บททั้งหมดของ Pursuing My Rejected Luna: บทที่ 121 - บทที่ 130

SkyeAt eight months pregnant, I’m the size of a small house, but somehow I've found the energy to reorganize the nursery dresser for the third time this week. The onesies were organized by size. Now they're organized by size and color within each size. This is a meaningful improvement that approximately no one will appreciate except me and a newborn who cannot yet perceive color.I reorganize them anyway. Goddess only knows why. Pregnancy is weird. Yesterday, Mikhail found me rearranging the sitting room furniture—furniture that’s not even mine to rearrange, by the way—and moved everything I pointed at without comment or expression, which is one of the things I've come to appreciate about him. He does not make me feel ridiculous for things I cannot help. No one here does. I stand in the nursery doorway when I'm done with the dresser. Just stand there, looking at it, while trying to convince my pregnant brain that everything is where it should be and nothing else needs to be done. My

JaxonRena directs me to the nursery as soon as I arrive for my weekly visit with Skye and our unborn pup. She doesn’t walk me through, assuming I know the way. Odd, since normally I’m treated like a spy attempting to steal state secrets the minute I show up to the gate.The nursery door is partially open when I make it upstairs. I hear them before I see them—Skye's voice, dry and patient, and Nicolai's, which carries the tone of a man arguing with an inanimate object and losing.I push the door open quietly. I know I shouldn’t eavesdrop, should announce myself. I don’t. Skye is in the nursing chair, both hands resting on her belly, watching Nicolai on the floor with the expression of someone managing a situation they find equal parts frustrating and entertaining.Nicolai is surrounded. A baby swing, it appears, in component form. Pieces arranged on the floor in what might be an attempt at the diagram's layout, or might be the aftermath of something that started organized and devolved

NicolaiI’ve taken to spending most nights in Skye’s bed recently. It’s not about sex. Much to her annoyance, I’m still refusing to cross that line until I’m one hundred percent sure Skye won’t regret it. It’s never mattered to me before whether a woman regretted giving herself to me or not. But this is Skye, and something tells me I wouldn’t survive it if she did. But since the night we admitted we’re in love with each other, sleeping apart didn’t seem reasonable anymore. Not when all I want to do is hold her, protect her, to know she’s safe in my arms. But tonight, it’s late when I’m finally able to join her in her room. I expect to find her already curled up on her side, her face buried in my pillow, seeking my scent even in sleep the way she does so often lately. So I’m a little anxious to find she’s not there. My frantic search leads me to the kitchen where I find her pouring over the papers she has spread out on the kitchen table. And she’s wearing the look of someone who has

SkyeFrom the minute I crawled out of bed after breathing through the first contraction, to the time NIcolai woke to find me bracing myself in the bathroom doorway, it seems fifteen minute pain intervals have become ten. And I want to find the person who wrote the chapter on early labor being a chance to prepare and have a word with them.Who could possibly think straight through pain like this, let alone prepare myself mentally for the pain to get worse? Because honestly, worse is unthinkable at the moment!That’s why I made a plan ahead of time. And my plan was specific. My plan had stages with clear delineations and reasonable timeframes. Just like all the books I read on childbirth told me I would. Apparently, they lied! Because my plan seems to have crumbled in the face of the child currently attempting to evacuate my uterus but taking his damn sweet time about it. He appears to have inherited his father's complete disregard for other people's schedules and his mother's absolute

JaxonBenjamin Marco, my son, weighs seven pounds and has his mother's eyes and my mouth and has been in the world for approximately eleven minutes when I understand, with complete and devastating clarity, everything I threw away. Everything I could never fully comprehend until this very moment. I watched him be born. Was present for every moment of the final hour—Skye's hand crushing mine, her voice breaking on a sound I'd never heard her make, the particular courage of a woman doing something enormous and doing it without complaint, without fear, just doing it because there was no version of not doing it.I thought I understood what this would mean. I didn't.Nothing prepares you for the specific quality of silence that exists in that gap between your child being physically here and actually crying. The way time does something strange in that space—stretches, or stops, or simply ceases to be the thing you thought it was. Three seconds. Four. The longest unit of time I've ever experi