Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 137

Chapter 137

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Benji is asleep before midnight for the first time in eight weeks. I stand in the kitchen, and register this fact the way you register something you stopped believing in-with suspicion first, then cautious acknowledgment, then something close to wonder.

The monitor is quiet. Actually quiet. Not the held-breath quiet of a baby who’s about to wake, but the deep, even breathing of a small person who has, for reasons entirely his own, decided that tonight he’ll sleep before midnight.

I stand at the counter in the dark kitchen eating toast over the sink and think, this is the best toast I’ve ever had I feel, for the first time in eight weeks, like a person who exists in a body rather than a mechanism for keeping a newborn alive. And that feeling just makes everything better. Even toast.

That feeling lasts all of five minutes before my brain, released from the immediate tyranny of feeding schedules and sleep windows and decoding the specific register of Benji’s various complaints, catches up to me.

And surfaces everything I haven’t had the bandwidth to think about.

The fog doesn’t lift all at once. It thins. Becomes fractionally less, so that you can see slightly further than the immediate demands of the next hour. Still there-Benji is still Benji, still my priority, still the little person I order my life around. But slightly less consuming than the first weeks, when I couldn’t have told you what day it was if my life depended on it.

I’ve had things waiting in the space behind the fog. Things like the fact I’m in a relationship with Nicolai. I love him. He loves me. We’ve said these things to each other and meant them and lived them together. These are

settled facts.

And underneath the facts, surfacing now in this quiet kitchen with my toast and the sleeping monitor, is a truth I have yet to face: I’ve never fully trusted myself since Jaxon. Not my feelings. Not the story I’m telling about them. Not the instrument of my own judgment.

I’m standing here with my toast, in the absence of my sleeping baby, and this is the moment my brain decides it’s time to face this truth. I quickly try to shove it out of my mind, telling myself I’m too tired, I’ll deal with it later. But my brain won’t budge on the matter.

So here I am thinking about the story I told myself for three years. That Jaxon would change. That the bond meant something permanent and true. That love was coming if I was patient enough, if I tried hard enough, if I made myself the right shape for him to love.

But I was wrong. Not a little wrong. Not wrong about one thing. Wrong about something fundamental, and I stayed wrong about it for three years because I convinced myself I knew how the story ended.

Skye Winters is not a stupid woman. I know this about myself. I’m politically sharp and emotionally perceptive and I had legal and practical resources to leave Jaxon years earlier than I did. Still, I stayed. I believed.

Which means one indisputable thing: I’m capable of being completely, thoroughly, earnestly wrong about the story I’m telling myself about someone. About my own feelings. About what I see in a relationship when I’m inside it.

Now I’m inside a different relationship. Telling a different story. And I can’t fully trust myself about whether this story is real or whether I’m doing the same thing-finding what I need to see, believing what I need to keep the hope alive.

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Not because Nicolai isn’t real. I know he’s real. What he’s built here, what he’s shown me-that’s not the question. The question is whether I know how to see it clearly. Whether the instrument of my own judgment, which I broke badly once, is calibrated correctly now.

I finish my toast in the dark kitchen.

Then I go find Nicolai.

He’s in his office, which is where he always is at this hour if we’re not in bed, stealing a few minutes sleep until Benji wakes again. The light is on under the door and I hear keyboard sounds, so I knock.

“Come in.” He calls.

He looks up, and the laptop closes before he’s fully registered that it’s me-that automatic clearing of everything, else, the way he does it every time, without thought. I’ve noticed this for months. Never quite let myself name

what it means.

It means: you are not an interruption. You are what I’d rather be doing.

“Can we talk?” I ask timidly.

“Always.” He adjusts-pushes back slightly from the desk to give me room, then pulls me to stand between his legs.

“You saw clearly,” he continues. “You saw a man who mated you and seemed to struggle with coldness and appeared to be trying. You were right that he was struggling. You were right that he was sometimes trying. The part you couldn’t see is that he was also terrified and unwilling to admit it, and that combination looked from the inside like something that might change.” He pauses. “That’s not your judgment failing. That’s the limits of what anyone can know from inside a relationship with someone who won’t be honest.”

“Then how do I know,” I ask, “that you’re being honest? That what I’m seeing now is what it actually is?”

“I’m not asking you to trust your feelings,” he says. “I’m asking you to trust the evidence. What I’ve shown you. Over months. In circumstances that didn’t leave much room for performance.” His voice is careful. “I showed you who I was before I was ever trying to impress you. You saw me managing threatening men in hallways and driving three hours in the middle of the night and giving you a key to a room and telling you the locks work from the inside. You saw me with Benji before he was born and after. You’ve been inside this life, inside this house, with full access to how I operate when I’m not curating what you see.”

He’s right. He’s right and I know he’s right and the fear doesn’t dissolve when something’s right but it becomes survivable.

“I see you,” he says. “All of you. The political mind and the postpartum floor-crying and the way you reorganize things when you’re anxious and the very specific way you look when you’re about to say something brave.” He holds my gaze. “I’m not going anywhere. That is also evidence. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again until you don’t need to hear it anymore.”

“I might always need to hear it,” I admit,

“Then I’ll always say it.”

I pull him even closer. He leans in immediately-hands on my face, careful and certain-and I stop trying to examine the feeling from the outside and just let it be what it is. Because what it is is burning too hot to question.

And the next thing I know, I’m in his arms and his lips are on mine.

Cara Anderson Author

Thank you for reading! Sorry for the single updates but the chapters are longer so taking more time. Thank you for understanding!

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