Chapter 102 Nesting
It started with the nursery curtains.
I had ordered them three weeks ago, cream colored with a small subtle pattern that caught the light in a way that felt soft without being precious. They arrived on a Tuesday morning in a flat cardboard box and I opened the box on the living room floor and held one panel up to the window to check the weight of the fabric and then I did not put them down for a very long time.
Lycian found me still standing there twenty minutes later.
“You’re nesting,” he said from the doorway.
“I’m checking the fabric.”
“You’ve been checking it for twenty minutes.”
I folded the panel carefully and put it back in the box. “I’m going to hang them today.”
“Okay.”
“And I want to move the crib. It’s three inches too close to the window. If the sun comes through in the morning it’ll hit their face.”
He looked at me for a moment with that careful expression he used when he was deciding whether to agree immediately or ask a question. He agreed immediately. Smart man.
Eighteen weeks. The bump was visible now without any ambiguity. Round and firm and mine, sitting low and forward, changing the way I moved through rooms, the way I reached for things, the way I slept. I had stopped sleeping on my stomach somewhere around week fifteen and mourned it quietly for about four days before Lycian started building elaborate pillow arrangements around me each night without being asked, adjusting them with the focused concentration of someone diffusing something important.
I hung the curtains. Then I moved the crib with Lycian’s help, measuring the distance from the window with actual measuring tape, which he held one end of without comment. Then I decided the small bookshelf Tessa had given us needed to be on the other wall. Then I sat in the rocking chair in the corner and looked at everything and felt the particular feeling that had been living in my chest for two weeks now, restless and warm and impossible to fully satisfy.
I wanted everything right. Not perfect. Not magazine-perfect. Just right. Safe and soft and thought through. A room that said you were expected and you are wanted and everything here was chosen with you in mind.
Lycian crouched in front of the rocking chair. His elbows on his knees. His face is level with mine.
“What else?” he asked.
“Nothing. Everything looks good.”
He waited.
“The light fitting,” I said. “It’s too harsh. I want something warmer. Something that won’t be startling in the night when we come in for feeds.”
He pulled out his phone and started looking without sighing, without pointing out that we had already changed the light fitting once. I watched him scroll through options and felt something so large and quiet move through me that I had to look away at the window.
This was who he was. Under everything. Under the Alpha and the heir and all the things the world had made of him. He crouched on the floor of our baby’s room at ten in the morning looking at light fittings because it mattered to me and therefore it mattered to him.
The baby kicked twice. Hard enough that I pressed my hand to the spot automatically.
Lycian looked up.
I took his hand and pressed it to the same place. We waited. Three seconds. Four.
Another kick, right against his palm, deliberate as a knock.
His face did the thing it always did. That slow quiet opening, like something releasing a breath it had forgotten it was holding. He kept his hand there even after the movement stopped, like he was hoping for more, as he would wait as long as it took.
“Hi,” he said softly. To my stomach. To whoever was in there listening. “I’m sorting out your light. It won’t be harsh. I promise.”
I pressed my lips together. Looked at the curtains hanging softly and cream in the afternoon light. Blinked twice.
The nesting had moved into the kitchen by Thursday.
I reorganized the cupboards. Moved the glasses to a different shelf because the shelf they were on was too high for me to reach comfortably now and I didn’t want to be reaching above my head in the middle of the night in three months. I cleaned the inside of the refrigerator with a focus that surprised even me, taking everything out, wiping every shelf, putting it all back in a different order that made more sense.
Lycian came home from a Council meeting to find me on my hands and knees cleaning the inside of the cabinet under the sink.
He stood in the kitchen doorway. Looked at the collection of cleaning supplies lined up on the floor beside me. Looked at me.
“How was the meeting?” I asked without stopping.
“Fine. Productive.” He put his keys on the counter. “Do you want help?”
“I’m almost done.”
He sat on the kitchen floor with his back against the counter and waited. Not on his phone. Not doing anything else. Just there, present in the particular way he had become present since we moved in, like he had decided that wherever I was was where he wanted to be.
When I finished I sat back on my heels and looked at the clean cabinet interior with genuine satisfaction.
He handed me a glass of water without being asked. I drank half of it in one go.
“Clara called,” he said. “She wants to schedule the twenty-week scan for next Friday.”
Twenty weeks. Halfway.
The word landed somewhere central and stayed there.
I looked down at my stomach. At the round visible reality of it under my shirt. Five more months of this. Five more months of kicks and light fittings and pillow arrangements and the particular terror and wonder of growing a person you already loved more than made any rational sense.
“Friday,” I said.
“Friday,” he confirmed.
I leaned back against the cabinet beside him. Our shoulders are touching. His warmth along my arm. The kitchen smelled like the cleaning spray I had been using and underneath it the remains of the soup we had made for lunch, garlic and thyme, still faint in the air.
He tilted his head until it rested against mine.
Outside the February wind moved through the bare trees in the garden, the branches tapping lightly against the fence. The sound of the house settling around us. The familiar tick of the heating. The small ordinary sounds of a life being lived in a place that was ours.
I closed my eyes.
The baby shifted, slow and rolling, turning in the warm dark.
Friday, I thought. Twenty weeks. Halfway to meeting you.