7. Valentina #4
The question comes out before I’ve decided to ask it, the way things come out when you’ve been awake so long that the editor in your head has gone to sleep.
“Do you ever think about having children?”
The cafeteria is suddenly very quiet even though it’s just us two.
Cillian looks at me in surprise. I feel the exposure of the question sitting there and I open my mouth to walk it back, but he speaks first.
“I don’t know,” he says. “My life isn’t—our world isn’t built for it. The kind of thing we grew up in. The kind we’re still in.”
“I know,” I say truthfully. I’ve always known the dangers of our world—the violence underneath, the way danger moves through families, the particular cruelty of loving a child when your life is the kind of life where loving someone can be used against you.
“I always thought of it as something other people did. People with different…circumstances.”
He nods slowly, eyes on me.
“But then you see Leo in that room,” I say, not sure why I’m continuing but shit, now that the dam is open, everything is coming out, “and you think maybe the two things aren’t incompatible. The dangerous world and the real thing.” I stop. The fluorescent light hums. “Maybe that’s naive.”
Cillian’s quiet for a long moment. “Maybe,” he says. “Or maybe it’s just true.”
I look at him. He stares back at me and he’s not hiding anything right now.
Whatever the thing is that lives underneath the stillness—I can see it, or the edges of it, and it undoes me slightly.
“I didn’t say I wanted it,” I add quickly, and a ghost of a smile graces his lips.
“I know,” he says.
Sweat trickles down my back. “I was just thinking out loud—”
“Valentina.” The way he says my name stops me. “I know.”
I shut up.
We sit in the quiet and drink our terrible coffee.
I think about Seraphina and her parents and all the things that could be, and I feel, sitting here in this terrible cafeteria with this terrible coffee with the man I was forced to accept who showed up with sandwiches and hasn’t left—
Something like wanting. Something like the beginning of something.
Something I don’t have a word for yet but that doesn’t feel far from one.
We go back to say goodbye to Emma, but she’s asleep, Seraphina in the bassinet beside her.
Leo in the bedside chair already dozing with his hand near the edge of the bed as close to Emma as he can get without actually being in it.
I stand in the doorway for a moment just looking at them. The three of them. This new, strange, perfect thing my brother and Emma have made. I close the door.
In the car going home the sky is pink. Not the aggressive pink of full sunrise, but the early morning hues. New York is unnaturally quiet, but then again, most of its inhabitants are still asleep. I lean my head against the window.
I am too tired for coherent thought but also very awake inside it, full of the night in a way that won’t let me go yet.
We go upstairs without talking. In the bedroom, I yank off my shoes and clothes and crawl into bed in just my underwear. I’m so exhausted, I don’t care about my state of undress.
I hear Cillian do the same on his side, then the mattress shifts. His arm comes around me from behind and pulls me close.
I let him and curl into the warmth of him, his chest against my back. I close my eyes.
“You deserve to know something,” he says into my hair.
“Mm?” I mumble sleepily, already tumbling headfirst into dreamland.
“You’d be a good mother.”
The words make it through my sleepy haze, and I go still. Leo crying at the foot of the bed runs through my head, along with Seraphina’s small furious face and Emma saying you don’t have to perform your way out of everything.
Then, the cafeteria and the question I asked that I didn’t mean to ask and the answer he gave.
I don’t have words.
I turn in his arms and find him staring at me, his blue eyes questioning.
Without thinking, I lean forward and kiss him. It’s different from how it usually is between us. This is something that isn’t about the rules.
This is just me and him in our bedroom with the pink sky coming through the curtain gap and the whole night still living in both of us.
He kisses me back the same way. His hands are gentle and I stop thinking and performing, and for a little while there’s just this.
I want more but I am so deeply tired that staying awake is no longer something my body is willing to negotiate. I put my face against his chest and listen to his heartbeat and I think, on the very edge of sleep, He meant that. What am I going to do with that?
No answer comes. My eyes are already closing. His arm is around me and he is warm and solid and so familiar now that the familiarity of him has become part of what this apartment means, part of what my life means.
Outside the window, on the other side of town, Seraphina Brennan Santoro is nearly four hours old.
Meanwhile, I am safe.
I am actually genuinely safe.
I am in my husband’s arms feeling something I had almost stopped believing was possible for someone like me.
I fall asleep before I can name it.