Page 180 of Pucked Around and Found Out

I look down at the pendant. I look at Em's pendant beside it. Then I pick up the new one and clasp it at the back of my neck. The gold settles warm against my sternum.

I stand up and pick up my textbook and my bag. I reach across the table and pick up Em's pendant too, close my fingers around it, then hold it out to him. He watches my face as he takes it and tucks it back inside his hoodie, back home against his chest where it belongs.

“Come on then,” I say.

He looks up at me. “Where?”

“You didn’t sleep. You're not sleeping in your car.” I hold his gaze. “You're going to see where I live. You're going to see what I've been building. And then we're going to talk, properly, like two people who are about to have a baby together and need to figure out what that actually looks like.” I raise an eyebrow. “Unless you'd rather sit in this coffee shop until they ask us to leave.”

He looks at me for a long moment. Something moves across his face that I don't quite catch before he stands, all six foot something of him rising from a chair that always looked slightly too small for him anyway, and he picks up his jacket and says nothing.

He just follows me out.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

XADEN

She lives on the third floor.

No elevator. She would pick a building with no elevator. She's always taken the stairs everywhere. I noticed it early and filed it away with everything else I collected about her without meaning to. I follow her up three flights of a narrow stairwell. She doesn't talk and the silence between us is the functional kind for once, the kind that doesn't have anything unresolved sitting inside it.

She stops at a door at the end of the third floor hallway and I watch her pull a key from her jacket pocket. A key. Her own key to a space she rented herself, in a city where nobody knows about the nightmare she lived through and nobody knows what it cost her to get here. The thought of it does something uncomfortable in my chest that I don't examine.

She opens the door, steps inside and I follow her in and stop.

I don't know what I expected. I've been in the places Toren has occupied before. The room at my place, bare and cold because I turned the heating off the first night to fuck with her, then later warmer, evidence of her creeping in around the edges in small ways I always pretended not to notice. I expected something similarly cautious. Provisional. The belongings of someone who hadn't decided yet whether to stay.

This is not that.

It's small, the kind of apartment that is fundamentally a room and a half with ambitions, but she has made it. There are books on every surface, not stacked neatly but lived-in, cracked spines with dog-eared pages and two laid flat with something pressed between them that I'd bet money are flowers drying. The kind of habit you only develop if you intend to stay somewhere long enough for flowers to dry.

A print on the wall above the small sofa. A throw blanket folded over the arm of it that looks soft enough that she probably bought it for exactly that quality. A mug on the kitchen counter with a lipstick mark on the rim, her coffee she remembered to finish, which means she was comfortable enough here that she didn't forget.

A small crib frame, flat-packed, leaned against the wall beside the window, still in the box. She hasn't built it yet but she bought it. She has been planning. Making space for something she is fully intending to be here for.

I look at all of it.

I look at the crib frame and the drying flowers and the books with broken spines and the mug on the counter and I understand, in a way I haven't let myself understand until this moment, exactly what I walked into when I walked through that door.

She built a life. A small, careful, entirely hers life in three weeks, in a city she chose because it was far enough from everything we are to give her room to breathe… And she did it while pregnant and alone, and I was the reason she had to.

That lands somewhere it needs to land and I let it.

“Sit down,” she says from the kitchen. “I'll make coffee.”

I don't sit down. I cross to the window instead and look out at the Colorado morning, gray sky pressing down, a strip of mountains visible between the buildings. I hear her moving behind me. The kettle. A drawer opening. The particular domestic sounds of someone who knows where everything is in a space.

She knows where everything is.

Three weeks and she already knows where everything is. I'm standing in her apartment, with a pendant under my hoodie, that she carried for me for a year and the word home is doing something in the back of my mind that I need to get ahead of before it gets ahead of me.

I reach into my pocket. The photograph she pinned to my wall, the one I haven't been able to stop carrying around, even though looking at it does things to me I don't have clean names for. I look at it now. The ultrasound. The tiny gray blur of something that is half me and half her and is currently the size of whatever fruit the app on Cas's phone said it was this week, because Cas looked it up and showed me. I read it despite myself.

A peach, I think. The size of a peach.

I put the photograph back in my pocket and turn around. She's standing at the counter with her back to me, doing something with mugs, and I look at her. The sweater I don't recognize, bought here, hers. Her hair down, one hand resting on the counter and the other at her side. She is the most frightening thing I have ever faced in my life and I have faced things that would stop most men's hearts.

But this. This small apartment. This woman at the counter. The crib frame still in the box because she's been doing everything alone. This is the thing that has been sitting at the center of every sleepless night for weeks and I haven't been able to name it until right now.