Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 122

Chapter 122

Skye

The quiet that’s fallen between Nicolai and I is heavy with meaning, with things unsaid. But something tells me he needs to hear my words right now and I want to say them.

“You’d be a good father,” I tell him.

I mean it as a compliment. An observation. The kind of thing you say when you’ve watched someone react to a baby’s kick with that expression he’s wearing. The way it lands is something more.

Nicolai is quiet for longer than the comment requires. Then, “Maybe someday,” he says.

His voice is careful. Neutral in the specific way it gets when he’s containing something he’s decided not to put on

But I’ve spent months learning this man. Learning the tell that means he’s more affected than he’s showing. The restraint he deploys when he thinks revealing the full truth of something would add pressure I don’t need. I see through it.

With you. That’s what the careful neutrality is protecting. He wants to be this baby’s father. Not a father to a child someday in some hypothetical future. This baby. Now. Already.

Neither of us says it. Both of us know it.

We sit on the sofa with his hand on my belly and the failed name list between us and the fire going down to embers, and neither of us moves to close the distance the unsaid thing has left.

I lie awake that night thinking about his face. Maybe someday. The want in those words. The restraint. The particular quality of a man who is choosing not to push toward something he wants badly because he knows 1 can’t be pushed toward anything right now without it becoming the wrong kind of yes.

He’s been so careful with me. From the beginning, he’s been careful-offering choices, naming the choices clearly, stepping back to give me room to make them. The key to my wing. The locks that work from the inside. The honesty about Tatiana. The honesty about the threat being neutralized so I could choose to stay.

He’s been engineering my freedom to choose at every opportunity. And now he wants something-something real, something I can see in every quiet way he is with this baby before the baby has even arrived-and he’s choosing not to ask for it because he thinks the asking would be pressure.

I think about Benji growing up here. I’ve been trying not to think about it too specifically-what comes after has been a category of thought I’ve been deliberately deferring because there’s been enough in the present to manage. But lying here at eight months pregnant in the room Nicolai gave me, with the nursery I reorganized down the hall, I let myself think about it.

I want Benji to have a father who is here every day. Not one who visits and leaves. Not a man whose car disappearing down the driveway is a repeated small loss, even when the man himself is genuinely trying.

Jaxon will be in Benji’s life. He should be. He’s Benji’s father and he’s trying to be worthy of that and I want my son to know him.

But I want Benji to have more than visits. I want him to have the person who puts his hand on your belly when you’re naming impossible names and goes quiet with feeling because he already loves what he’s feeling.

I want Nicolai. Not as a replacement for what Jaxon should have been. Not as a consolation. Not because he’s the safe option or the convenient option or the one who’s here. Because he’s the one who sees me.

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I don’t say any of this. Not yet. But I stop pretending I’m not thinking about it.

But I know which one I’m thinking about.

Cara Anderson Author

Thank you for reading!

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