Page 23 of Bound Enemies
And then, of course, Assumpció was a delight. She was irreverent with Pau, warm and direct with Leontina, and when it was time for the ultrasound, she made it all seem easy and natural and even comfortable.
Lying on that table, her feet in stirrups, Leontina thought that really, this was the point where she ought to have been embarrassed. There could not be anything more inelegant than lying like this while a stranger bustled around and everyone pretended that Leontina’s most private parts were not on display.
But somehow, that wasn’t how it felt at all.
And as she lay there, she felt a strange sensation inside her. Like a wriggling—and then, in the very same moment she asked herself what it was, she knew the answer.
Without thinking, she reached out and grabbed Pau’s hand, then pressed it to her belly with its little bump.
“The baby is kicking,” she told him excitedly. “Can you feel it?”
She glanced up to find him looking startled, his dark eyes blazing gold. The baby kicked again then, even harder, and both of them seemed to break into the same smile at once.
And for all the wildly hot nights they’d shared, all the positions they’d tried, and the ecstasy they’d eked out of each other’s bodies, Leontina couldn’t help thinking that this was a far greater intimacy than any of them. It was a different, simpler joy.
It was theirs in a way that felt deeply rooted in both of them, and she could feel it in the warmth of his palm against her belly.
“Do you want to know the baby’s sex?” Assumpció asked quietly, somehow not breaking into the moment, but deepening it.
Leontina couldn’t tear her gaze away from Pau’s. She could see his answer there. Slowly, she nodded, too.
“Yes,” Pau said quietly. “We would.”
“It is my pleasure and privilege to tell you that you will be having a little boy,” Assumpció told them. “A perfect little boy, by all current measurements. As happy and healthy as anyone could wish.” She looked at Leontina then. “You are doing beautifully.”
Then the doctor excused herself from the room. It took Leontina long moments to slowly realize that she was lying there in nothing but a hospital gown, with Pau’s hand a blaze of heat, a sweet and heavy weight on her belly.
And it never would have occurred to her that a clinical moment like this could be so many other things as well. That so many emotions could be involved. That the air itself could feellayeredwith things too dangerous to speak out loud.
There was the heat of his hand and the way her body responded to that, and to him, and that physical connection of theirs that only seemed to deepen—and even more so today. It was like the heat wound its way into her and made her glow.
There was that look in his eyes, somehow tender and arresting at once.
And she could not stop thinking how magical and bizarre it was that a night that had seemed so decadent, so vulnerable, sowicked, could lead to something as pure as the baby she carried and the shivery, delicious complication of this moment they shared together.
They had enjoyed each other so thoroughly that they had left marks on each other’s skin, but they’d also made a wholelife.
That made something in her crack wide open.
“Pau,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper, “I have to tell you—”
“I will wait outside while you dress,” he told her, quietly.
And Leontina lay there, awash in something like misery—but sharper—once he left.
Maybe this was the price she had to pay, as simple as that. Maybe she was just going to have to live with this. It was a sort of tax she would have to pay again and again in moments like this, because ofhowshe’d done this. Because of what she’d done and how she’d let it carry on this long.
She told herself that there was no such thing as perfect happiness, and she was a fool to imagine that if she only came clean, she and Pau could achieve it.
And maybe it was nothing more than selfishness in the first place that made her want to tell him the truth. Because what could he do about it anyway? Nothing could change what had happened.
The only thing that could change was that he might make her feel better about it, somehow, and Leontina knew she had to let that go. Because it was also possible that her confession could make things worse, and that wasn’t fair to the baby.
She was going to have to find a way to come to terms with the fact that she’d done what she’d done for the right reasons, no matter if anyone else thought she was right to do it. And if she had any emotional reaction to that, well, that was something she would have to forge through on her own.
It wasn’t that she was unused to figuring things out for herself. It was that these last weeks with Pau had made her realize how much better everything was when she was not left entirely to her own devices.
When she wasn’t alone.
