Page 190 of Pucked Around and Found Out

I drink it every morning.

This is what love does to you.

The apartment is full of it, the particular light that Colorado November mornings make, coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows in flat gray sheets that should be depressing and are instead the kind of beautiful that doesn't announce itself. The mountains are visible in the gap between buildings and I can see the first proper snow on the high peaks from where I'm sitting at my worktable, with my hands wrapped around the mug that is too strong and too hot and exactly right.

I can hear Xaden getting ready.

Game days have a sound. I've learned it over the months, this particular sequence of him, the earlier alarm, the longer shower, the ten minutes of silence in the bedroom that I now understand is him sitting on the edge of the bed running through something internal that he has never described but that I recognize as the specific preparation of a person who needs to be completely inside themselves before they can be completely inside the game. On regular days he moves through the apartment like he owns it, which he does, with the easy dominance of someone who has never had to consider whether a room wants him in it. On game days he moves like water, quiet, deliberate, conserving something.

I don't interrupt it.

I have learned which parts of him need space and which parts need presence and I have learned to give both without making a production of it, which is, I think, the least romantic and most important skill a person can develop in the specific business of loving Xaden Devlin.

He appears in the kitchen doorway.

He's in his warm-up gear, Stormsend Ravens track pants that look wrong here and right everywhere, a Henley pushed up at the forearms, hair still damp from the shower. He looks at me looking at him and says nothing, goes to the coffee machine, does the thing with the grounds before the water.

I say nothing.

I drink my coffee.

He brings his mug to the worktable and sits across from me, which he started doing about six weeks ago and which I have catalogued carefully alongside all the other things that arrived without announcement. He doesn't talk on game day mornings. He reads, or he sits, or like now, he just occupies the same space and lets it mean whatever it means.

I look at him over the rim of my mug.

He looks back.

“Stop,” he says.

“I'm not doing anything.”

“You have a face.”

“I don't have a face.”

His eyes narrow fractionally. The corner of his mouth does a thing that isn't a smile but is the shadow of one. “You're doing the thing where you look at me like you're memorizing something.”

I set my mug down. “What if I am?”

He holds my gaze across the table. The light from the windows is doing something to his eyes that makes them look less gray and more like the color of the sky right before snow, that particular silver that could go either way. I have been trying for four months to describe the color of Xaden Devlin's eyes in a way that captures what they actually are and I have failed consistently because they are not a static thing. They change with his mood and the light and whether he is performing the version of himself that the world gets or the one that lives in this apartment.

Right now they are the unperformed version.

“The baby was moving all night,” I say.

Something shifts across his face. Subtle. The careful neutrality that is not detachment but self-management, the face of a man who has decided that feeling things in private is safer than feeling them in public and hasn't entirely figured out yet that this kitchen is private.

“Yeah?” he says.

“Yeah.” I pick up his hand from the table. Not dramatically. Just reach across and take it, the way I have been slowly learning to do things with him, without announcement, without making them significant out loud, just doing them and letting him decide what to do with the fact that they happen. I press his palm flat against the side of my stomach, where the movement was last night, a small assertive flutter that woke me at three in the morning and made me lie in the dark for a long time afterwards, feeling something I don't have a clean word for.

He goes completely still.

The baby doesn't move.

Of course the baby doesn't move, babies perform exclusively on their own schedule with total disregard for the dramatic weight of the moment but Xaden keeps his hand where it is. Doesn't pull back. Doesn't make a joke or redirect. Just sits there with his coffee in one hand and his palm against my stomach and that look on his face that belongs to nobody else.

We stay like that for a long time.