I hate you," Emily told Leah with a deep frown pulling down her lips.
"You should. You really should," Leah responded, one eye brow arched in defiance.
Emily groaned and consoled herself with a sweet, sloppy spoonful of cookie dough ice cream. Emily's swollen feet were propped up on a pillow, displaying the cracking navy blue nail polish on each toe. She nursed the bowl of ice cream where it perched precariously on the convenient ledge her belly created.
"Not a single bout of morning sickness?" Emily asked again, just to make sure she had understood Leah properly the first time.
"Not even once."
Emily's attempt at another groan was interrupted with a bout of hiccups. "I hate you," she squeaked out between hics. "I don't know why they lie and call it 'morning sickness.' It's more like 'all day sickness.' I could barely eat the first few months and now I can only eat Fruity Pebbles and Twinkies. Anything else comes right back up again, no matter what I do."
Leah might have tossed her head a smidge too haughtily and shook her head.
"Nope. I've had a full appetite of human food, no blood shakes for this woman. No broken ribs or gruesome and dramatic weight loss episodes. My biggest struggle is keeping enough food in the house. All this fast growing has to be fueled by something and I've been eating eight meals a day with snacks between. It's basically a perpetual buffet, but one I need to cook for, shop for, and clean up after, which kinda sucks some of the joy out of it."
"Isn't Nahuel helping?"
Leah snorted. "He tried to cook. He really did. And I tried to appreciate his efforts. He did ok with reheating the food mom and Bella and Kim keep sending over, but not so well on original creations. Let's just say I started having doubts when he served peanut butter on spaghetti. I ate it anyway, that's just how hungry I was. But after the day he went grocery shopping at the pet store, then it was all over."
"The pet store?" Emily asked, her eyes wide.
"Jungle Cat made me roasted tarantulas. Apparently, it's a delicacy where he's from."
Emily's laugh burst out so raucously that she spilled melted ice cream all over her shirt and her renewed hiccups interrupted all attempts at cleaning up.
"Tell me you at least have stretch marks," Emily said once her bowl was righted and her hiccups waned.
"Not a one. Wolf healing, remember?"
"Ugh! I am as striped as a tiger now and it's not even close to being over! I don't think these are ever going away," Emily said with a pout.
"I think I earned a few benefits from this whole wolf thing," Leah answered with a shrug. Her own unswollen feet were similarly propped upright on a pillow, and her bowl of ice cream was piled twice as high as her cousin's, as was the mountain of vibrating baby belly it sat upon.
"Yeah. You did. You really did," Emily easily agreed. "I'm glad of that. I just might turn green with envy along the way. I wouldn't have minded getting all this over with in four months instead of nine, especially since the first two, you didn't even know what was going on so they don't even count."
"I always heard stories of those women who don't know they are pregnant till they give birth. I didn't get it. I have a whole new appreciation for those stories now."
Emily snorted. "By the looks of you, I think you'll have me beat to the finish line, easily."
"That was my goal. My inner competitor is eternally driven by nothing but the thought of beating you," Leah said.
"Only me?" Emily asked with an arched eyebrow.
"You caught me. The only reason I got knocked up in the first place was to show up Bella Cullen. Now, my life goal is to prove I am stronger than the vamp's bride."
Emily held her spoon in her mouth as she laughed. "I will award you with a metal."
"You know me, go big or go home," Leah answered.
"Oh, you've gone big alright. You sure you only have one in there and not a whole litter?"
Leah rolled her eyes and chucked a pillow at her cousin. Emily ducked and it fell harmlessly on the couch beside her. Emily squished the pillow's edges with her free hand and Leah could tell she was debating whether to throw it back or not. She most likely was remembering the lamp that was the casualty of their last pillow war and she refrained from retributive violence for the moment.
"Yeah. We checked. Only one. He's just a great, big, bouncing boy," Leah answered. She rolled up her shirt to reveal how the skin beneath buckled and rolled with movement. "It looks like I swallowed an alien octopus. Don't get too close. It might suck your face off at any moment with its tentacles."
"Don't listen to her. She doesn't mean it," Emily cooed to Leah's belly. "Aunty Em is here to look out for you and keep your mama from mistaking you for an alien octopus, little one."
Then Emily yawned, stood, and tried to stretch. She fumbled over the awkward center of gravity she now carried and Leah caught her arm to steady her. She fully sympathized with that particular byproduct of pregnancy, Wolf balance or no.
It was one of many things that Leah had to adjust to...and quickly.
Another was her unexpected initiation into the "Mom Club." It was just as secret, and just as awkward, as her initiation into the Wolf Pack. This "Mom Club" meant that as soon as her pregnancy was apparent, Leah began to be regaled with all the intimate details of every other Club members' mom lives. Birth details, pregnancy trials, and all taboos of bodily functions were out the window faster than day old fish bones.
She supposed being part of the Wolf Pack led to a similar loss of dignified verbal filtration, but none of her other packmates talked about menstruation or leaking milk or post-partum hair loss. It was a whole other world of "too much information" than she had yet encountered and she wondered which was worse - Quil's admiration of his developing pectoral hair or Aunt Camilla's tirade on the best positions to use to conceive a boy.
On the plus side, the Wolf Pack was in for a glut of truly enlightening information if she ever phased again. They really needed to experience Aunt Camilla's wisdom for themselves. And what man didn't need to know what it felt like to try to roll over when one felt like a beached walrus? And childbirth? Yeah. Not a single Wolf was going to escape knowing the intimate details of that experience, if she could help it.
It was for their own good, she told herself with vindictive glee. It was her duty, as the lone female of the pack, to tend to the lapses in their education...so they could treat the women in their lives with the necessary respect and groveling.
A lot of groveling.
There were a few unexpected side benefits to pregnancy, as well. For one, her mom came home with ice cream for her. Every day. While it barely made a dent in her daily dietary requirements, it did make her exorbitantly happy and she would take it while she could get it.
Another benefit was the newest Wolf Imprint family was permitted back onto the Res and home had never felt so sweet.
It was all Emily's doing.
"How long you gonna fight the inevitable, Sam?" Emily argued. "The Cullens and the Quileutes are interconnected now, whether we wanna be or not. Between Jacob and Leah, we can't pretend like nothing has changed."
"But he's dangerous!" Sam retorted.
"More dangerous than you?" Emily argued, her scarred face imploring.
"They are gonna have a baby," Emily continued. "They need their family and they need to come home."
Sam's following arguments were extinguished and Emily made the calls to the elders and Pack soon after. Leah hadn't even waited a day before she grabbed Nahuel from the Cullen's and brought him back to her childhood home.
The Wolf Pack came out in droves with secondhand baby clothes and Tupperware of frozen salmon and bags of smoked salmon and piles of canned salmon. Sheepish words of congratulations were given along with reluctant, empty words of welcome to Nahuel. Leah didn't care if they were all lying through their teeth out of fear of Emily's promised retribution for disobedience, she'd take it. She gave them all the most genuine smile she'd given them since she first phased, and thanked them, even the glowering, gristling Paul. (Besides, she needed all the clothes and calories she could get.)
When the familiar sights and smells of home wrapped around her like a bad Christmas commercial, she burst into tears out of happiness (and hormones) and hugged her favorite pillow on the floor of the familiar living room, spoon of ice cream in her mouth, and huge, soppy grin on her face.
She was home…and no longer stepping around on tip toes as the uncomfortable guest in Charlie's house.
It's not that Charlie ever said anything. But it was asking a lot of the Chief to take in all the tumbles and turmoils that followed in Leah's wake.
"What do you mean she's going to have a baby in two months?" he had roared when Sue first broke the news. It crashed on him with as much grace as dynamite on an snow pack and the predictable avalanche that followed only grew deeper with the intervention of the well-meaning Billy Black. Afterwards, Charlie left the house with his fishing pole and hadn't returned for three days. When he came home, the ice chest was full of more halibut than he had ever come home with before. He barely grunted two words at Sue or Leah before he burrowed into his chair like a gopher in a hole and hid in the relative safety of a baseball game.
Sue shook her head at Leah to keep her from disturbing Charlie's solace and Leah disappeared into her temporary room. He didn't meet Leah's eye for a week...and when he finally did, it was only to avoid gawking at the now protrusive growth exploding from her abdomen.
"So, what exactly did you end up telling him?" Leah asked her mother, when it became clear that it was only Leah and not the Cullens that Charlie felt uncomfortable around.
"Well, we still didn't feel right telling him everything," Sue began.
Leah's groan interrupted her mother until Sue lifted her hands placatingly and implored her daughter to listen.
"We told him that there were more young ones from La Push 'like Jacob' and all have special abilities, including the ability to grow supernaturally fast. We explained, briefly, about imprinting, and how you are the only she-wolf we have had and so no one knows what to expect with you and so this has all been a bit of a surprise for all of us."
"But you didn't tell him about Bella," Leah stated, without inflection.
"We are still bound by treaty...and while Charlie may be connected in many ways, he is not connected by imprint and so he is excluded from our terms of inclusion. It's only the Cullens who can let him in on their secret."
"That's B.S. and you know it!" Leah interjected. "You and Billy were just too chicken to break his heart over his precious little girl becoming the Bride of Dracula. Now I'm stuck front and center as the freak step-daughter."
"Leah," her mother warned with that look only Sue Clearwater could muster and Leah knew she had crossed a line. She promptly shut her errant mouth and whispered her apology for her outburst. Then, she dropped it. Even if she disagreed, Billy and Sue were her elders.
Charlie's discomfort grew as pronounced as Leah's supernatural pregnancy and she jumped with joy when Emily gave her the unexpected go-ahead to return to La Push. She knew Charlie would come around, in his own time, but he needed some time and that was one thing they were short on at the moment. With Grandpa Charlie self-medicating his second initiation into grandparenthood through sports therapy, that left only one reluctant father-to-be to reconcile to the rapidly approached Day of Birth.
It was Huilen who managed it, in the end. Carlisle's expert medical opinion and undaunted optimism failed to merit so much as a cloud break in Nahuel's self-flagellation. Edward and Bella's saccharine sweet tales of devotion and their glow of new parenthood only led to their audience developing cavities and failed to inspire similar felicity in Nahuel. Not even Jake's assurances of Leah's strength to wrestle down an adult Cold One unharmed meant a miniature quarter Cold One would be no problem made a dent in Nahuel's thick pessimism.
And Leah? Well, he couldn't so much as look at her without bursting into tears and apologies and promises to "follow after her" and pleas of how he couldn't "bear to live" without her.
It wasn't that he was opposed to parenthood, per say, but the prospect of childbirth dredged up a hundred and fifty years of unresolved mommy issues...which, when mixed with culture shock, led to an explosive mix of emotional turbulence rivalling even that induced by pregnancy hormones. Leah couldn't deal with his rollercoaster on top of her own, so she gave it up and left him in the care of his aunt.
Another unexpected side benefit of pregnancy was that Huilen changed from the "Anti-Leah" to "Pro-Leah" team overnight and Leah had a hard time shaking the soon-to-be great aunt from her shadow. The vampire positively glowed with delight when she was informed that she was soon to be elevated to the position of "Great Aunt Hui".
"I never dreamed it would be possible," the ancient woman said as she threw her cold arms around Leah and refused to let go. "This is a gift! A beautiful, wonderful gift!"
After days of melodramatic daddy drama, "woe-is-me" pity parties, and "the sky is falling" monologues, Huilen set out into the forest with her teeth set and her orange eyes glowing like a magma chamber. No one ever knew what exactly she had said to him, only that the forest shook with the force of it and when Nahuel returned, his broad shoulders were hunched, his face downcast, and his manner as repentant as a thief in a confessional.
"I have dishonored you as both my wife and the mother of my child," he said to Leah when he returned. "I have maligned both your courage and your strength as a woman. You have my deepest apologies and I am most ashamed of my hubris and for giving way to fear."
Leah's shock soon melted into skepticism. She placed her hands on her rapidly expanding hips and glared at him with enough wrath that if he were an icicle, he would have melted into a puddle at her feet. She refused to offer trite and meaningless statements of acceptance meant to relieve his well-deserved guilt or ease his own rightfully wallowing self-image. She kept her silent accusations fixed on him until he made a peace offering.
"I brought you chocolate!" he said with such earnest pleading that she replaced her glare with warming laughter.
"Cheap trick. If it wasn't dark chocolate, I never would have caved so easily," Leah said as she took his peace offering and shared it with him.
"May I cook a meal for you and our child?" he asked.
"You don't know how to cook," she said.
"I have never had a reason to learn," he answered. His following embrace and pleading eyes were so warm that she was the one that melted and she agreed.
He burned the toast, but he did succeed in boiling eggs, so she praised his success and cleared her plate with relish.
"What's bothering you?" she asked after she finished. She swept all the egg shells onto her plate and waited for him to put his thoughts together. He opened and closed his mouth before he deflated and let his head fall into his hands.
"What if I am as terrible as my father? I never had a father or an uncle or a grandfather or even a friend who is a father. I do not know how. I cannot teach this child how to live or grow. I have never felt so weak or inept as I do now."
Leah rose and placed her arms around his neck so she could place a kiss on the top of his head.
"You told me you had a parrot once. You fed it and taught it to speak and kept it alive."
"Are you comparing our child to a parrot?" he asked, turning his head so she could see his dubious expression.
"I don't see how it's that much different. If you can manage a parrot, you can manage a baby," she answered back with a shrug.
He laughed and clapped his hand over hers.
"And you, how many parrots have you raised?" he asked.
"Not a single one. You are way more prepared for this than I am," she answered with a grin.
By the way his shoulders relaxed and warmth flooded his face, she knew he would be ok.
He was even more ok when she stabbed herself with a knife…well, not initially more ok, but later. At first, Nahuel looked on in horror and nearly leapt from his seat to disarm her and prevent any further harm.
However, she only stabbed her hand, and she did it on purpose to prove a point. After, Leah grinned at him and held up her bleeding palm. Within moments, the wound knitted itself and by the time the clock struck the next hour, it was only a scab.
"See? I am still a wolf, just with less fur!" she told him gleefully. "Super-healing powers! I am still just as strong as I was before. This will be no problem! Even if Carlisle has to cut the baby out, I'll be causing chaos by dinner time and ready to kick your ass by morning."
"Don't you ever do that again," Nahuel responded with wide eyes. He watched her like a hawk for the next day, just in case she attempted any more potentially injurious "tests" with sharp objects, but she did succeed in proving her point.
In retrospect, proving her hardiness through intentional self-harm was probably not the best way to assuage his fears over her well-being. Then again, she wasn't always the best at thinking over consequences before setting herself on a particular course of action (as her current "delicate condition" could attest to). Still, it set Nahuel at ease to know she was not as "delicate" as a human woman and would most likely have minimal complications.
Moving into her mom's old house proved a good move for both of them. They had space to be alone, together, and within doors instead of under the eaves of the forest or the watchful eyes of well-meaning, but rather intrusive, family members. Huilen would probably never be allowed onto the Res…ever…and Leah was very ok with that. It eased some of Nahuel's residual anxiety to have space to be on his own with less pressure to conform to Cullen expectations.
Nothing adds spice to a fledgling relationship quite like the turbulence of culture shock and Nahuel needed time to retreat into the solace of his own space from time-to-time. Predictably, Nahuel experienced all stages. Initially, all was wonderful. Forks was nearly as divine as his beloved Fonte Boa and nothing in the world was as genius as soda dispensers and elevators. The "honeymoon" stage was quickly replaced with the "shock" stage and he grew as grumpy and irritable as a bear woken early from hibernation and he groused about everything from the lack of tree sloths to the inescapable sound of truck horns.
She tried to sympathize as much as she could, knowing she would be just as bad (if not worse) if she was away from her home.
"Why does no one play football here?" Nahuel asked. He sighed deeply and lost himself in a pensive gaze out the window of the living room. The gentle rain sang against the roof and walls and the sound of the breakers of the ocean was not far behind. Leah looked up from her piles of laundry in confusion. The low volume of the T.V. behind them showed a Mariners' game in progress.
"People play football all the time. You can barely pry Charlie from the screen with a crowbar during the season," she said.
"That is not football," he said with a derisive disdain. "I mean the real football. The Beautiful Game."
"You live in a rainforest. How do you know about soccer…football?" she asked.
He looked at her as if she had sprung antlers.
"Of course, I watched football. Doesn't everyone? That is why they hold the…what is it called? World Cup. Everyone in the world watches football," he said.
"Except on this side of the world," she said with an apologetic shrug.
"I do not understand," he said.
He sighed and absentmindedly flipped through channels again. He settled on a Spanish telenovela and sat half-watching it, and half fiddling with a book on his lap.
"I tire of confinement," he said after the telenovela ended. "I wish to sleep in the forest and under the canopy of leaves. Why do your people spend so much of their lives within walls and not in the freedom of the forest? Why is so much life spent watching others live fabricated lives on a screen instead of living life for themselves?"
"Let's go sleep outside tonight," she answered. She tugged on his hand to take him out the door of the house and into the sanctity of the rainforest. After a night alongside the Hoh River, under the dense roof of the old growth forest, it refreshed his Amazonian soul and he came home grinning again the next day.
It was a lot to get used to. She didn't blame him for the dark clouds that sometimes gathered on his brow and dimmed the light in his eyes. The shift from "demi-god" to "demi-stock clerk" was a bit of a demotion and would be hard on anyone's ego...and the residents of Forks were sometimes less than enthusiastic about "outsiders". He handled it admirably enough...and only destroyed one box of fishing bait after a particularly trying day.
"Why must they refer to me as 'son' and 'boy'? I am older than their great-great-great grandparents," he complained.
"Yeah, but they can't know that and you look like you are the age of their kid," she explained.
"I do not behave as a youth."
"Well, they don't know that."
"I do not enjoy pretending to be what I am not," he said. "I find it tiresome and repugnant and would prefer to be open about who and what I am."
"I know," she said. "But it wouldn't be safe."
He gave a derisive snort, flashed his venomous incisors, and flexed his substantial muscles.
"I am not insulting your manhood, Jungle Cat," she sat and pushed his flexing arm away from her. "I am sure you could protect us, but then we would never be accepted back here."
"One day, you must come with me to my home. My people will love you, nearly as much as I love you and you will not have to hide yourself away as you do here," he told her, his dark eyes bright in his enthusiasm.
"Someday, Jungle Cat, someday," she promised. She meant it. Someday, she would travel with him to his home, if for no other reason than it would make him happy…and help her understand him better.
But not today. Today, they were still in Washington, for better or for worse, and he was the one constantly swimming upstream.
"I miss the music," he continued. "In my home, when the villages gather to sing and dance with their rattles and drums, it is the most beautiful of all sounds - even more beautiful than the songs of the birds in the canopies of the forest. Even after my people exchanged grass and reed houses for ones built of bricks and cement and took on the clothes like yours and the strange ways of the peoples of the cities, even then, they still made time to sing and dance. It is too quiet here. Where are the festivals and celebrations? When do the peoples of this village gather together to sing as one?"
She had to pull strings and get special permission from Sam and the elders, but she managed it. When the second annual "Welcoming the Whales" ceremony was held at tribal school at La Push, she brought Nahuel along. The children wore red and black blankets and rain hats. In rhythm together, they rowed their paddles to the beat of the drum and the song to welcome the migration of the grey whales again.
"Forks doesn't gather together to sing, but the Quileute do. You can learn our songs," she told him when they arrived. He watched, entranced.
"You are wise, my wife. It is time I learn more of your songs," he said. "Our child must know both our songs and now is the time to learn yours. Later, you will learn mine."
She nodded and nestled into where he wrapped one arm around her open rain jacket and kissed her on her rain-soaked cheek. She lost herself in the sound of the music and the familiar timbre of the drums. Across the circle of participants and guests, she could see Sue Clearwater bustling around the grills where the salmon steamed in preparation for the following feast. She meted out instructions to the various volunteers, a firm smile on her face, and frequent, ready laughter filling the air around her.
Leah watched her mother's face in awe. How many good-night kisses ghosted her lips? How many tears washed those russet cheeks? Each line and wrinkle evolved out of the relentless drip of the mundane work of mothering and living and womaning and doing all that only Sue Clearwater could do. The unceasing dribble and drobble of the moments and months and ages of her life had carved her face like a glacier through a valley, leaving a permanent trail of memories in their wake and she was indescribably beautiful.
"I love you, mama," Leah mouthed across the clearing when she managed to catch her mother's eyes.
"I love you, too, Baby Girl," Sue mouthed back with a wink and a wave.
Leah sighed and inwardly, she prayed again. She prayed she would be as good a mother as her own had been. At that, she couldn't help but smile.
A year ago, she thought she would never have the chance to pray such a prayer.
She was never one to throw the advice of her elders away, but maybe Granny Grace was wrong. Maybe it was time to throw caution to the wind and pray as boldly and as wildly and as recklessly as possible, embracing the answers that came her way, no matter how unexpected or outlandish they appeared on the surface.
Her mind wandered back to a recent conversation with Emily. They sat on the porch of Emily's house, quietly listening to the rain and talking about everything and nothing at all, like they had done when they were young and undisturbed by Creatures of the Night. There still lay a chasm of scar tissue between them, but it was no longer festering and bloody. Even the scabs were healing up and, with time and tears, they could hope for something new and fresh to grow back. They were family, after all, and that was worth more than all the Cullens' cars put together.
"Would you change it, if you had the chance?" Emily asked as her rocking chair squeaked rhythmically against the slats of the porch.
Leah sighed. The initiation into Wolfhood, the loss of Sam, her time with the Pack, her imprint, she knew Emily was referring to all of it.
Would she change it?
At one point in her life, she might have said yes. She had daydreamed back then about what she would change.
Sam would imprint on her…or better yet, never phase. There would be no myths and monsters, just "normal" people and "normal" life and a cascade of the mundane to bury their hopes and dreams in the daily toil of living.
But would she have been better off?
She had spent months inside Sam's head. She wasn't sure that phasing was the biggest hindrance to "them" anymore. Sam's daddy issues nearly rivalled Nahuel's – at least Evil Vamp Dad occasionally checked up on the welfare of his spawn. No one remembered the last time Joshua Uley called, let alone came home. And Sam's insecurities too often fed into his latent, boiling anger and shows of bravado. He came with his own warehouse of woes and she wasn't sure she would have necessarily been "better off."
The Wolf Life had cost Emily, too, as the scars on her face reminded her. The scars on her heart were just as apparent. Sam's imprint had cost Emily the family she loved as much as her own and she was working, tooth and nail, to heal the rift and salvage whatever she could from the aftermath.
Another thing, wolfing wasn't all that conducive to economic stability. While high on prestige, it was low on cash, and Emily had to squeak out as many hours as she could at the local grocery store before the baby came to make sure they could make ends meet. Emily understood, more than most, how hard it was to keep a Wolf metabolism maintained on a limited income.
They both had their struggles and they shared imprinting on someone they wouldn't have chosen. Leah understood that now.
Leah bit her lip and shook her head slowly. "No, Em. I wouldn't change it, not anymore," she said and surprised herself by actually meaning it.
It just went to show her how much she had changed. So much of her past anger and bitterness had been drenched out simply in the space she found in Jacob's pack. Her face was fixed on the road ahead instead of the road behind that that freed her to enjoy the journey.
It was a journey she never would have chosen for herself, but she had to admit, it was growing on her. Nahuel's quiet strength proved a solid grounding for her frenetic energy and he was what she needed, even if not exactly what she wanted.
And it was always full of surprises.
Jasper taught Nahuel to read a month or so after he arrived. It only took a week before the man could read Chaucer. By the next, he was reading Don Quixote in Spanish. His eyes grew bright with a lust for learning and soon he was devouring everything he could find in Carlisle's extensive library before attacking the Forks library shelves.
"It is a gift! This, the written word, how have I never known of this before!" he said in a weighted delight. His long hair was pulled back behind his ears and shown brightly in the little lamp overhead. "I will write down all the stories I have heard, all I know of my people! I will carve our memory into pages if I cannot carve them into stones."
"You do that," she said with an amused smile. She kissed him gently on the cheek and sat on the arm of his chair in the living room of their house. She read over his shoulder onto the page he had open on his lap and she intertwined her fingers through his loose hair, humming quietly to herself.
"Geology?" she asked in surprise as she saw the diagrams of the rock cycle on the shiny page of the textbook.
"Yes! I am learning of the magnificent of the very earth beneath our feet!" he said with an enthusiasm she had never felt for the topic. "Did you know that the very heights of the mighty mountains are alive and growing, built by the fragments of the earth itself shifting and colliding against itself?"
Leah shrugged. "Yeah. You remember I told you about earthquakes?"
"You told me of the danger of earthquakes, you did not speak of what they are part of creating. Yes, it is fearful for the earth to shake, but that is part of two distinct lands becoming one. It may require some of the old boundaries to shift and crumble, but look at what may result? How tall stands Mount Olympus, watching over the sea and sending its shadow over the forests! Yes, you spoke of the great waves that could bury these lands after the shaking ends and I do not doubt they can be as terrible as they are awe-inspiring, but, oh, my wife, what beauty! I would not trade it for all the flattest of plains and the most solid of ground in the world!"
As he spoke, his eyes burned with an intensity which told her he was not referring to geology anymore. She let out a surprised squeak as his arm snaked its way around her waist and gently pulled her onto his lap, the book falling with a bump onto the floor by his ankles.
He spread his palms as wide as they would go across the globe of her womb, though there was still space between his fingers no matter how he stretched. Any day, any moment, their lives would be shaken up again when they held the newest Clearwater in their arms. Until then, it was quiet and still. Nahuel's lips nestled into her neck where he inhaled the scent of her and let her hair fall over his face. He stayed there, their heartbeats the only sound to punctuate the silence.
Of all the beings in the universe that could be the magnetic north of her compass, it would have to be the half-vampire man plucked straight out of the Amazon and dropped into her life with all the fury and upset of an earthquake. He was part and parcel of the forces intent on shaking her upside and inside and outside and making her and remaking her all over again with all the cataclysm of the collision of tectonic plates.
But how could she wish it to be any other way?
She was Leah Elizabeth Clearwater. She was never meant to be ordinary but extraordinary.
She was one-of-a-kind, as was Nahuel. Together, they made an exceptional pair of exceptions. Together, they would be ok.
The End