Blood for Lover, Tears for Luna

Chapter 1: The Corridor with No Corners

The fluorescent light above my hospital bed hummed like a tired bee—steady, unglamorous, and somehow reassuring. A heart monitor ticked off my breaths in patient beeps, as if counting was a kind of prayer. I let my eyes stay closed a second longer and made a prayer of my own, the same one I have whispered every night since the worst night ended: Thank you, Moon Goddess, for putting a roof over the storm. Thank you for a husband who stands in the doorway and makes the wind remember its manners. Thank you for this small life inside me, even if it came from a place where light refused to go. Thank you that my husband loves me anyway, and loves this child he did not plant.

When I open my eyes, the world is white and pale green and smelling of lemon. Evans is there already—my husband, my Alpha—hands braced on the bed rail, shoulders squared like a man ready to hold up something heavier than he is. He doesn't speak at first. Instead he cups my fingers, thumbs tracing light circles, a silent Oh please stay with me in a language his hands learned before his mouth did. The worry in his face carves him cleaner; the tenderness softens the edges. He bends and kisses my forehead, the way he has done three breaths after every fright since we married. It is a ritual now: the kiss, the small smile he sets just for me, the way he tucks a bit of hair behind my ear to prove that the room is gentle.

“What happened?" I ask, because even rituals need narration sometimes.

“You fainted." His voice is the private one, the one he never spends on anyone else. “Blood pressure dipped. Four months and still forgetting you're not allowed to run." His attempt at teasing is dry as toast, but it lands where it needs to—on the thin shelf where I keep my courage.

“Is the baby…?" I can't finish the sentence, because saying a fear too completely makes it greedy.

He answers it anyway with another kiss to my temple. “Strong," he says. “Stronger than both of us." He lifts a paper cup to my mouth and I sip, obedient and grateful. The water tastes like paper and metal and relief.

I let the thank‑you I keep in my chest unspool. Thank you, Moon Goddess, for a man who still calls me his whole world after the world came for me in the dark. Thank you that when I told him we could end this pregnancy, he said he would hold my hand to the clinic door and after. Thank you that when I decided to keep the baby, he said he would hold my hand to the delivery room and after. Thank you that his promise did not flinch when I told him what happened among the trees—that bark pressed my cheek, that the air smelled like iron, that another's weight crushed prayer into noise. Thank you for a husband who looked at my shaking and said, We will build something soft enough to hold it.

I try the smile I wear for him, the one that means I am here, I am trying, I am more than the worst thing. It works. His shoulders drop a fraction, as if the room set a heavier box down quietly. The nurse tightens the cuff and says I'm stable now. Evans thanks her by name, and the way she flushes makes me briefly proud that he's mine. He tucks the blanket to my hips as if I'm porcelain; he murmurs a list of practicalities—guards on the elevator, no visitors without permission, call if you feel dizzy, I'll be right outside—each one a brick in a wall around me. I lean into the safety of it because safety is a rare animal and you must not startle it.

When he steps away to rearrange patrol schedules and boss the day into a shape he likes, the room remembers how to be only itself. Vent hush. Printer click. A cart squeaks past like a polite mouse. I rub the heel of my hand over my sternum and practice breathing without needing to ask permission from the air.

The memory that owns the worst room in my head rises and knocks: four months ago. I open the door, because ignoring guests doesn't make them leave. The pack had been loud with battle, the east ridge answering the night with howls. I was supposed to stay behind the line with a med kit and good intentions. No one told the second wave to mind its manners. The woods went quiet the way a mouth goes quiet before it spits. Then there were hands and bark and iron breath and a body that was not mine forcing itself into the place where I keep my kindness. After, I walked until my feet blistered inside my boots, and I scrubbed my skin until the hot water cooled and then ran again. A month later the test strip turned a color I wasn't ready to name.

I had sat on the edge of the tub with two hands pressed over my mouth and thought of ways to unmake a future. Evans had found me, palms shaking with mine. “Whichever way you choose," he said, “I choose with you." When the choosing settled inside me in the shape of keeping, he had kissed my forehead the way he always does and said, “Then I will love this baby like I love you." I have been grateful so hard since then that my ribs sometimes ache with it. Gratitude is a heavy necklace; you forget how much it weighs until you take it off for a second and your neck feels like a new country. I try not to take it off. I try to be the woman who deserved a man like this the first time the Goddess handed out hearts.

I swing my legs over the side of the bed. The room sways, then decides against dramatics. I want air that hasn't learned the hospital's vocabulary and water that doesn't borrow its flavor from paper. The hallway is a long spine of light, the kind that pretends there are no corners. Two guards nod by the elevator. I nod back. The lounge by the window is mostly a ficus doing its best and a vending machine considering theft, but it has a view of sky and that is enough.

As I walk, I file small blessings like receipts: a husband whose hands know how to be gentle when the world was not; a child who flutters sometimes like a fish turning in a clear lake; a Goddess who did not stop listening even when I had no words left that were not broken. I tell myself stories I can live in. In one, I am the luckiest woman in the pack, because I fell and someone tugged me back to the path. In another, I am a house with a new door cut into a wall that used to be solid fear. When I reach the lounge, I practice the bravest story: that I can be both grateful and honest; that I can love the hand that steadies me and still tell the truth about where the shaking started.

A whisper of voices drifts from the alcove by the window—soft, private, two shapes braided into one sound. I am not looking for secrets; I am looking for coffee. But my body knows before my mind does. I slow. The corner works like a veil; I lift it with one step and see what I see.

Evans stands with his back to me. In his arms, a woman in a pale hospital gown and a cardigan the color of unripe pear. His hands rest on her shoulders, not professionally, not politely, but with the ease of someone who has been allowed to memorize the geography of another person. Her head tilts toward his chest like the quietest kind of surrender. He holds her like he knows how she likes to be held. It is not a long embrace or a frantic one. It is the kind that assumes it does not have to ask permission.

I stop so quickly my heel scuffs the baseboard. The ficus behind me rattles as if it, too, has a pulse. I do not make a sound. The hospital hum goes on politely without me: vents, wheels, a printer with opinions about margins. For a second that stretches like a wire, I reach instinctively for the necklace around my throat and discover that gratitude, startled, is a slippery thing. It slides. It leaves the skin it warmed a little colder.

I fix my eyes on his hands because hands are true even when mouths are careful. His thumbs move in the small circles he saves for me. The kindness of it pinches. I try to be the generous wife, the adult who believes in context, the woman who knows hospitals make people soft. I tell myself: She could be a patient who lost something. He could be giving comfort the way a cup gives water. I could walk away and make this a moment I never ask about.

Then the woman lifts her face just enough for the light to draw a line over her cheek, and the name presents itself the way old stories present their inevitable turning: Eve.

I have never seen her in daylight. I have only ever seen the outline of her in campfire talk—the first song someone loved so much that every other song had to explain itself after. The old version of the tale says that before me, before the vows and the small house and the fridge with magnets shaped like wolves, Evans loved a girl named Eve and the world told him no. The new version says it doesn't matter because a door closed and another opened and there I was in the doorway. I believed the new version because I live in it.

Eve's profile is clean and tender in the window's light. Evans's chin dips toward her hair. Their bodies fit where mine has learned to fit him. The picture does not wobble. It sits easily in the frame of the lounge window as if it has lived there the whole time, waiting for my eyes to arrive.

My hands go to my belly in a reflex older than language. The child moves—one small swirl, real as breath. I press gently, as if pressing back could make a contract. “Hello," I think, and the word becomes a small warm lantern under my palm. I wish the lantern could light the dark rooms inside me where doubt arranges furniture.

I do not step forward. I do not ask what this is. I do not clear my throat or perform my claim with a smile and a joke about jealous wives. The advice my mother used to give when I was a girl flickers up like a streetlight coming on: If you do not know the shape of a thing yet, don't grab it. Let it show you its edges.

So I stand very still and I let the scene draw itself without my interruption. My breath becomes the careful kind I practiced as a child at the quarry, trying to see how long I could stay under without the panic snapping my lungs open. The corridor's air tastes like lemon and paper. My mouth tastes like the echo of prayers. In my head, I repeat what has kept me stitched these months: He chose me. He loves me. He loves this child. He would not wound what he works so hard to hold.

The repetition lands and slides. I do not chase it. I reach for a simpler sentence, the kind that can carry me back to the bed without spilling: Keep breathing. One breath. Then another. Then one more after that. The monitor in my room will count them if I cannot.

A cart wheels past behind me; the nurse humming at the station rounds a note that makes the hallway feel briefly like a kitchen. Eve's fingers curl into the fabric of Evans's shirt, an intimacy small enough to make me feel impolite for noticing. He doesn't pull away. He doesn't speak. She doesn't either. They simply occupy the same breath in a way I know too well.

I could make a drama. I could think loud thoughts with sharp edges. Instead I collect myself like the nurse collects charts—quietly, with both hands, without bending the corners. I turn my body back the way I came, one step, then another, the way you walk when balancing a bowl of water to the table. I do not hurry. I do not stumble. I do not let the necklace of gratitude fall and shatter on the tile. I carry it even if it has grown heavier in the space of a heartbeat.

In my room, I pull the blanket to my waist and fold my palms over the small curve. The light on the IV pole makes a long shadow across the wall like a ship's mast. “We're okay," I tell the life under my hands, and the words are not a lie so much as a wish I am practicing into truth. “We're okay, little one. We'll keep breathing." The monitor complies with a small, stubborn beep from down the hall, as if to say it has never considered any other job.

When I am steady enough to look at my phone, it wakes to my husband's name and a message I do not open. I lay it face-down on the tray and choose quiet. The corridor beyond my door knits itself back into innocuous sounds and distant footsteps. The world does not tilt off its axis simply because my own has shifted a degree. That feels, somehow, merciful.

Later, when I need more air and the hallway thins to evening, I will walk again past the lounge with its ficus and its window and its notions. For now, I memorize the sentence I will take with me like a coin in my cheek in case I need to buy courage quickly: One breath at a time.

I close my eyes and rest. The room breathes with me. Somewhere behind glass, the corridor ends in a corner. Somewhere beyond that corner, the lounge window frames a picture I do not touch. I let the picture be a picture and the breath be a breath. And I let the chapter end here: with the sight that found me and the stillness I chose at the edge of it—

Across the corridor, through the lounge's square of glass, my husband stands with his arms around a woman in a hospital gown.