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The sound of Makoa’s voice boomed through the air. Grandma Payaka turned around to look—he’d climbed to the top of a tall coconut palm and was swinging the tree back and forth like a blade of grass.
“Makoa! You’re far too big to do that, you’re going to kill yourself!”
“Get your coconuts!” he shouted, plucking them off the tree.
Ari dashed for my window, vaulted into my room, and slammed the shutters closed. He scooped me up into his arms, then zipped to his office and shut the door behind us.
I washed my face in the corner basin as he measured out the ingredients for a potion. “It just happened so suddenly,” I said.
“It’s normal to feel ill,” he replied calmly. “This medicine should help.”
I pulled the front of my robe open and showed him the swell in my stomach. “This!” I said, pointing. “This happened!”
“Yes, you’re pregnant,” he said as he tipped a measure of gray powder into a cup of hot water and mixed it with a bamboo stick. “Drink this.”
It was bitter and burned my tongue, but did give some immediate relief to my nausea.
“May I?” he asked, gesturing to my stomach.
I nodded, and Ari had me remove the top of my robe and sit on the examination chair. As he opened his box of instruments, I felt my heart quicken. Up until now, the baby had been an idea. Yes, I knew it was coming, but in a way, this was like the first time we were meeting it, and I was nervous about what Ari would find.
“I bought this scope from a human healer, two years ago,” Ari said, showing me the metal cone attached to what looked like a stone at the end of a length of rope. “It’s for hearing inside the body. Sometimes, no matter how well you train your senses, a device will do it better.”
He sat down on the floor in front of me and gently moved my hands away from my stomach. The stone was cold against my skin. He held the cone to his ear and listened, eyes closed. Then he smiled.
“There you are,” he said softly.
“You can hear them?”
“A little heartbeat. Strong.”
He offered me the cone, and I brought it to my ear.
I was unprepared for how that little sound would affect me. A drumbeat from the void, an announcement of “I’m here!”
As a Protector of the forest, I’d used my power to create and nurture life many, many times. I’d raised great trees and shepherded starved soil back to fertile grassland. The web of creation was my dance partner, and I knew all of its movements. But this was something completely different.
Ari held my hips in his hands and laid his ear on my stomach, next to the listening stone. My skin prickled with goosebumps.
“Listen to that,” he said. “Incredible.”
Without thinking, I stroked the back of Ari’s neck. “Is everything okay? Are they healthy?”
“They’re healthy,” he said.
I’d never seen Ari look so unguarded. The smile on his face was so pure.
He slipped his hand around the small of my back and adjusted his ear against my skin. A surge of need rushed through my body as I watched him.
Was that real affection I felt for him at that moment? Was I losing my mind?
What was definitely real was the heat building between my legs. I was already pregnant—why was my mind suddenly overtaken by the need to have it happen again?
My face flushed with embarrassed excitement as I watched his nose twitch. “You’re smelling me right now, aren’t you?” I said.
“I can’t help it.”
“Neither can I. I wish I wasn’t so fucking needy right now.”
