Author's Chapter Notes:
This happened randomly.
In the slanted afternoon sunlight, the outskirts of evening, she tells him, “I’m going to love you forever.” There is something sad in her voice, some lonely place hollowed out between the words. Particles of dust move about lazily in the light that floods through the bedroom window. He reaches for them, tries to catch one between his fingers but they float away in the breeze his movements make.
Her body moves, legs twining, the minor swell of their child pressing into his lower back. She says the word “forever” again with her lips moving against his spine so the weight of it seeps into his bones and fills him up.
He reaches behind him blindly to find her hand, bringing her arm over his body. He grips her fingers tightly and her forehead drops against his shoulder. His eyes close, the backs of their lids going orange in the sun. He feels warm and begins to drift.
Everything is still and he is nearly asleep when he feels their baby move against his back suddenly. It happens once and then again before it goes away, a fluttering of miraculous movement.
They hold their breath together, trying to prolong this, the most intimate they have ever been. Five seconds of life have hummed fleetingly through both of them, remain vibrating inside of them. How quickly they have been changed. He knows that he is not the same person anymore, that he will never again be who he was before this feeling. They will never be who they were.
It grows darker as they stay there, holding onto each other with their child, calm now, cradled between them. He says with his eyes on the rising moon in the window, “Say it again.”
“I’m going to love you forever.”
unfold is the author of 102 other stories.
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