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"I say you can start using it as soon as you want," I replied. Solomon made his way through to the kitchen, and Olya smiled up at me for a moment.
"You okay?" she asked softly. I nodded. She came over to me, winding her arms around my shoulders and looking up at me.
"We haven’t really had a chance to talk, just the two of us," she murmured. "Since...since I told you about the baby."
I moved my hands to the small of her back, pulling her against me. I still couldn’t quite believe it; this woman, this perfect, gorgeous woman, was carrying my child. She wanted to have a family with me. I was going to be part of a family again, after what felt like a lifetime – since I had lost my own parents all those years ago, and then, when I had lost my second family, when my unit had perished in front of me.
"There’s not much to say," I replied. She cocked her head at me.
"You sure about that?" she asked.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, before all this happened," she reminded me. "You told me that you wanted to keep things professional."
I sighed, leaning my forehead against hers for a moment.
"I know," I admitted.
"Why...what was going through your head?" she asked me softly. "What changed?"
I swallowed hard. Much as I wanted to tell her to just focus on the future, I knew she deserved an answer. She was worried that I was going to slip back into those old ways if she wasn’t careful, even if I couldn’t even imagine that right now.
"When I was in the army," I explained to her, slowly, finally. I knew I had to get this off my chest if we were going to move forward with nothing else between us – she deserved an explanation.
"I...I got close to the people in my unit," I explained. "There weren’t many of us – twelve, in that graduating unit together. We went to Afghanistan, we fought alongside each other, and what that does to you, the kind of bonds that form...there’s nothing like it. I hadn’t let myself get that close to anyone since my parents had passed in a car accident when I was a kid. I never thought I would feel like a part of something again, never let myself believe there was even a chance that could have happened....but then, it did."
I closed my eyes. The memories were battering the inside of my brain right now, so sharp-edged it felt like they were tearing chunks out of me. I forced myself to go on.
"And I lost them," I told her, my voice cracking. "After all that, I lost them. I didn’t just lose them, either, I watched them die. It was an attack on our camp, at the break of dawn, someone had sold us out – I just happened to wake a little earlier than the rest of them, and I was up when I heard the first gunshot. And...and I ran. I ran."
She reached up to caress my face softly.
"But you survived," she murmured.
"Sometimes, I feel like I didn’t deserve to," I admitted. "I should have stayed there and died with them. Alongside them."
"Don’t ever say that," she insisted. "If you had...if you had gone then, I would never have met you. We would never have had this..."
I nodded.
"I know," I murmured. "And that’s what scared me off. I felt like I didn’t deserve to have this, to have this chance with you, to get close to someone the way I was getting close to you after what happened. It just...it didn’t feel fair that I got to live out the rest of my life, and they didn’t."
"Oh, Alex," she murmured, rubbing her thumb across my jaw. "You can’t think like that. These people cared about you, right?"
I nodded.
"Then they wouldn’t have wanted you to spend the rest of your life suffering and beating yourself up for what happened," she pointed out. "They would have wanted you to keep on living. In their memory. And for yourself, too."
Those words made my head spin, in a way I didn’t even realize I needed. I had been telling myself, for so damn long, that I should have died out there with my unit. But here, standing with her, hearing those words come out of her mouth, for the first time...I started to believe in something different.
"Hey, what are you two talking about?" Solomon asked, as he wandered out of the kitchen again, takeout menus in his hand. I kissed her temple and pulled back from her.
"Just the baby," I replied quickly. I knew he was in a good mood, and I didn’t want to sour it with the reality of our conversation right now, no matter how cathartic it had been for me.
"What do you want, Italian or Indian?" he asked, holding up both menus. Olya tapped her finger on her chin, considering for a moment before she replied.
"Indian," she replied. "Sound good?”
