Page 71 of Omega’s Fold

“It’s okay,” I say.

Mr. Follett frowns but he doesn’t argue with me. Instead he turns to Julian and says, “What can I get you?”

“Black coffee, please.”

He goes. Julian does not sit.

Julian looks at the booth seat next to me and I realize that I have not asked him to join us. I can smell him. My stomach moves. Not the sickness from earlier in the pregnancy, which has gone. The new thing, which is worse, which is the way a body remembers a body.

He goes still.

I watch his nostrils move. It is the small involuntary thing he did the very first day in my yard, the thing he did when he was trying not to breathe me in. He is doing it now.

He has gone the color of a man who has been told something he did not want to be told.

His eyes drop, fast, then come back up.

He has worked it out.

He does not say it. He does not say one word. He looks at me and he holds my gaze for a long count and then he looks at Caleb and he looks at Matthew and he looks at me again. “Outside,” he says.

“Yes.”

I push the coffee away and slide out of the booth. I do not look at Caleb. I do not need to look at him.

“Order the pancakes,” I tell Matthew. “Tell Mr. Follett I’ll have pancakes too. I’ll be back.”

“Wyatt — “

“Bud. Pancakes.”

I follow Julian to the door. The bell rings as he holds it open for me. The cold air comes in past him. I go through.

Julian walks me round the side of the building. There is a strip of dirt along the wall where the kitchen extractor blows out and where Mr. Follett puts his cigarette ends in an old coffee can. We stop there. The wall is cold against my back.

He stops in front of me. He is closer than he should be.

“You’re pregnant.”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

He puts his hands behind his neck. He turns in a half circle on the dirt. He turns back. His hands come down.

“You weren’t going to tell me?”

“No.”

He looks at me. He puts one hand against the wall beside my head. He does not lean in. He stops his hand on the wall and he leaves it there and he looks at me, and when I drop my eyes he puts his other hand under my chin and he lifts my face back up.

His hand is warm. It is colder out here than I had registered.

He keeps looking at me. The hand under my chin moves. It goes back to the side of my neck where his palm is flat against my skin, the same place he put it in the kitchen the night the heat started, and my whole body remembers.

I breathe in. I cannot help it. I get the full of him, soap and travel and Julian, and the thing in the pit of my belly that has been dormant since spring rolls over and stretches.

“Don’t,” I say.