Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 132

Chapter 132

Sve

The event I now affectionately refer to as the 3 AM moment occurs on a Tuesday.

Benji has been crying for forty minutes. Not the hungry cry. Not the tired cry. Not any of the classifiable cries- just the cry that means the world is overwhelming and I have feelings about this and I need you to know.

I have tried everything I know.

I’m sitting on the floor of the nursery with my back against the side of the crib, Benji on my chest/still crying, because the floor felt necessary and also because I got down here and standing up again felt like too much effort.

I am beginning to cry too, which I will not admit is primarily the six-weeks-postpartum hormones that Dr. Chernov warned me about and which I was confident would not significantly affect me because I am a practical person. It is primarily the hormones.

It is also 3 AM and Benji has been crying for forty minutes and I can’t fix it and there’s a specific quality to 3 AM that makes everything feel permanent and final in ways that daylight would make obviously irrational.

Nicolai appears in the nursery doorway. He looks at me on the floor. Looks at Benji. Then makes a decision I can see happen in real time.

He holds out his hands. I hand Benji over without a word. I’m not entirely sure I even have the capacity for words.

Nicolai takes him-settling him against his chest with the ease of someone who has learned exactly how Benji wants to be held-and walks. Just walks.

Out of the nursery. Into the hallway. The steady rhythm of his steps, back and forth, disappearing and returning past the doorway.

I stay on the nursery floor and listen. After a few minutes, the crying changes. Becomes intermittent. A protest, then silence, then another protest, smaller. Then silence again.

I get up and slowly make my way to the nursery door. They’re at the far end of the hallway. Nicolai has Benji against his chest, one large hand spanning my son’s entire back-his hand is big enough that it covers from shoulders to hips, which is something I notice every time and which, every time, does something to me.

He’s speaking to our son in a low voice I can’t hear from here. Not words I can make out. Just the particular quality of his voice when he’s talking to Benji, low and steady and continuous, that I know means he’s telling him some sort of story.

Benji is quiet. And it’s not the quiet of a problem temporarily interrupted. It’s the quiet of someone who has found exactly the place they were looking for. That breaks something open in me.

Standing in the nursery doorway at 3 AM watching my son be held by a man who chose this-Not biology. Not obligation. Not a mate bond or pack tradition or any of the automatic mechanisms that bind wolves to their offspring. Just a man who learned the difference between a hungry cry and a tired cry and is currently walking the hallway of his own house with my son against his chest because my son needed it.

He chose it. He keeps choosing it. And has not once acted as though it costs him something.

I slide down the door frame and sit on the hallway floor and cry. Silently, because I will not disturb either of them. Just-cry, in the specific inarticulate way of someone whose defenses have been comprehensively dismantled.

It’s not sadness. It’s not grief. It’s simply the overwhelming, armor-dissolving reality of being loved when you

We sit on the hallway floor for a long time. The baby monitor is quiet. The entire estate is quiet. And I think, sitting here, about the word deserve-about how it assumes a ledger, a balance, an earning system.

Maybe that’s not what this is. Maybe this is just what happens when two people choose each other.

Over and over.

Even at 3 AM.

Even on the floor.

Cara Anderson Author

Thank you for reading!

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