Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 129

Chapter 129

Jaxon

Benjamin Marco, my son, weighs seven pounds and has his mother’s eyes and my mouth and has been in the world for approximately eleven minutes when I understand, with complete and devastating clarity, everything I threw away. Everything I could never fully comprehend until this very moment.

I watched him be born. Was present for every moment of the final hour-Skye’s hand crushing mine, her voice breaking on a sound I’d never heard her make, the particular courage of a woman doing something/enormous and doing it without complaint, without fear, just doing it because there was no version of not doing it.

I thought I understood what this would mean. I didn’t.

Nothing prepares you for the specific quality of silence that exists in that gap between your child,being physically here and actually crying. The way time does something strange in that space-stretches, or stops, or simply ceases to be the thing you thought it was. Three seconds. Four. The longest unit of time I’ve ever experienced, standing there not breathing, waiting for the sound that means everything is right.

And then it comes. And the room exhales as one organism.

I watched Skye become a mother in real time. Watched something in her face shift permanently, irreversibly, the moment they put our son on her chest. I’d seen her strong. Seen her furious, devastated, composed under fire I created. I had never seen this.

I don’t have words for what it did to me.

They put him in my arms eventually. After the immediate flurry of weighing and checking and the things medical people do that I don’t fully register because I’m watching my son’s face the entire time. After Skye held him skin- to-skin and breathed him in until she could barely keep her eyes open from exhaustion.

Then he’s suddenly in my arms, and I completely fall apart. After anxiously waiting through all those months to finally arrive at this exact moment, holding my son, it was bound to happen.

There’s no dignified version of this, No measured response. Just the full collapse of a man holding something that has reordered every priority he’s ever had in the space of those eleven minutes.

Benji is so small in my arms. And warm in a way that doesn’t feel like ordinary warmth-not just physical warmth, but the kind that’s contagious, that seeps beneath your skin and lights you up from the inside out.

He looks up at me with the unfocused gaze of someone who has just arrived somewhere and is reserving judgment about whether it was a good idea. From the way his tiny nose wrinkles and his miniature lips purse, I’d say the jury’s still out.

“Hi,” I whisper to him. It’s the only word I can find. Every other word I know has temporarily left me.

Benji blinks. Then he makes a sound that isn’t quite a word and isn’t quite nothing-something between a sigh and a complaint-and I laugh and cry at the same time, which I don’t think I’ve ever done before in my entire adult life. Not at my father’s funeral. Not at my wedding. Not at anything. It’s the first time I’ve ever felt something so big, I can’t decide which emotion to feel first.

I look at this small furious face and think: I would burn down the world for you. I would have burned it down a year ago if I’d understood I was capable of feeling this.

I look up from his face eventually. Skye is resting against the pillows, eyes heavy, the exhaustion of labor arriving all at once now that the thing it was building toward has happened. She’s beautiful in the specific way people are

Clean and total and entirely earned.

Cara Anderson Author

Thank you for reading!

心 20

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