Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 131

Chapter 131

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It’s been six weeks since Benji was born. At least I think it has. I’m pretty sure. To be honest, time has stopped making sense.

But regardless of time or my inability to keep it, here are the things I’ve learned so far:

I can spend forty-five minutes on a single feeding-trying to get Benji to latch, repositioning, trying again, succeeding, losing it, trying again-and then look up and discover it’s 4 AM and I haven’t eaten since yesterday’s lunch and somehow the entire day has both lasted forever and not happened at all.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Nicolai would never let me go a whole day without eating. But the principle stands. I’ve definitely lost all concept of time or schedule.

I mentioned this to Dr. Chernov at the two-week appointment. He just looked at me like I was stating the obvious and said, “Yes. That’s newborns.” Very helpful.

Here is what nobody tells you about loving a baby: It’s not soft. It’s not the warm, gauzy feeling implied by the imagery. It’s sharp. Immediate. The specific ferocity of something that doesn’t have room for conditions or

caveats.

I love Benji the way I’d love someone who had taken up residence in my chest cavity and begun rearranging the furniture, like they’d finally found home. It’s constant and completely without concern for my pre-existing ideas on the matter.

While my son is infallible in my eyes, I can admit he is demanding in the way all newborns are demanding—his needs are immediate, total, non-negotiable. His needs arrive without context or warning and require a complete and unerringly accurate response.

He does not care what time it is. He does not care that I’ve been awake for twenty-two hours or that my body is six weeks post-delivery or that I haven’t eaten. He cares that he is experiencing something he objects to and that I am the person responsible for addressing it.

I love him with a ferocity that still surprises me. Watching him sleep, his face doing the complicated thing that isn’t quite a smile yet but is the clear predecessor of one-I feel something so large it briefly has no edges.

I’m happy. I’m also, quietly, barely keeping my head above water.

My saving grace is that Nicolai is in the trenches with me. I say this, not as a small thing. I say it as the thing I did not know to expect and have no words for how much I appreciate it. Goddess, how does anyone do this alone?

He takes Benji when he won’t settle and I’ve already tried everything I know-just rolls over in our bed and gets up when I’m struggling, no discussion, no groan of sacrifice. He appears in whatever room I’m in with food I didn’t know I needed and couldn’t have articulated wanting. He learns Benji’s specific fussiness tells with an accuracy that, at first, mystified me. Benji has a particular quality to his pre-hunger cry that is different from the pre-tired cry, different again from the I am bored and require stimulation cry, different entirely from the I have an opinion about the temperature of this room cry,

I know this because Nicolai figured it out and explained it to me. I had, at that point, been Benji’s mother for three weeks. Nicolai had been Benji’s father-in every way that matters, for roughly the same amount of time.

This is a man who runs an empire. Who has people in his employ who handle problems permanently. Who walks into rooms and makes the quality of air in them change. Who negotiated a trade dispute last Tuesday by saying one sentence that I wasn’t sure was legally a threat but was clearly understood as one.

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Chapter

Nicolai is always there.

Cara Anderson Author

Thank you for reading!

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