completely, and every thrust sent heat shooting up my spine.
“That’s it.” His voice was rough in my ear. “That’s so good. Four days on the other side of the world picturing exactly this, and here you are, wrapped around me.”
I couldn’t respond with words. I could only moan and pull him closer and chase the ache building low in my belly. He shifted his angle slightly, and I cried out, and he did it again, and again, watching my face the whole time with those dark, focused eyes.
“Look at you.” His thumb brushed across my cheekbone. “Look at how beautiful you are when you fall apart for me.”
It broke over me all at once, sharp and bright, and I clamped down around him with his name spilling out of my mouth. He followed a moment later, burying his face in my neck and groaning my name in that wrecked, desperate voice that made me feel powerful and wanted and loved.
After, he pulled me against his chest and traced patterns on my shoulder blade while our breathing slowed.
“I meant what I said.” His voice was sleepy and satisfied. “No more airports without you. I’ll just bring you with me everywhere. You can sit in the corner of my conference rooms and make sarcastic comments about everyone’s presentations.”
“That sounds like a nightmare for everyone involved.”
“It sounds like the best thing I can imagine.” He kissed the top of my head. “You and me against the world. That’s all I need.”
I believed him. God help me, I believed every word.
***
Now
The kitchen smelled faintly of the coffee I’d made that morning and forgotten to drink. I stood at the counter and watched Killian scroll through his phone, and I felt the distance between us in every inch of my skin.
He’d arrived on the island that afternoon.
Later than he’d promised, but he’d arrived.
He’d hugged Ivy and swung her around and listened to her talk about the beach and her grandparents and the hermit crab she’d named Professor Whiskers.
He’d been present and engaged and everything a father should be.
Then Ivy went to bed, and we were alone, and he’d immediately pulled out his phone.
“The Seoul team is having some issues with the calibration parameters.” He didn’t look up. “I told them I’d review the data tonight.”
“It’s nine o’clock.”
“They’re thirteen hours ahead. It’s their morning.”
I turned back to the dishes I’d been washing before he came in. The water was too hot. It felt good against my hands, the slight sting of it.
I’d been planning to tell him about the baby tonight.
I’d rehearsed the words in my head all day, had imagined his face when I said them.
In some versions he was ecstatic, sweeping me into his arms, promising to be present this time.
In other versions he was distracted, half-listening, already thinking about Seoul and calibration parameters.
The phone in his hand glowed.
I turned off the water and dried my hands on a towel.
“I need to tell you something.”
“Hmm?” He was typing now, his thumbs moving fast across the screen.
“Killian. Put the phone down.”
“One second, I just need to-”
“Put. The phone. Down.”
He looked up at that, registering the tone in my voice. He set the phone on the counter, screen down, and gave me the first undivided attention I’d gotten from him in months.
“Sorry. What’s going on?”
I opened my mouth. The words were right there, ready: I’m pregnant.
His phone buzzed against the counter.
He didn’t move toward it. He didn’t look at it. But I saw his eyes flick to it, just for a second, and that second was enough.
“Answer it,” I said.
“Sabrina-”
“Answer your phone. It’s clearly more important than whatever I have to say.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Nothing about this is fair.” The words came out sharp and hot. “I’ve been here almost a week, Killian. A week of taking care of our daughter and dealing with your family and waiting for you to show up, and you arrive today and you’re already back on your phone handling work emergencies.”
“It’s one email.”
“It’s never one email. It’s always one email that turns into a call that turns into a meeting that turns into you falling asleep at your computer at two in the morning while I go to bed alone again.”
He rubbed his hand over his face. He looked tired, I noticed. There were dark circles under his eyes and a tension in his jaw that hadn’t been there two years ago.
“I’m doing the best I can.”
“Are you? Because it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like you’re physically present but mentally somewhere else entirely. It feels like I’m married to a ghost who shows up for dinner sometimes.”
“You’ve been distant too.” He said it quietly, but the words landed hard. “You barely look at me anymore. You don’t talk to me about anything except Ivy’s schedule and the grocery list. We used to talk for hours, Sabrina. We used to tell each other everything.”
“When would we talk? You’re never here.”
“I’m here right now.”
“With your phone in your hand.”
He picked up the phone and put it in his pocket. “It’s gone. It’s away. Talk to me.”
But the moment had passed. Whatever courage I’d gathered to tell him about the baby had evaporated, replaced by a flat, exhausted cold.
“I stood in this kitchen an hour ago rehearsing how to tell you something.” My voice was steady in a way that surprised me.
“I had it word for word. I practiced it while I washed your mother’s baking dish.
And then you walked in and picked up your phone, and I watched the whole thing go out of me like air out of a tire. ”
“Tell me now.”
“No. That’s the part you keep missing. There was a version of tonight where I told you, and it needed you to already be in the room. You can’t arrive after the door closes and ask me to open it again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t fix it. Sorry doesn’t make up for two years of being a single parent in a marriage.”
He stared at me, and his face changed. The tiredness stayed, but grief moved under it.
“I’m not trying to abandon you,” he said. “I’m not trying to be absent. I just get caught up in things, and I lose track of time, and before I know it, hours have passed and I’ve missed everything that mattered.”
“I know that’s not malicious, Killian. I know you don’t mean to hurt me. But the outcome is the same whether you mean it or not.”
“Then give me a system. Give me a list, give me a schedule, give me concrete steps and I’ll follow them.”
“I shouldn’t have to give you a list. You should want to be present. You should want to come home. You should want to have dinner with your family and put your daughter to bed and spend time with your wife without me having to pencil it into your calendar.”
He didn’t answer right away. Then he nodded.
“You’re right. You’re absolutely right.” He moved toward me, and I stepped back. He stopped. “I have no defense for any of this. I’ve been a terrible husband and an absent father and you deserve so much better than what I’ve given you.”
“I don’t want better. I want you. The you I married. The you who used to look at me the way you did that night in our old apartment, when you came home from Seoul and couldn’t wait to touch me.”
“I still feel that way.”
“You don’t act like it.”
“Then I’ll do better. Starting right now. Starting tonight.”
I wanted to believe him. I wanted it so badly that my chest ached with it. But I’d heard this before, after the miscarriage, after our first big fight about his hours, after a dozen smaller confrontations that ended with promises and changed nothing.
“Don’t say anything else tonight. Please. Every word you add makes it worse.”
“Sabrina-”
“I mean it. I’ve got nothing left to hear with.”
He held my eyes longer than he should have, searching for a sign I didn’t give him. Then he nodded.
“Killian.”
He stopped.
“I love you.” The words came out hoarse. “That’s the worst part. I love you so much, and it doesn’t change anything.”
He turned back, and his eyes were bright and wet.
“I love you too,” he said. “And I’m going to prove it. However long it takes.”
He came to bed an hour later and lay down on his side of it, close enough to touch, and neither of us reached across.
I put my hand on my stomach, where a new life was just beginning to grow. He didn’t know about it, and it terrified me.
I lay awake beside him for a long time and listened to him not sleeping either, and neither of us said a word about it.