Levi’s suggestion to move into the Pacific Heights house wasn’t a suggestion at all. It was a, not a command, but a non-negotiable direction. He wanted to move me to New York for the duration of the pregnancy, but that wasn’t going to happen. Yeah, Strickland’s was opening on the East Coast, but I still worked here. I would at least until the baby came and then we would talk about it.

I understood that he just wanted to make sure I was okay. He was good at hiding it, but he was a lot more stressed out about the hematoma than I was. The bleeding went on sometimes heavier, sometimes lighter, but I never had any pain.

The best of the three possible eventualities had ended up happening. The hematoma had bled out. The bedrest had only lasted a month. The pelvic rest, however, had been longer by a couple of weeks and had been hellish for both of us.

Pelvic rest meant no sex, no insertion of anything and no orgasms. Levi took it better than me, but the poor guy, his arm was probably going to fall off. At least he didn’t have rivers of hormones running through him, making his libido spike.

It got so bad I started having dreams about fucking, like a teenage boy going through puberty. I couldn’t help Levi out, sucking him off because that turned me on. The one time I’d relented and played with my nipples, I’d had a bloody discharge the next day.

Even though I had been staying in Pacific Heights, Levi had still been flying back and forth between the Bay and New York, his stays in San Francisco longer than just weekends. It wasn’t a permanent arrangement; it was just till my bed and pelvic rest were over. Till I got the all clear after the twelve-week ultrasound.

He said that it was easier to make sure I had care while he was away if I was staying in his condo. My only condition was the cats got to come too. I wasn’t going to fight him about it. I had to give him something. He was there. I was the one who had been shutting him out. When he had said care, I thought he meant a midwife or nurse. I’d been horrified to find out he meant his mother.

Silvia Guzman was a great roommate, but it had taken days to get used to asking her for help. She was excited about the baby, more than Levi and I combined. Apparently, she had thought the way I had, that he wouldn’t want one. She had ended up coming with me to my twelve-week ultrasound because Levi couldn’t make it back to the Bay for the appointment. Twelve weeks was when you found out your due date.

She had cried when we saw the baby on the monitor. I had had ultrasounds before the twelve weeks because of the hematoma, but all they would tell me when they looked in there was whether the baby was okay, their heart rate and the condition of the hematoma. I knew what the baby looked like; I had seen it before, so it didn’t hit me the way it hit Silvia.

It was nice, though. Being there with her made it feel a little special, I guess. Closer to Levi in a way. It had been just me and my mother my whole life. Even after she started taking in foster kids, our family never felt big. All this love was suddenly coming at me from these new people, from new directions, and it overwhelmed me. It wasn’t just Levi who had entered my life.

It was his mother, Celeste, even Max a little bit, when he was in a good enough mood to have a conversation once in a while. I had known from the beginning that he had a little crush on me, but we both knew it wouldn’t come to anything. He never brought the pictures that Zahira had shown me of us up again, but I never heard about them anywhere else, so I let it slide. Levi’s closeness to his family had sort of left me bemused at first. I hadn’t known what to make of it, but now I knew it just made me love him even more.

Silvia stayed with me the couple of days before Levi came back. She would head back to LA when he came back. She had me help her cook dinner the day he landed back in the Bay, teasing me that I would have to learn how to cook Argentinian food to keep her son well fed. Levi had arrived from the airport sometime during the preparation and sat in the kitchen with us. I had never asked Levi how much he talked to her about me, but it was probably safe to say a lot.

A lot and long term. The thought of losing him shrunk with each passing day. I shouldn’t have been thinking it in the first place. It was me. I was thinking it. He wasn’t. He wasn’t giving me reasons to think he didn’t want me. I had been.

I had been mad at Levi for making decisions on my behalf, but I couldn’t be mad at Zahira the same way for calling him when I was at the hospital, basically deciding that he was going to know about the baby before I made the decision to tell him. If she hadn’t, who was to say what would have happened? By shutting up about it, I had just let my fear stop me from pursuing what I wanted.

When I started bleeding, I thought it was over. I thought that was the end and I wouldn’t have to tell him because I was losing it anyway. When we learned it wasn’t what I had thought it was, I was relieved and stressed out all at once. I didn’t want to lose it, but then I still had to break the news to Levi. He had shown up before I had figured out how to do it yet. He hadn’t had the reaction that I had ideally wanted, but he hadn’t had the one that I had dreaded he would. He was just scared for my health. He just wanted to take care of me. He was just upset that I had shut him out; the same thing I had felt when we first got together.

More than that, he was worried about the baby too. He cared about the baby. He was excited about the baby. He was going to have the baby with me. In the beginning, I thought he was just doing it because he didn’t want to ask me to get rid of it, but when he started absently placing his hand on my stomach, and asking me what I thought about names, I knew it wasn’t just for me. He had told me about the sort of father Jackson Strickland had been to him and his siblings. Something told me it was one aspect in which he definitely wasn’t going to follow in his footsteps.

Silvia teased her son relentlessly through dinner when she wasn’t gushing over ultrasound images of the baby. She suggested us abandoning New York as an idea completely and just moving to LA so we could live near her. We would have to have the conversation eventually, and I could sympathize, but the kid would have a grandmother in New York too. We still had some time to think. Besides, it was New York, not New Zealand, right?

After she left, Levi cleared the table, telling me to rest on the couch. He joined me when he was done, bringing me a mug of hot water with honey and lemon. Didn’t come close to coffee or booze, but it tasted good.

“How’s that? Too sweet?” he asked.

“No, it’s delicious. Thank you. How was your flight?”

“Long. Oh, I have a present for you,” he said, pulling something out of his pocket. The box was the wrong shape and wrong type for what I couldn’t help thinking it might be, but I thought it anyway.

“What is it?” I asked, pulling the lid off. It was a key. Not a normal key that went in a door. It was like the key I had seen his assistant use when she was letting me into his penthouse in New York. One of those access keys that you used in the elevator to give you access to private floors. It was a key to his house. I hadn’t been back there since the weekend we had spent together in New York, but it still surprised me.

“I told you I wanted us to live together,” he said.

“We never talked about me moving back to New York with you after that weekend.”

“I know. I know your life is here right now, but I want you to have it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t live there, I want you to feel like it’s your home too. You have a key. You can come and go as you please.”

“There’s no chance you’ll move to California for me?” I asked, more to see what he’d say than an actual request.

“I’d do anything for you,” he said, brushing the back of his hand on my cheek.

“What about moving to Brooklyn?”

“Hm. Anything but that,” he said smiling. I kissed him, and it was supposed to be sweet, but he had been holding back all evening. He had been on his best behavior when his mother was there, but now we were alone. My pelvic rest had been over for a little while, but I hadn’t tried anything. Partly out of fear, but also because I didn’t want to waste my first orgasm in weeks on my hand or a vibrator.

He picked me up and walked us to the bedroom, setting me down on the bed before he climbed on top of me. His restraint quickly expired from there. His hands and mouth were on me at the same time pulling clothes loose, his and mine, like he couldn’t get us naked fast enough. I was in a dress so that came off easy. Most of the buttons on his shirt were lost trying to get it off.

“I feel like we should start slow,” I said.

“I haven’t touched you in weeks; I cannot do slow,” he said.

“I don’t want it to be over before we’ve begun.”

“When have I ever given you a reason to worry about that?” he asked, smirking. True. I surrendered, letting him take me. Once our clothes were off his tongue was between my legs, darting in and out of me quickly. His thumb rotated firm circles over my clitoris, just heightening the quick, shallow, erotic penetration.

I was coming, grinding against his face in seconds. He had to hold me down on the bed so I’d stop moving. He didn’t stop when I came, letting his mouth take over from his hand on my clit and sliding two fingers inside me. He sucked and licked slower, but like he said, he hadn’t touched me in weeks. I didn’t stand a chance. I felt wild with desire. There was no holding off when my second orgasm came. I screamed, feeling it shoot through me, just made stronger as he continued to lick me as I rode it out.

I pushed him away clamping my thighs together. If he made me come again so soon after the other two, I’d pass out.

“Levi… stop,” I gasped. He leaned into me kissing my forehead, then my lips.

“Too much?” he asked slyly, gently prying my thighs apart and settling between them again. He kissed me languorously, letting me taste myself on his tongue. His hard cock was pressed against my stomach.

“Let me make you come,” I said, reaching between us and stroking him.

“Not like that. I want you to milk me dry with your pussy, sweetheart,” he growled.

He held himself over me and filled me up, thick and smooth. He felt incredible pressing against my walls. It had been way too long. I had missed this. His weight above me and his length inside me. His smell, his hard, muscled body. They were vivid in my fantasies and dreams, but overwhelming in reality; completely possessing me, rendering me helpless.

“Fuck me, you’re so tight,” he said like we had never had sex before. He thrust into me slowly, his strokes long and deep. He looked at me, staring directly into my eyes. I fought to keep my gaze leveled with his; it was so intense. He was there. He was open, and he was present, he was inside of me, but I felt like I was inside of him too. Pushing my legs up behind the knee, the head of his cock stroked the spot inside me he had stimulated with his fingers earlier. The spot that made me writhe and moan underneath him. I felt him speed up, his stroke becoming harder to control the closer he got to coming.

I held his gaze feeling full, satisfied and in love. Another orgasm shot through me, and I felt my body seize. Bliss bathed every nerve ending in my body. I squeezed my eyes shut as we came at the same time. The moments after we just lay there, neither of us speaking. We didn’t need words just then. He knew, and I knew. Something that wasn’t physical vibrated between us—a shared vulnerability that we both bared trusting the other to accept.

There was nothing blocking him from me. I had him, and I wasn’t scared that I didn’t anymore. Nothing mattered but what I felt and what I knew. Not distance, fear, time or money. Nothing.

Just us.