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“That’s what you want to talk about?” She snatched up the tea and held it between her breasts, and she hunched in her shoulders. “We have a spell, all right? No more back-and-forth with our emotions, nothing like that. He’s moved on, anyway. And it was my idea to get divorced. We never really meshed, truthfully.”
“Didn’t mesh with your fated, biological mate?” He obviously thought this sounded ridiculous. “That doesn’t happen. If you mate someone, you don’t get divorced. That’s—what did he do?”
“Nothing.” She tried to drink the tea. It was too hot. She set it back down on the ottoman. “I don’t want to talk about that yet.”
“I can kill him for you if you want,” said Gunnar. He considered. “Let’s downgrade to punching him, maybe? I don’t know if I’m any good to you and the baby in jail for the rest of my life. But, uh, yeah, I’ll beat him bloody if that needs to happen.”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t his fault. It just…” She sighed. There was only one way to get Gunnar to drop this conversation, she thought, and that was to tell him the truth. She didn’t want to have to say it out loud, didn’t want the rush of awful emotion that came with it, especially now, when her hormones made everything more intense.
“Could I take him in a fight?”
“Definitely,” she said, letting out a laugh. “No, he’s an English professor. He’s not even remotely good at fighting.”
“Huh,” said Gunnar. “And you guys didn’t mesh? Isn’t that the sort of guy you’d want?”
“You know, I’m not actually like this. I’m not…” She picked up the tea again. “He’s the feminist, he’s the one who works the patriarchy into every conversation. I’m the one who’s cringing and wishing he’d leave well enough alone.”
Gunnar sat up straighter. “You’re still into him.”
“No.”
“Of course you would be,” he muttered, sweeping up his own tea. He picked up the tea bag and dunked it in and out of the mug, then squeezed it out and toss it on the tray on the ottoman. “You’re mated to him.”
“It’s not like that,” she said. “We lost an infant.” There, there it was.
He went still. “Oh, shit,” he breathed. “Shit, I’m so fucking sorry, and here I am, just digging into the whole thing—”
“No, it’s okay, you didn’t know, and I—”
“Actually, my brother and his wife, they—their son, he was seventeen, it was a car accident—they split up. Right now, I spend a lot of time with their younger son, my nephew Tyr. He’s gotten kind of lost in the shuffle, and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to move back here, to be close to everyone, because everything’s just been—”
“Seventeen? Really? I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, it’s…” He nodded. “It’s been hard. But compared to an infant, to a baby—”
“Well, this was a long time ago, years ago, and this sounds recent?”
“Spring,” he said, nodding. He drank tea. “I didn’t bring it up to be like, hey, let’s compare grief or something, just… that I get it, how it breaks you apart in a relationship, losing a kid. You wouldn’t think it would, but it…”
“You think it’s common?”
“I actually was looking into it for my brother,” said Gunnar. “It’s not common, exactly, but it happens to, like, sixteen percent of couples who lose a child.”
“Really?” She took a drink of tea, feeling somehow lighter, as if someone had suddenly informed her the biggest failure of her entire life was no longer a failure, but just a thing that sometimes people did—normal people did. That when an awful, heartbreaking thing happened, sometimes, the way she reacted was just a normal way to react. “Sixteen percent?”
“It’s not, like, it’s not a big percentage, true,” said Gunnar. “I don’t think it made my brother feel better. He didn’t want her to leave, but she… my sister-in-law, she wanted it. She wants it over. She doesn’t want to live in that house anymore, and she doesn’t want—I mean, to be honest, I don’t think she likeslookingat my brother. I think he reminds her of their son.”
She nodded. “Yeah, I was kind of that way. I wanted to pack up the nursery and redo it and he didn’t want that. Because I wanted to get pregnant again, actually.”
“Yeah.” Gunnar nodded. “But he didn’t want you to?”
“He… it, um, it was his... He’s a carrier for this disease that only affects orcs, and it…” She drank more tea, shaking her head. “He was supposed to get a vasectomy and we were going to use his brother’s sperm, and it was going to be fine. And he… just… wouldn’t move on. He wouldn’t do any of it.”
“Seriously?” said Gunnar. “What a dick. He wouldn’t get the vasectomy? Like, he knows he could knock you up again at any point and the baby would die again, and he wouldn’t?”
“No.”
“No wonder you left his fucking ass. What kind of…?” Gunnar slammed his tea down. “Fuck that guy.”
