84 days:
And yet
"What do you think he's going to look like?" Peeta asks me late in the night, hours after we have completed our nightly charade of getting ready to go to bed, both of us occupying ourselves with projects under the guise of insomnia. It doesn't seem to matter how many years spin out in between us and the past; I still wake screaming from dreams of Prim; Peeta still reaches for me with hands that are shaking, refusing to look at me with eyes that twitch.
Fighting a look at the clock that I've broken so that no longer ticks, I stick a finger in between the pages of the book I'm reading and look over at him, his rumpled blond hair haloed in the lamplight.
"She," I needle him jokingly, and that funny half-excitement-half-guilt twinge knocks on my stomach as I see him smile to himself and wave my comment away; Peeta, who could care less if we have a boy or a girl; Peeta, who is so excited about the prospect of either that he spends hours, days, weeks painting and repainting the walls of the room that will serve as a nursery.
"I think," I say musingly, "that she – or he – is going to look like you. At least, I hope so."
His nose wrinkles at this prediction, but he is still smiling.
"When I picture her," he tells me, "she has your hair and my eyes"
"And," he continues, reaching over to flip off the lamp, crashing the room into darkness as my eyes scramble to adjust to the scant moonlight coming in from the window behind us. I feel warm fingers skid up over the barely discernible slope of my stomach, and his hand stops for a moment and flattens, palm down, before continuing on its teasing journey.
"I think," he whispers, and now his breath is stirring the hair by the side of my cheeks as his hand curls around my waist and pulls me over to his side of the bed, "that she's going to be brave like you."
He kisses me once, his hand restless as it skims above my shirt and touches the bare skin beneath.
"She's going to be artistic, like me."
Another kiss, and now his hand is slipping upward once again.
"She's going to be clever, like Haymitch."
"Haymitch?" I interrupt him acidly, and I feel his laughter against my lips, find myself drawing in a sharp breath as his fingers find something interesting.
"Clever like you," he corrects himself and kisses me, harder this time, longer this time, until he is drawing the breath from my mouth into his.
"Beautiful like you," he whispers, and the moon slips behind a cloud and leaves us together in the dark.