And then I smile through the kiss and I feel him smirking, our lips mirroring each other, and for long moments we just stay like that, floating in perfection.
Chapter Eight
Artem
“Okay, are we going to cook now?” Anna sasses as she dons her chef’s hat, having cleaned up now, aiming a glorious smile at me.
It’s the sort of smile I can easily imagine her aiming at our children, her whole face lighting up under its illumination. Her blue eyes sparkling as she struts over to the work surface in her full get-up.
The scent of our sex lingers in the air, and as I breathe it in deeply – savoring it, reliving the memory of her tightness and her eagerness and her beautiful confidence – I just know that she’s pregnant.
This was it.
I’ve put a baby in her.
The certainty is deafening inside of me.
“I’m at your command,” I say. “Just try to be a little less sexy, okay?”
She rolls her eyes, her cheeks shimmering nervous carmine for a moment.
“Jesus, do you have any idea how intoxicating that is, Anna?”
“What?” she says, glancing at me as she takes the chopping board and brings it front and center.
“The way you go from ready to take on the world one second to intensely human and vulnerable the next. There’s something so—Jesus, Anna. I’ve never been a wordsmith. I’ve used words as weapons. In business, words can crumple men just as easily as bullets. But this is not the same. I’m trying to appreciate something, somebody, you. Not tear something down. But it’s just so beautifully, amazingly human, this thing we have.”
“I agree,” she whispers. “And there you go, huh? I’m even less of a wordsmith than you. Now, please, you wild freaking caveman, will you pass me the peppers?”
I laugh darkly and fetch the peppers, my body feeling light and airy in a way it never has before.
There’s something swirling around inside of me, something …
Love.
For a moment, I just stand there, staring as Anna starts to lay out the peppers on the chopping board.
The notion that I could be in love is instinctively absurd to me.
I remember a small, broken boy huddling in the dark, gnawing on a piece of bread and wondering if tomorrow he’d even get that much. I remember a boy – a boy who would one day miraculously grow to seven feet tall – who knew that love was not for him, not ever.
He had to make himself hard.
He had to make himself cold.
But now, as I stare at Anna, I feel it flushing through me like a tonic.
“Anna,” I whisper.
“Hmm?” she says, half turning her head as she begins to chop the peppers, consumed with the subtle delicacy of her work.
“Do you think our childhoods ruined us at all?”
Cult, that’s the sound her knife makes on the chopping board. And then she lays it aside, facing me fully, her eyebrows knitted in concern.
“What do you mean?”
I move close to her and smooth a strand of shiny dark hair from her forehead, tucking it behind her ear. It feels physically impossible that it was only a week ago I laid eyes on this woman, and only yesterday that I declared that she’s mine.
It feels like a thousand years, an eternity.
The notion that I was ever without Anna seems like a twisted fucking joke. And I’m not laughing.
“I mean that other people, they seem to develop, I don’t know …”
“Feelings?” Anna says, eyebrow cocked in curiosity now. “The general tools that most people seem to have to handle human-to-human interactions?”
I smirk. “Yeah, exactly.”
She moves close and places her hands on my shoulders.
“I used to think that. When I was a little girl, I was so used to being abandoned. My parents died shortly after I was born. Nobody seemed to care about me. When I was really young, I played this game, the ghost game, where I’d see how long I could go without anybody looking at me or speaking to me. Where can love fit into a world like that, right? But …”
“But what?” I ask, when she trails off, eyes becoming glassy.
“But then I met you,” she whispers, a note of shyness in her voice. “I met you and everything changed. I know it sounds crazy, Artem. Or maybe it won’t to you. But to other people it would. People who don’t feel what we feel. But the second you said you were claiming me, I felt it. I felt like all my life had been leading up to that moment. And it just clicked into place. So what if you bought me? So what if we are about as unconventional as it’s possible to get? I knew right then that I could give my childhood a big fat middle finger, that it didn’t have to rule over me anymore. Now, are you going to help me with these peppers or am I going to give more lofty speeches in my frankly ridiculous getup?”