Epilogue #2
The result is a coffee that is approximately twice as strong as it should be and requires the kind of preparation most people reserve for shots of something alcoholic.
Cas made the mistake of trying it the first week, went very still, and quietly put the mug down and left the kitchen without comment.
Cas, who can eat anything and has done things with a knife that still gives me complicated feelings, looked at Xaden's coffee and chose silence.
I drink it every morning.
This is what love does to you.
The apartment is full of it, the particular light that Colorado November mornings make, coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows in flat gray sheets that should be depressing and are instead the kind of beautiful that doesn't announce itself.
The mountains are visible in the gap between buildings and I can see the first proper snow on the high peaks from where I'm sitting at my worktable, with my hands wrapped around the mug that is too strong and too hot and exactly right.
I can hear Xaden getting ready.
Game days have a sound. I've learned it over the months, this particular sequence of him, the earlier alarm, the longer shower, the ten minutes of silence in the bedroom that I now understand is him sitting on the edge of the bed running through something internal that he has never described but that I recognize as the specific preparation of a person who needs to be completely inside themselves before they can be completely inside the game.
On regular days he moves through the apartment like he owns it, which he does, with the easy dominance of someone who has never had to consider whether a room wants him in it.
On game days he moves like water, quiet, deliberate, conserving something.
I don't interrupt it.
I have learned which parts of him need space and which parts need presence and I have learned to give both without making a production of it, which is, I think, the least romantic and most important skill a person can develop in the specific business of loving Xaden Devlin.
He appears in the kitchen doorway.
He's in his warm-up gear, Stormsend Ravens track pants that look wrong here and right everywhere, a Henley pushed up at the forearms, hair still damp from the shower. He looks at me looking at him and says nothing, goes to the coffee machine, does the thing with the grounds before the water.
I say nothing.
I drink my coffee.
He brings his mug to the worktable and sits across from me, which he started doing about six weeks ago and which I have catalogued carefully alongside all the other things that arrived without announcement.
He doesn't talk on game day mornings. He reads, or he sits, or like now, he just occupies the same space and lets it mean whatever it means.
I look at him over the rim of my mug.
He looks back.
“Stop,” he says.
“I'm not doing anything.”
“You have a face.”
“I don't have a face.”
His eyes narrow fractionally. The corner of his mouth does a thing that isn't a smile but is the shadow of one. “You're doing the thing where you look at me like you're memorizing something.”
I set my mug down. “What if I am?”
He holds my gaze across the table. The light from the windows is doing something to his eyes that makes them look less gray and more like the color of the sky right before snow, that particular silver that could go either way.
I have been trying for four months to describe the color of Xaden Devlin's eyes in a way that captures what they actually are and I have failed consistently because they are not a static thing.
They change with his mood and the light and whether he is performing the version of himself that the world gets or the one that lives in this apartment.
Right now they are the unperformed version.
“The baby was moving all night,” I say.
Something shifts across his face. Subtle. The careful neutrality that is not detachment but self-management, the face of a man who has decided that feeling things in private is safer than feeling them in public and hasn't entirely figured out yet that this kitchen is private.
“Yeah?” he says.
“Yeah.” I pick up his hand from the table.
Not dramatically. Just reach across and take it, the way I have been slowly learning to do things with him, without announcement, without making them significant out loud, just doing them and letting him decide what to do with the fact that they happen.
I press his palm flat against the side of my stomach, where the movement was last night, a small assertive flutter that woke me at three in the morning and made me lie in the dark for a long time afterwards, feeling something I don't have a clean word for.
He goes completely still.
The baby doesn't move.
Of course the baby doesn't move, babies perform exclusively on their own schedule with total disregard for the dramatic weight of the moment but Xaden keeps his hand where it is.
Doesn't pull back. Doesn't make a joke or redirect.
Just sits there with his coffee in one hand and his palm against my stomach and that look on his face that belongs to nobody else.
We stay like that for a long time.
Outside, the Colorado morning carries on. The mountains are white at the top, the coffee is too strong and somewhere across town the rink is waiting with scouts in the upper tier who have already made their decision about the man sitting across from me, they just haven't put it in writing yet.
“You're going to win tonight,” I say.
“I know,” he says. Simple. Not arrogant, just certain in the way he is about a small number of things that matter.
“Don't get cocky.”
“I'm always cocky.”
“You're always right about being cocky, which is worse.”
The almost-smile again.
His thumb moves against my stomach, one small deliberate motion, and I feel the warmth of it move all the way through me.
“Go get ready,” I tell him. “Cas will be here in an hour and if you aren't dressed he'll spend the entire drive here telling me about your morning routine in levels of detail I don't need.”
He looks at me for one more second.
Then he picks up his coffee, stands, and goes.
I sit at my worktable in the Colorado morning with my hand where his was and the mountains visible in the gap between buildings and the particular quiet of a life that is ours, small and careful and built from scratch, and entirely, completely, mine.
To teach is to learn. To learn is to excel. To excel is to thrive. To thrive is to live.
I'm thriving.
Finally.
Finally.
The jersey is no longer enormous on me now.
This is not a new problem, Xaden's number five Ravens jersey was never designed with a thirty-four-week pregnant woman in mind, but it is a more pronounced problem than it was two months ago when I could still pretend I was wearing it as a fashion statement.
Now I am wearing it as a structural necessity and the only person enjoying this more than me is Harper, who took a photograph the moment I walked out of the bedroom and has been visibly delighted about it ever since.
“You look incredible,” she says, completely sincerely.
“I look like I'm smuggling a basketball under a jersey.”
“Xaden's going to lose his mind.”
“Xaden sees me every day.”
“Not on game day in his jersey in the front row.” She loops her arm through mine and steers me toward the ice. “There's a difference.”
She's not wrong about that. There is a specific thing that happens to Xaden Devlin on game days that I have observed enough times now to understand the pattern.
He goes quiet in the morning, focused in an internal way that isn't the usual controlled quiet but something more electric underneath it.
He doesn't eat breakfast. He skates for an hour alone before the team warm-up.
He comes back and finds me wherever I am in the apartment and says nothing, just stands close enough that I can feel the heat off him, and I have learned that what he needs in those moments is not words but presence, so I give him that.
Today I gave him that, then I told him he'd better not lose because I am thirty-four weeks pregnant and in no condition to manage his foul mood after a defeat.
He almost smiled.
‘Almost’ being the operative word.
The rink is full.
Different to the old one I’m used to back home.
Everything about this university is different to Stormsend, polished in ways that Stormsend was deliberately gritty, but the energy before a game is the same everywhere, that particular compressed electricity of a crowd that wants something and is very close to getting it.
I find our front row seats, because of course Xaden arranged front row, and lower myself into mine and Harper sits beside me, then hands me a hot chocolate.
Someone drops into the seat on my other side.
“You look ridiculous in that jersey,” Carnage says.
I turn, look at him and immediately feel my whole chest loosen the way it always does when he's in the same room as me. He's in a black jacket, arms crossed, already surveying the rink with the expression of a man cataloguing all potential threats in an enclosed space, which is just his face.
“You made it,” I say.
“Said I would.” He looks sideways at me.
His eyes drop to the pendant at my collarbone, then to my stomach, then back up to my face.
Something moves in his expression that he doesn't bother hiding from me, the same thing that's always been there, quiet and steady and entirely Carnage. ‘How are you feeling?”
“Like I'm thirty-four weeks pregnant and sitting on a hard plastic seat.”
“Want me to go get you something softer to sit on?”
“I want you to watch the game.”
“I can do both.”
“Carn.”
He looks at me. I look at him. The silent conversation we have been having in one form or another since the night he drove to Colorado and sat on the end of my bed at two in the morning, the one where he makes sure I'm okay and I make sure he knows I see him and we don't embarrass either of us by saying any of it out loud.