I’m already thinking about the next time. About filling her until she’s dripping with me. About the day her belly starts to swell with our child.
But for now, I just hold her, heart hammering against hers, and let her stay exactly where she belongs, on top of me, in control, learning how to claim what’s already hers.
Wren
The dress is red.
Not the muted tones he usually chooses for me. Not the soft grays and creams and dusty pinks that coordinate with his wardrobe and make me look like an extension of his aesthetic. This dress is red like a warning. Floor-length, high-necked, fitted so precisely to my body that it feels like a second skin.
He laid it on the bed this morning while I was in the shower. When I came out with my hair in a towel and his henley clinging to my damp skin, he was leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed, watching me the way he always watches me.
"We're going out tonight," he said.
Those four words feel different than they would have a month ago. A month ago,going outwould have meant escape. A door opening. A chance. Now it means something else entirely, and the shift happened so gradually that I didn't notice it until it was already complete.
Going out means he's taking me somewhere. Going out means I'll be beside him. Going out means the world will see me, and he wants the world to see me in red.
"Where?" I asked.
"A gathering. People I do business with. People who need to meet you."
"Meet me as what?"
He looked at me. That steady, pale gaze that takes me apart and puts me back together every single time.
"As mine."
I'm standing in front of the bathroom mirror now, and the woman looking back at me is someone I'm still learning to recognize. Not the girl from Bridgeport with the dull skin and the chewed nails and the eyes that were always exhausted. This woman has color in her cheeks. Strength in her jaw. Her hair is thick and glossy from weeks of proper nutrition and expensive shampoo. Her nails are clean and even. Her skin glows.
He did this.
Meal by meal, night by night, touch by touch, he rebuilt me from the inside out. Not into someone different. Into the version of me that was always there but never had the resources to surface. The version that existed underneath the exhaustion and the hunger and the constant, grinding anxiety of keeping a household alive on a salary that someone else kept stealing.
I look at myself in this red dress and I think:this is what it looks like when someone invests in you.
I press my hand flat against my stomach. It's too early to feel anything. Too early to know anything for certain. But my period is five days late, and my breasts are tender in a way that has nothing to do with how thoroughly he handled them last night, and this morning I couldn't stomach coffee, which has never happened before.
I haven't told him.
I don't know why. Maybe because I want to be sure. Maybe because the moment I say it out loud, it becomes real, and real means permanent, and permanent means I have admitted, fully and without reservation, that I am staying. That I chose this.That the cage door has been open for weeks and I haven't walked through it because everything I want is on this side of the bars.
He appears behind me in the mirror. Black suit. Black shirt. No tie. He looks like the cover of a novel about a man you should run from, and I'm wearing his ring, and I'm quite possibly carrying his child, and I don't want to run.
The ring. He put it on my finger three days ago. No box. No knee. He took my left hand while we were eating breakfast and slid a diamond onto my ring finger like he was correcting an oversight.
"You didn't ask," I said, staring at the stone. It is obscene. A cushion-cut diamond in a platinum setting that caught the morning light and threw tiny arcs across the kitchen ceiling.
"The ring isn't a question, Wren. The ring is a fact."
In the mirror, he stands behind me and puts his hands on my hips and pulls me back against his chest. His chin rests on top of my head. We look at each other in the glass.
"You look like a queen," he says.
"I look like a mob wife."
"Same thing," he says with a grin and he drops a kiss on my jaw.
I almost laugh. "Dominik."