He kissed my belly — soft, ridiculous, reverent — and I felt the babies kick like tiny fists in agreement. The hour was a beautiful, unhealthy thing: an authorized theft of time.
When the recorder beeped softly, the alarms of the small room announcing the ten-minute mark, he laughed like a man who suddenly understood the absurdity and the gift. “We have ten minutes,” he said, as if we had a sacred little comet.
We made love again, this time gentler, as if rehearsing a promise rather than inventing one. His hands roamed with the cautious devotion of a man who had learned the shape of my hurts and wanted to press them away. The rhythm was slow and full and everything in me was an ache of wanting and a carefulness that remembered the fragility of our lives.
Afterward, we lay wrapped in the
