We stayed like that for a long time.
I was aware, distantly, that I was in some state I didn't have a name for. Past exhausted. Past oversensitive. Through the other side of it into something quiet and loose and completely,stupidly content. My body felt like something he'd worked over carefully and put back together even more carefully, and he was still holding all the pieces together with his arms and the hot water and the solid certainty of his chest against my back.
His hand spread flat across my stomach.
He did that constantly. Had been doing it since the first night, since before there was anything to feel, his palm pressing warm like it could will something into being.
Maybe it could. Maybe it already had.
"How do you feel?" he said.
"Like you've been breeding me for three days."
A low sound from him. Satisfied and unapologetic. "Good."
"That wasn't a complaint."
"I know." His thumb moved slow across my stomach. "How do youfeel?"
I thought about it. My body, the weight of it in the water. The specific ache that had stopped feeling like ache and started feeling like proof. The way his hands on me had started to feel not like want but likeright, like where they belonged, like something that had been true for longer than I'd known him.
"Different," I said.
He didn't answer. His hand just pressed a little warmer.
I let myself lean into it. Into him. Into the enormous quiet of the ranch outside and the steam and his arms and the specific stupid terrifying hope of it all.
I was twenty-six years old. I'd had a plan and it had fallen apart and I'd made a different plan and this had happened instead. A man I'd met in a waiting room. A contract that had become something that didn't have a name yet. A piece of land that had started feeling like mine.
I pressed my hand over his on my stomach.
"Gage."
"Mm."
"I'm going to take a test in the morning."
His arm tightened fractionally. "Okay."
"Whatever it says?—"
"I know."
"I just mean—" I stopped. Started again. "I know you said you knew. But I don't want you to—I don't want it to be?—"
"Millie." His mouth pressed to my temple. "Whatever it says, you're still in this bed tomorrow night."
I exhaled.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay," he said back. Matter-of-fact. Like it was already settled. Like it had been settled for weeks and I'd just needed to hear it.
Outside the creek ran over limestone in the dark.
I closed my eyes and let the water hold me and thought:this is what I was making room for. All those spreadsheets. All that planning. I was making room for this, even though I didn't know it.
He kept his hand on my stomach all the way until the water went cold.
