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She turns to look at me, finally able to calm herself down a bit. “Do you have any nieces or nephews? What are they like?”
“I do actually. I have three, a boy and two girls. They’re hellions, all three of them, but they’re some of my favorite people. Not to mention that they love me to death. I’m their favorite uncle,” I joke.
For the first time since she came back, I see her smile. “Okay, well I guess that isn’t so hard to believe. Do you give them a lot of gifts?”
I laugh a bit. “I mean, by some standards I suppose you could consider it a lot. But that’s not what’s important. The thing that they like about me so much is that I’m present with them when I’m there. They love having an adult that pays attention to them and their interests, even if it’s difficult for me to pay attention sometimes. If our kid ends up getting into making bead art, I’ll be able to help them make some pretty cool shit.”
Her smile grows now, and I’m starting to feel a warmth growing between the two of us. It feels like and entirely new bond, something that some people never find when they discover that they’re having a kid. I already feel lucky that this is happening with her instead of some of the other women I’ve engaged with in the past.
“Okay, well, if you insist that you’re willing to go through this with me, then I guess I can put my mind at ease a little. I just thought for sure you were going to stress about it right away. I was hoping that it would be easy to cover up until we got back to the states.”
Now that we’re here together talking openly about it, I picture what she’ll look like when her belly is bigger. She’s going to look absolutely gorgeous when the baby begins to grow, and I’ll be so honored to bring her places where people know that she’s having my baby. We might not be dating, at least not officially, but the idea of her carrying my child feels like a gift to me from the universe.
I lower myself to the ground from the bed, lifting her shirt and kissing her belly a couple of times. Such an act feels extremely intimate without any sex to be found, and I can’t say I’ve ever felt compelled toward someone like this before. She feels like an angel right now, someone who has been sent to change my life for the better, and I couldn’t be more grateful.
21
Faye
Telling Aleksander about the baby was terrifying, but the way that he received the news has given me so much more hope about our situation and our relationship. He is not only accepting of the fact that we’re having a baby, but he even seems thrilled about it. I had no idea that he could be so overjoyed about having a baby with someone like me, but I choose to just let the good be good and leave the rest.
That is, until we start arguing.
The baby itself isn’t even the issue lately. Aleksander has been stalling on trying to find and kill Grisha ever since we got out of Tokyo. At first, I was understanding about it as he needed more time to properly pinpoint Grisha’s location in order to avoid simple mistakes. However, lately he’s seemed a lot less motivated to have him killed, and it’s been weighing on me.
“Why can’t you send some of your more qualified men to take him down? Shouldn’t you have been able to find him by now?” I ask, growing restless now that I’ve been forced to stay in the house indefinitely. Aleksander has moved us to a slightly larger accommodation, but he doesn’t want to do anything that could draw attention to us. The house might be bigger than the hotel rooms we had been staying in, but I still feel like I’m trapped in a prison.
“It really isn’t that simple. We could probably figure out the general area where he’s operating out of, but it would be far too difficult to narrow it down with the limited information we have. He moves around a lot, and if we try to ambush him and fail, he’ll know that we’re planning something big. We would be giving ourselves away.”
I hate it when he talks about strategy like this. He knows I have no idea how to contribute to the conversation, and it’s not like I even would if I could. I know he doesn’t want to hear my opinions about his battle games, and he would be pissed if he knew that’s how I see them.
“So, are you going to make a move in either direction? Don’t you need to rescue your brother?” I ask, feeling pressured to at least advocate for Adam. It’s been a little while since we heard any details about him, and Aleksander has been trying to communicate with his men as little as possible to avoid having his cell phone signal triangulated by Grisha.
“Again, it’s really not that simple, and I feel like its time for you to believe that I know what I’m doing. It bothers me that you think I’m running away from the responsibility of getting my brother back when everyone’s lives are in the balance. I have to be extremely careful about how I proceed,” he replies.
I want to scream in frustration, but he never responds well to any sort of aggression from me. He thinks I’m losing my mind from the pregnancy, and he isn’t necessarily incorrect. However, it makes conversations impossible to have when he believes that all of my higher thinking abilities are being hijacked by a fetus.
“You need to find a path and stick to it, Aleksander. What are you so worried about? This isn’t like you. The version of you that I met at the hotel would have stormed that mole-rat-looking motherfucker out of his childhood home without a second thought. Why are you sparing him?”
He rolls his eyes slightly, which he knows I absolutely hate. It bothers me so much how flippant he can be about not taking my concerns seriously.
“Grisha allegedly thinks I’m dead, right? If he thinks I’m dead, then he knows that Adam is next in line to inherit my position in the Bratva. That alone gives him more reason to keep him alive. It might not be ideal for Adam, but he’ll be grateful for the chance to survive this,” he says with that familiar defensive tone in his voice.
“But what about the drugs then? Are you going to buy the shit back from the DEA or not?” I reply, losing my patience with him. “I just don’t understand why you can’t at least pursue that aspect of this issue if you’re going to leave Adam to be tortured by Grisha.”
“Okay, first of all, keep my brother’s fucking name out of your mouth. Secondly, it’s not like I can just call up my guys at the Drug Enforcement Agency and ask for my shit back. Having this particular drug charge is a huge offense since it’s still classed as one of the most dangerous drugs on the market. Don’t you realize that we’re still being hunted for the murders?”
I hate how mean he can get when he’s tired or overwhelmed, but he takes it out on me far too often. I’m starting to fear for the baby’s safety with all the stress surrounding us. I still don’t have a doctor out here, and there’s still no telling when we’re going to have the chance to find one. I’ve been hoping that we would go back to the States soon enough for me to find one there, but I have so little information about our future plans that I’m tearing my hair out.
“Aleksander, I still need to have my first prenatal checkup. I’ve been pregnant for two and a half months now. I need to make sure that I’m getting the right nutrients in my diet, the right amount of exercise, stuff like that. Being pregnant is kind of my full-time job now since I don’t have a real job to go back to anymore,” I say, wishing I hadn’t put so much bitterness into my voice.
He sighs heavily, rubbing his temples as he gets up from the couch to make himself some food. “You know, you really should be just a little more grateful for the opportunity to live the way you have been. We’re in a beautiful, progressive country, and you get to live for free while getting essentially anything you want. It sucks to see how much you hate it here. So many women your age would kill for this.”
I want to shout in his face about how sexist and reductive his argument is, but again, he won’t respond to my aggression. I hate the fact that I always have to be calm and collected around him even when he’s hurling insults and baseless arguments at me. At the end of the day, he still gets the final say in everything that we do, so it feels stupid and mean of him to point out how much he does for me. I never, ever asked him for a single thing. I’m not here by choice, even if he and I have warmed up to each other considerably.
“I just... I just didn’t picture my first pregnancy going anything like this. I just want to be somewhere safe,actuallysafe, where I’m not being hunted by a sociopath who doesn’t even know me. Why can’t you send me back to the US by myself?” I ask, hoping that maybe something has changed since the last time I made this request.
“How many times have we been over this, Faye? If literally anyone gets word that you’re traveling back to the US, the feds will be waiting for you at your gate when you touch down. I can’t risk having the mother of my child going to prison. I have some people working on your case, trying to pin the murders on Grisha, but that’s going to take time. It’s not like in TV where everything happens in a week,” he replies without looking at me.
