She had not planned on him verifying it with his own eyes first. She had not planned on sprinting out of the room right after. And she had certainly not planned on being buck ass naked.
Also, she’d hoped there would be less lotion smeared everywhere. She grimaced down at the cocoa butter on her hands and legs. No point in wasting it, this stretch mark balm was expensive.
Another deep breath and she stood back up. She was a little shaky on her feet, but the deep breaths were helping. Carefully, methodically, she started rubbing in the lotion.
“Naomi.” Sequence’s deep voice was right outside the bathroom door, making her jump. His voice was ragged and scratched, like he’d been dragging it over sandpaper. Vaguely, she was surprised that he was still there. She’d expected him to turn tail and run. She’d halfway been preparing herself to have to hunt him down first thing in the morning.
“I—” she replied, wondering what the hell she was supposed to say. “I can’t come out right now.”
It was true. She was mostly naked and covered in body butter.
Naomi went back to deep breaths and soothing herself by firmly rubbing in the lotion. A moment later, she heard her bedroom door close and she forced her breaths to become even deeper, even calmer.
He’d left. And that was fine. She was going to finish up her nighttime routine, then she was going to finish her movie in bed. In the morning, she’d have all her thoughts gathered and her nerves under control and they’d have a conversation about it. And then let the chips fall where they may. Naomi couldn’t control his reaction to this. She could only take care of herself.
And her baby. Lastly, Naomi smoothed the lotion over her belly, her eyes on the bump in the mirror. Her perfect baby who had fingers and a heartbeat and a big ole forehead. At least now that the cat was out of the bag, she could hang up the sonogram in her room.
She didn’t have to hide anymore and that, at least, made the tension in her belly unwind by a few degrees. She hadn’t realized just how stressful that had been until just that very moment.
Continuing on with her yoga breaths, Naomi brushed her teeth and washed her face. She carefully smoothed her nighttime cream onto her face and pulled her short hair back into a stubby ponytail. Lastly, she shrugged into the cotton robe she kept hanging in the bathroom, grateful for its coziness.
Finally calm, Naomi opened her bathroom door, stepped into her bedroom, and nearly jumped clear out of her skin.
“Sequence! Jeez!” Naomi skittered back from where he stood in the middle of the room, still as a statue except for his eyes. His eyes burned with some cocktail of emotions. Naomi couldn’t have deciphered the ingredients if her life had depended on it. He didn’t move an inch. His hands were shoved in his pockets but his eyes dropped back to her midsection. He squeezed them closed and when he opened them again, he finally dragged his gaze back to her face.
Naomi, standing five feet away from him, recommenced with the yoga breathing and crossed her arms over her chest. For the second time in less than ten minutes, she was braless in front of him. At least this time, the girls were covered. But it was very thin fabric and Naomi’s nipples seemed to have a mind of their own these days. She didn’t need him poking an eye out, so she pressed her forearms into herself.
When she was in the bathroom, she could have sworn that he’d left the room. Apparently not. Her eyes flickered to the closed door behind him.
“No,” he murmured finally, misinterpreting her glance at the door. “No. Please, Naomi. Don’t send me away.”
Send him away? Naomi was shocked that his mind had gone there so easily. Sequence was a leaver, sure, but Naomi was not a sender. She would never send him away from her. It just wasn’t in her nature.
“I—” she started, befuddled and thrown off and altogether overwhelmed. She cut herself off and lifted a hand to her brow, which had begun to pound with stress.
“Please,” he said again, his voice hoarse and ragged, emotion pressurizing the sound. Naomi got the distinct impression that please was not a word that had spent much time in Sequence’s mouth. He said it now like it was a prayer, a spell, the last bit of magic between him and obliteration. “Don’t send me away.”
Naomi was speechless. Her mind raced, but she couldn’t think of a single thing to say to this man right now. She wanted to soothe him. She wanted to soothe herself. She wanted to pull the covers over her head and not come up until sunrise. She felt too full and too blank all at once.
His eyes pleading with her, again misinterpreting her silence, Sequence did the very last thing that Naomi ever expected him to do. He went to his knees in front of her. He put his palms up in supplication. “Don’t send me away. Please. Not yet. I might not deserve to stay, Naomi, but please. Don’t send me away.”
She gaped at him. She’d never, in her wildest dreams, had thought Sequence would ever be on his knees in front of her. Begging her for something. For something that only she could give him. He just wasn’t that kind of man. Yet, there he was.
She sucked in a breath, realizing that she’d been frozen solid and un-breathing. “I—need to sit down.”
To both of their surprises, she just plunked right down in the middle of the floor. He stared at her, still on his knees, his palms still out.
“You can stay,” she told him, and it was as if she’d removed a loaded gun from his temple. His body went from wire-tight to sagging with relief. He landed forward, on his knuckles, and dropped his head. She stared at the top of his blonde head as he took deep breaths, filling up the barrel of his chest with more oxygen than seemed humanly possible.
Knowing just how good he was at yoga, Naomi attempted to match her breaths with his.
In, in, in, hold, hold, out, out, out, out, out, out, out. She repeated the pattern of breaths with him three times, four times, five. He leaned back then, sitting on his heels. Their eyes held as they breathed together and the corners of his mouth twitched when he realized that she was following his breaths.
“Are you all right?” she eventually asked.
Sequence’s eyebrows shot up. “Me? You’re asking if I’m all right? Jesus, could you be any sweeter?”
Naomi’s cheeks pinked. “I mean, sure, this was a day for the record books in terms of stress for me. But I’ve had a lot more time to get used to, you know, this.” She pointed at her belly.
Sequence’s breath caught as he looked at her midsection again. He was doing that unnaturally still thing he did and Naomi realized, for the first time, that he only did that when he was keeping a tight leash on himself. He only did that when what he really, really wanted to do was move. It broke a little something in her heart, that he kept himself in such a cage.
She needed to lay down. She needed to get off the floor. And, she realized, that she needed to make sure that Sequence was all right. Maybe a different woman would have made him suffer a little bit, but that wasn’t Naomi’s nature. She wasn’t ready to open her arms to him, but she also didn’t want him to be in pain. Plus, she needed him to freaking move already. He was freaking her out with his stillness.
It hit her what they both needed. He needed a way to care for her, and he had absolutely no clue how to do it.
“I need seltzer. And chamomile tea. And maybe… yogurt?” she decided.
He immediately animated, rising to his feet with the blunt ease that his muscular body allowed him. “I’ll get it. I’ll bring it up right now.”
“Good,” she told him, making everything easier with a smile. “Because I also need to lie down.”
And then, with the infinite kindness in her heart, she made another thing easier for both of them. She lifted her hands to him and allowed him to help her off the ground. The second their hands touched, she felt a specific tension lift off of his shoulders.
Not only had he been expecting her to send him away, he’d obviously been expecting her to reject him in every way. To shy away from his touch.
Her chest tightened at the warmth of his hand.
To her, Sequence was like a cinnamon roll fresh out of the oven. She wanted him so, so badly, but he’d burn her if she indulged herself. She could be kind to him, but she had to be careful not to push things further, not to let herself get burned.
As soon as she was steady on her feet, she let go of his hands and moved toward the bed.
“I’ll be right back,” he told her as she walked away.
“‘Kay,” she agreed, not turning as she heard the door close.
Naomi fluffed the pillows around her and pulled her covers up over her chest. She swam her feet under the covers and got comfortable, shifting her computer over to the side.
She was grateful for the armor the blankets provided and grateful for the minute alone that this errand provided both of them.
With Sequence’s black-hole presence gone from the room for a moment, Naomi could gather her thoughts. There was no reason why she couldn’t give him the speech that she’d prepared. He understood she was pregnant, yes, but that had only been the very first part of what she’d had to say to him. There was a whole lot more to say and there was no reason that the shock of him walking in on her had to preclude all of that.
She clicked on her movie in order to calm her nerves a bit more, but she paused it when he knocked on the door and came in with a tray of food for her. In typical Sequence fashion, he’d gone completely overboard with toppings. Her tray was packed with four different flavors of yogurt, diced fruit, nuts, a bowl of honey. Her tea steeped on one corner and three types of canned seltzer sat in the other corner.
She laughed to herself and shook her head, selecting a plain seltzer and setting the rest of the tray aside. “Wanna sit?” she asked him, because he was hovering at the edge of the bed, his hands in his pockets.
Sequence’s eyes zeroed in on her desk chair and he dragged it over to her bedside. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and his eyes on hers.
Naomi took a sip of her drink to steady herself and opened her mouth to start in on her speech.
“I’m the father,” Sequence told her, stunning her into silence.
She hadn’t expected him to speak during this. And, yeah, she’d figured that she’d have to lead by explaining that he was the father. She’d figured that she’d offer to have a paternity test performed after the baby was born if he wanted.
“That’s my baby,” he said, and there was zero uncertainty in his tone. He wasn’t asking, he was telling her something that he seemed to know in the core of him. This was a truth that was coming up from deep in his gut. “That’s our baby.”
Naomi cleared her throat, dropping her eyes from his bright gaze. It was too much, like chasing the sun’s reflection across a clear lake. “Yes.”
“That means the kid is already four months along?”
She wasn’t sure why it surprised her that he’d worked that out already, but it did. “Yeah. It was the four-month appointment that I had to go do today.”
“Shit.” He dropped his head into his hands at the reminder of what had happened at the doctor’s office today. “That’s why you wanted a little space from Rook. You wanted privacy for your appointment.”
She nodded. “It’s kind of a big appointment. I wanted a little space from… everybody, I guess.”
“I should have been there,” he said hoarsely. “I should have been the one to be there.”
Naomi was shocked by the vehemence in his voice and by the sentiment in general. Did he mean that he should have been there as the father of her baby or as the one member of her security team that she might have let stick close to her? Or as both? She wasn’t sure.
He looked up again. Little by little, he was inching forward on his chair. His elbows, that had been resting on his knees, were now resting on the edge of her bed. “You said it was a big appointment? Did everything go all right? Is the baby healthy?”
Her throat clamped. Of course he would care that the baby was healthy. He wasn't a monster. Just because he wanted the baby to be healthy didn’t mean anything else. “Yes, the baby is very healthy. The doctor says I’m a little underweight, though, she wants me to be eating foods with a higher caloric content. Like this,” she held up the full fat yogurt. “And she really wants me to keep my stress down. She recommended prenatal yoga and lots of self care.”
If eyes could eat words, Sequence’s were devouring every syllable she said. It was like he was a plant in the desert and Naomi’s words were the first water he’d seen in weeks. He drank it all in, absorbing it all.
“Okay, I can work with that. I’ll do some research on other foods that might be good for you. Are you nauseated? That’s why you haven’t been eating? I thought morning sickness didn’t last this long. We’ll find something that will pique your appetite. And the prenatal yoga is easy enough. I’ll look into how to modify my practice so that it’ll work for you and we can work it into your schedule. Does self care mean like that lotion you were putting on? Baths and stuff? Manicures?”
Naomi gaped. That was more words than she’d ever heard Sequence speak before. Combined. He actually had to draw in a deep breath at the end of his speech because he’d talked the air out of his lungs. She was astonished. And what was even more astonishing was the fact that Sequence didn’t even seem to notice that he’d just talked her ear off. He was just waiting there, his eyes bright, waiting for the answers to all of his questions.
This was really not how Naomi had pictured this going.
“Um. Wow. I’m often nauseated, but mostly just nothing sounds good to eat. I do have a worse case of morning sickness than a lot of women and the doctor said it should ease up in the next few weeks. If you really wanna do yoga together, we can, but I can always just youtube some videos to do on my own. And as for self care, pregnant women can’t take baths. And manicures are no good because of the chemicals. But yeah, that special lotion counts. But anything that is good for me counts. Putting my feet up, getting a massage, lighting some candles and listening to music, taking the time to read a good book. Laughing, relaxing, long showers, that kind of thing.”
Again, he was absorbing every part of what she was saying. She’d never had anyone pay this close of attention to her before.
“Okay,” he said at length. Then he turned to her tray. “Which kind of yogurt do you want?”
She really didn’t want any, but she figured she’d better get used to eating stuff she wasn’t hungry for. The doctor had given her a very stern talking-to about her lack of weight gain. Apparently the baby wasn’t in danger, because it was going to take whatever it needed from Naomi’s body. Naomi, on the other hand, ran the risk of getting all of her nutrients stripped right out of her if she didn’t start eating again.
“Oh. Peach, I guess.” She watched, partially mystified, as Sequence carefully stripped the top off of her yogurt and gently mixed in the fruit on the bottom. Next, he poured her a cup of tea and handed it over.
“What?” he asked her as she stared at him.
“Nothing.”
“Fancy, tell me what you’re thinking over there. Before you bite your lip off.”
Naomi released her bottom lip from her teeth. “I guess…”
“Eat while you talk.”
She obediently took a bite and tried to swallow quickly. “I guess I’m just surprised that you’re still here. I kind of thought that you would—”
“Freak out and ghost you just like I did before?”
“Well, yeah,” she answered honestly.
Sequence looked so ashamed and tired in that moment, that Naomi almost wished that she hadn’t been quite so honest. He took a long time to answer, his eyes on the two steel marbles that chased one another around his hands.
“I am freaking out,” he eventually said.
“But you’re not leaving.”
He was quiet again for a long time. “I’ve been going to therapy. Did I tell you that?”
“No.” Naomi was surprised. “Is it good for you?”
“I think so. I like the
therapist. She specializes in PTSD. Which she thinks I probably have from all the fucked-up shit that happened to me and Atlas when we were kids.”
“PTSD… I thought that was what happened to people who came back from war.”
“It is. But it can happen to anyone who’s been through something traumatic. Part of what is so shitty about it, if you don’t help treat it, is that it feels like who you are. The symptoms feel like they’re a part of your personality. Even though it’s a mental thing that can be dealt with if you try.”
“What do you mean it feels like who you are?”
“I mean that staying with you that night, after we slept together. After we made… that guy,” he pointed at her belly in a candid way that made Naomi’s stomach flip. She still was not used to talking about the baby like everyone knew about it. “Staying wasn’t an option. I couldn’t have stayed. I don’t say that as an excuse. I’m just explaining that I really, really wanted to stay. As soon as I left, I wanted to come back. When you texted, I wanted to text back. But I just couldn’t. Everything that’s happened to me… It’s made me really wary of anyone who wants a piece of me. Sometimes I feel like there’s nothing left to share. Like I didn’t have anything to give you. So what was the point of staying? At some point you were just going to find out that I didn’t have anything left to share with you.”
“Oh, Seek,” she whispered. She set aside her half-eaten yogurt and curled toward him. She was under the covers and his elbows were over, his fingers playing in the threads that were just a few inches from her knees.
“I know. It’s all so fucked up.”
“I still don’t understand how any of that means that you stayed tonight. If me plus a casual dinner made you run for the hills, wouldn’t it mean that you’re sprinting away from me plus a baby?”
He winced but didn’t refute her assessment. “I don’t know, Naomi.” He was quiet for a long time, running the steel balls over the comforter in a way that showed Naomi he was still thinking. Trying to answer her question. “I think part of why I’m reacting like this is because it’s a done deal. We can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, you know.”
Rook Security Complete Series Page 43
