18 Weeks. Luka
She's looking at herself in the mirror again. He remembers lying in this exact position watching Sam as she fixed her hair in that exact mirror, blonde hair beautifully styled, frowning as she pulled at the invisible flaws she saw in her face. It's different when Abby looks at that shiny glass; she's not looking at her face at all.
He smiles. She's smiling again. Its one of those uncontrollable grins that you try with all your might to fight against but never win. He wants to get up and join her, hug her from behind, be close to her. But he knows there will be time to be close to her later on and maybe admiring her from afar is the perfect way to stop himself taking any second of this for granted.
Besides, the moments like this aren't as rare as they used to be. In their first failure of a relationship he doesn't remember her smiling more than a dozen times in a year. Now he's lost count of the times she's smiled, its not even smiling a lot of the time, it's beaming. She's glowing. When he tells her this she complains that's because she's got the skin of a teenager. He tells her she's glowing inside too. She claims she must be radioactive then, all those x-rays she says. He lets out a laugh from his belly and reaches forward to disturb her from her self-inspection. Pulling her towards him, kissing her forehead.
She leans into him.
"I'm getting fat"
It's a simple statement. He remembers Daniella saying it more than once. He rolls his eyes. He's heard it from Abby copious times already. He tells her she's beautiful and he knows she doesn't believe him, but she'll accept this compliment just because it's from him.
She is beautiful. They're discovering a bigger belly every morning when they wake up. He hasn't been so contented with hearing the alarm clock in a long time, finds himself waking up before it, loves that in a few months they'll wake up and meet their new child everyday. The prospect awakens butterflies, ones that won't leave his stomach for a while, as he thinks about what he or she will look like. He hopes they look like Abby. He wants a beautiful baby with her eyes and her courage. He already knows they will have her love.
He wonders if it will be a little girl. At thoughts like this he inevitably thinks of Jasna. The butterflies leave him momentarily as he thinks of his children. He wonders what they would think about of having a little brother or sister. He wishes he could tell them. He doesn't wish they were here because now he realises that all the wishing wells in the world wouldn't being them back to him. This is his life now. He feels almost guilty that for the first time in a long time, he doesn't compare one to the other and think that things can never be as good as they were before. He knows things will never go to back to how they were. But he is finally happy with what God is handing him now. He has Abby. She turns out to be the very thing he needed all along. He has needed her for so long.
She thinks they're going to have a boy. He's not so sure. In many ways he doesn't mind, because they will still be half of him and half of her.