Logan lays me down on his sprawling bed. I’ve never been in here before, and normally I’d be nosing around, trying to suss out all his secrets. You know, important stuff, like what kind of book he keeps on his nightstand, or exactly how many pairs of shoes he owns. But this time, my eyes are glued to Logan’s. I couldn’t tear them away even if I wanted to.

He’s incredibly gentle with me. Nothing like the other times we’ve been together. He peels my leggings off one leg at a time, kissing my skin, running his tongue over the fields of goosebumps. We’re both silent, focused. I unbutton his shirt, slide it off his shoulders, run my nails down the hard plains of his chest. His beautiful chest.

My hands can’t get enough of him. My mouth, either. We strip off the remainder of our clothing, such as it is, and explore each other’s bodies in a slow and languorous way. Again, so different from the other times we’ve been together. The moonlight streams in from the giant windows beside his bed, bathing us both in pale luminescence.

My pussy throbs, aching to feel him inside me, but I like this slow thing, too. It feels right. For a second, I let myself imagine that I have a lifetime of this to look forward to, a lifetime of Logan and his hands and his tongue and his heart.

I blink back the tears that want to fall. Because I don’t have a lifetime. I might only have tonight. Especially once I tell him the truth.

I roll onto my back and pull him with me. I want to feel the weight of him on top of me. The heft. The hardness. He cups my face in his hands and grazes my lips with his.

“Blake,” he says, between kisses. He seems like he wants to say something, but instead he just shakes his head and kisses me again. “Blake.”

I put my hands over his. “Logan.”

Nothing but names, but maybe they say more than that. A name is who you are, all the different parts of you. There are a thousand different pieces of me, and somehow Logan seems to know them. There are a thousand parts of him, too. And I’m starting to know them. Once, he was just a heartbreaker. Now, I know he’s the heartbroken, too. Both at once. Funny how that works.

“Please,” I say to Logan, when I can’t wait any longer. He nods once, then reaches towards his nightstand. When I see him pull out the slim silver packet, guilt ricochets through me. But this hardly seems the time to tell him we won’t be needing that, so I clamp my lips shut and wait.

When he’s poised above me again, I press my fingers to his jaw, forcing his eyes to stay on me. They’re dark blue now, almost navy. As dark and unfathomable as the ocean.

Logan presses the head of his cock against my entrance. For a second, I feel poised on the brink of some great chasm. Then he’s pushing forward, filling me with his length, his thickness. I curl around him. My arms wrapped around his shoulders, my legs around his waist, the walls of my pussy hugging his cock. Every part of me trying to bind him to me somehow.

We move together like that. Skin to skin. Heartbeat to heartbeat. The only lovers left on an empty planet.

I whimper as the sensations get to be too much. Logan kisses my eyelids, then my lips, then slams his hips against me again. Tender, yet unyielding. Just like Logan.

I can’t hold on any longer. I wrap my legs tighter around him, pulling him to me. My hips buck underneath him. Everything inside me clenches and then loosens. Liquid pools through me, to the pads of my fingers, the tips of my toes.

I realize I’m chanting his name, over and over. Logan kisses me again, silencing me, pinning his name against my tongue. He grunts once as he pummels into me, and then he’s collapsing on top of me, kissing the side of my neck, the hollow under my ear.

Somehow, I remember to breathe. I remember to blink and to swallow and to take air in and out of my lungs. Thank God for autonomic nervous systems.

Logan’s head is on my chest, and I trail one finger along his jaw. He doesn’t look at me. I see the cord in his neck tense. I swallow again. Nothing autonomic this time — pure nerves. I want him to look at me. I need him to look at me.

“Hey,” I say. Even though I speak softly, my voice sounds like a gunshot in the silent bedroom. For a minute, Logan still doesn’t move. Then finally, he tilts his face up, meeting my gaze.

His eyes are sad. Haunted, almost. The way he peers up at me, from between those dark lashes. Something in it cuts me. I realize, in that moment, that he wants to love me. He really does. I just don’t know if he can. If he’ll ever let himself.

The thought fills me with the deepest sadness I’ve ever known. Sadness for me, sadness for the little one growing inside me, and most of all, sadness for Logan. For this shining man who’s gone so dim. Who doesn’t let anyone see the flame that still flickers inside him.

Anyone, that is, except me. I’ve seen glimpses of it. His face when he enters me. The tension that seeps out of his shoulders when he’s kissing me. The way he bites back a grin when I deliver one of my oh-so-hilarious comments.

I’ve seen it. I know it’s there, those sizzling embers, that briefest flicker. But I don’t know how to fan it into life for him. I don’t know if I can.

His chest rises and falls. He hasn’t looked away from me yet. Maybe that’s good. Maybe this is ...

He rises up out of the bed. The sheets slip from his naked frame. He doesn’t say anything, just walks into the bathroom and closes the door behind him.

Everything in me deflates. Because this is too hard. It’s just too hard. For me and for him. And what’s going to happen when he finds out about the baby? If even loving me terrifies him this much, then how is he going to feel about adding another life to the mix? Especially a life that’s so tiny and fragile and tender?

A loss like the one Logan experienced, it changes you. Hardens something inside you. It has to. And maybe it’s just been too long for Logan. Maybe it’s just too hard.

I pull my knees up to my chest, wrapping the sheet around me as I wait for him to come out of the bathroom. It seems to take forever, but finally the door cracks open and he pads back to the bed.

This time, he sits beside me. Knees up, just like mine. We don’t touch, and the six inches between us might as well be a mile.

I take a deep breath. I’m going to tell him. I have to tell him. This is far from a perfect moment, but I doubt I’ll ever get a truly perfect moment. The truth is, there isn’t one. And even though tonight has been hard, it feels like there’s a connection here. A fine golden line that goes straight from my heart to his.

“Logan, I ...” I pause. I want to do this, and I’ve thought about doing it for so long, but somehow I never stopped to consider the actual words I might use. Do I just blurt it out?

Logan must be able to tell that something is bothering me, because he reaches out and squeezes my hand. The touch is comforting, even though we started out this evening with me wanting to be the one comforting him. God, what if I screw this whole thing up? What if this makes it so much harder for him?

“Blake, what’s going on? You look like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders.”

I smile grimly. “I kind of feel like I do.”

“If it’s what I told you earlier … I don’t want you worrying about it. I didn’t tell you because I wanted to upset you.”

“No, no,” I assure him hastily. God, why does he have to be so sweet sometimes? This man seemed so cold and unfeeling when I first met him — he isn’t, though, not at all. He’s just buried everything in him that was soft, that could hurt. Now I understand why.

And here I am, about to present him with something that’s the ultimate in vulnerability. I’ve only been in the role for a few weeks now, but being a parent already feels like it might be the equivalent of carving your heart open every day for the rest of your life.

“Logan, I ...”

I don’t get a chance to finish my sentence. From in the hallway, where I’d dropped my purse earlier, I hear a familiar chirping.

“Is that your phone?”

“I think it is. But it’s so late. It’s ...”

“After midnight.”

“My sister, maybe?” My mind races. What if something had happened to them at the bar? Or on their way home? It’s Friday night, after all, there are bound to be all kinds of drunks out there. I fight to kick Logan’s sheets off from around my legs, and I almost fall flat on my face in the process. Logan grabs my arm to keep me from stumbling and then vaults out of bed.

“I’ll get it.” He bounds naked into the hallway and returns a moment later with my bag. I’m too worried now to even admire his form. I fish the phone frantically out of my bag, praying it doesn’t stop ringing. When I look down at the screen, it’s not Rori or Emma or Lucy’s name that I see there — it’s my mom’s.

I frown. My hands tremble as I hit the answer button.

“Hi Mom. What’s up?” I look over at Logan as I’m saying it, as if he can somehow make this all turn out okay.

“Oh, honey,” Mom sobs into the phone. Everything inside my chest crunches up, like a used napkin. “It’s Daddy, Blakey. Daddy had a heart attack.”