Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 121

Chapter 121

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At eight months pregnant, I’m the size of a small house, but somehow I’ve found the energy to reorganize the nursery dresser for the third time this week. The onesies were organized by size. Now they’re organized by size and color within each size. This is a meaningful improvement that approximately no one will appreciate except me and a newborn who cannot yet perceive color.

I reorganize them anyway. Goddess only knows why. Pregnancy is weird.

Yesterday, Mikhail found me rearranging the sitting room furniture-furniture that’s not even mine to rearrange, by the way—and moved everything I pointed at without comment or expression, which is one of the things I’ve come to appreciate about him. He does not make me feel ridiculous for things I cannot help. No one here does.

I stand in the nursery doorway when I’m done with the dresser. Just stand there, looking at it, while trying to convince my pregnant brain that everything is where it should be and nothing else needs to be done. My pregnant brain is not convinced.

The crib Nicolai assembled with such aggrieved concentration. The mobile that plays soft music when you wind it. The small bookshelf that’s already filled because I’ve been collecting books for a month. The chair in the corner- a wide, comfortable nursing chair in soft gray that appeared one morning because someone paid attention to something I said in passing.

I should be embarrassed by how much I love this room. I’m not. This is the first space that has ever felt genuinely, completely mine.

I think about that while I make my way carefully to the kitchen, because every step I take has to be careful these days. My center of gravity has completely left the building. Not that Nicolai ever comments on my unwieldy body. Instead, he just looks at me with this hunger in his eyes that makes my thighs wet and my core ache.

NIcolai. He’s the reason for all of it. The reason the Woolf estate has become home. I’ve known this for a while-it stopped being a surprise sometime in the second month, when I caught myself referring to “my office” without quotation marks around it in my head.

But what strikes me now, at eight months pregnant and rearranging dresser drawers, is the why of it.

Jaxon was my fated mate. The bond should have made my transition to life in Ironwood seamless. Every room should have felt right. Every morning should have brought an affirmation that I was where I belonged. That’s how mate bonds work-the biology of it, the deep wolf-instinct pull toward the person you’re matched to. You’re supposed to feel home in their space. In their arms. In the life you build around the connection your wolves recognized.

I felt none of that at Ironwood.

Three years and it never stopped feeling like wearing shoes on the wrong feet. Technically functional. Consistently, specifically wrong. I kept waiting for it to settle. Kept thinking I just needed to try harder, be softer, take up less space, make myself easier to love. But the bond never delivered what it promised.

And here-here with a man who is not my fated mate. Who has no biological claim on my wolf’s instincts. Who I chose and who chose me back with no cosmic intervention, no involuntary bond-snap, just two people deciding. Here I reorganize dresser drawers at eight months pregnant and hum to myself while I do it.

The bond was never the point. The person is the point. I’ve known this, intellectually, for a long time. But now, standing in this kitchen making tea, I feel it for the first time.

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Despite what happened the last time he set foot on Woolf property, Jaxon’s visits continue. He still arrives like pekwork weekly, as agreed, and although I hate to admit it, he is-genuinely, visibly, consistently-trying.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was a completely different man. He asks the right questions now and remembers things I mentioned last visit. He brings books he thinks I might like, which suggests he’s been paying attention to my tastes in a way that would have meant everything to me three years ago.

Two weeks ago he brought chamomile honey from a tea shop I mentioned in passing months ago. I thanked him, I think. To be honest I was somewhat in shock. Still, the distance between us didn’t move.

That’s the thing about effort that comes too late-it proves the capacity was always there. Which is its own kind of grief, separate from anger. He could have done this. He just didn’t.

I watch him understand that a little more with each visit. He sits across from me and tries to bridge something built from history, not from his current behavior. And history can’t be unbuilt by chamomile honey, however good

the intention.

I am polite. I am fair. But I am completely unreachable. And I watch him learn the shape of that.

It couldn’t be more different from the way things are between Nicolai and I. Easy. Built on a foundation of friendship. And a history in which he’s never let me down.

After dinner two nights ago, Nicolai and I were in the sitting room with a problem. Girl names. We have Benjamin sorted-Benjamin Marco, which I decided privately and announced and Nicolai received with the expression of a man who thinks this is exactly right and is pleased to have been told. But Dr. Chernov has been carefully neutral on the question of certainty, and last week said I think it’s a boy but prepare for surprises in a tone that made preparation feel advisable.

So: girl names. The list on the coffee table between us has been accumulating for forty minutes and represents a complete failure to agree on anything.

“Aleksandra,” Nicolai says, for the second time.

“We’ve discussed Aleksandra.” I remind him.

“Aleksandra is dignified. It has history. Weight.” He presses.

“It has four syllables and every nickname is also four syllables.”

“You started it with Aleksandra.” I giggle at his affronted expression.

We don’t land on anything. The list by the end is longer on crossed-out names than on candidates, which is its own kind of progress.

Nicolai puts his hand on my belly-casual now, the gesture easy the way it’s gotten over weeks of it becoming ordinary. Benji kicks. Hard. Directly into Nicolai’s palm, with the conviction of someone registering an opinion.

“He’s voting against girl names entirely,” I say, still chuckling. But Nicolai goes quiet.

His hand is still on my belly. His expression is something I’ve learned to read-the way it gets when he’s moved and doesn’t want to make it large. He’s this big, scary man to the rest of the world and sometimes he uses that persona to hide when his emotions get too big.

But he can’t hide from me.

And that makes me love him even more.

Cara Anderson Author

Thank you for reading!

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