On His Knees for the Plump Luna

CHAPTER ONE — THE DEAL I DIDN'T KNOW I MADE I come home with the offer letter still in my hand, ink barely dry, and I'm smiling before I even get the door open. "I got it," I say, holding it up like proof. "The hospital position. I start next month." My father doesn't look up from his newspaper. My mother's face doesn't move at all — not surprise, not pride, nothing, like I've announced the weather. My sister Isabel looks up from the couch, slim legs folded under her, and gives me the smile she gives waiters right before she sends a plate back. "That's nice," she says, in a voice that means the opposite. I lower the letter. The room has a temperature to it, and it isn't the one I walked in with. "Sit down," my father says. Not congratulations. Not a single word about the job. Just sit down, like I'm about to be handed a bill. I sit. My mother folds her hands in her lap the way she does before she says something she's rehearsed. "Your father took a loan," she says. "A large one. From the wrong people." "How large." "Large enough that if it isn't paid, he doesn't come home one night." She says it flat. She says it like she's reading me a grocery list, not my father's life expectancy. "There's a way out of it." My father finally looks at me, and there's something in his face I've never seen aimed at me before — not affection, something closer to relief that it isn't going to cost him. "The Cross family. They'll clear the debt. In exchange for a marriage." I laugh, one short confused sound, because surely — "A marriage. To who." "Julian Cross," my mother says. "Alpha of the Ashford pack. Head of the family." The word Alpha sits wrong in my chest before I even understand why. "He's a—" "Lycan," my father says, like the word costs him nothing. "Yes." "You want me to marry a werewolf mafia boss I've never met to pay off a debt I didn't take out." "We want you to save your father's life," my mother says. "Is that so difficult to understand?" "Isabel could—" "Isabel is soft," my mother cuts in, before Isabel can even open her mouth. "She wouldn't last a week in that house. You, at least—" she looks me over, the same inventory-check stare I'll get from a stranger at the altar in three weeks, though I don't know that yet. "You, at least, would be useful for something. No man's lining up for you as it is. Might as well let this be worth something." The words land somewhere under my ribs and stay there. "I have a job," I say, quieter now. "I have a life. I have dreams that don't involve—" My mother's hand cracks across my face before I finish the sentence. The sound of it is louder than the sting. Isabel goes still on the couch. My father doesn't move at all. "You ungrateful child," my mother says, and her voice is shaking now, finally showing something, though it's not for me. "We have done everything for you. Do you want your father to die? Can you not do this one thing?" Isabel gets up then, crosses the room, puts a hand on our mother's arm. "Mum, please, calm down. It's not her fault." She turns to me, and for one second I let myself believe she's on my side. "I know he's ruthless. Everyone knows what the Cross name means. I'll take her place." For half a breath, something in my chest loosens. "No," my mother says, before my father can even open his mouth. "It has to be her. The contract already has her name on it." Isabel's hand drops from our mother's arm. She doesn't argue again. I watch the offer die in her face, and I understand, with a kind of clarity that hurts worse than the slap, that it was never really an offer. It was a performance, and it's already over. My mother steps in front of me, close enough that I can smell her perfume, and says the only sentence in the whole conversation that isn't a question. "You will marry him. You have no say in this." I don't have the offer letter anymore. I don't remember putting it down. It's on the floor by my foot, and nobody in the room looks at it, not even me. • • • Three weeks later I'm in front of a floor-length mirror in a dress that cost more than my mother made in a year. The dressmaker had offered a slimming panel, twice. I said no both times. My hands find my hips anyway, smoothing the silk down, checking, that old reflex, hunting for proof I still look like something worth wanting. I pin my hands to my sides and make them stay there. My aunt fixes a pin in my hair that didn't need fixing, because her hands need something to do, and so do mine. She's the only one who came to help me dress. My mother is downstairs greeting guests like she didn't put a bruise under my makeup three weeks ago. Julian Cross is thirty-one. Alpha of a pack whose territory takes up half the county on maps nobody official ever draws. Four companies I can name, several more the tabloids can't. Never once photographed smiling. That's the whole of what I know walking down the aisle toward him. His eyes aren't brown. They're gold, and they don't blink the way a person's should, and when they go over me — head to foot, an inventory check — something in the pit of my stomach recognizes that I am standing in front of something that isn't entirely a man. Then his hand finds the small of my back and it's warm and it's steady and I hate how much I want that one point of contact to mean something. • • • The reception thins the crowd toward the bar, and that's where I hear it — not quiet, not meant to be missed, three women with champagne flutes angled just enough that the sound carries. "Really. She's so fat. I never expected a man like him to marry a woman like that." "Look at her cheeks in that photo." "That dress would've been beautiful. On someone else." "I would've made a better wife than her, and everyone here knows it." I don't turn around. I keep my spine straight and count the beats of the song until the shake in my hands settles. Julian is four feet away, in conversation with someone in a dark suit, and I watch — I actually watch, I give him the chance — to see if the words reach him, if his jaw does anything at all. Nothing. Not a flicker. He keeps talking about territory lines like the air around us hasn't just curdled. I pick up two glasses of champagne from a passing tray and hand one to the loudest of the three women, smile with my teeth, say, "Enjoy the open bar," and walk away before my face can do anything I don't approve of. • • • By midnight it's just the two of us in a car with tinted windows. I fill the silence — my cousin crying into the cake — because silence with him feels like standing at the edge of something. He doesn't laugh. He doesn't tell me to stop either. I let that count as something. The house swallows sound the way money always does. A staff member takes my coat without meeting my eyes. Julian doesn't speak again until the bedroom door is shut, and then his hand is at the back of my neck, and I go still, and some small i***t part of me thinks: here. This is where it turns into something. It doesn't turn into anything. There's no place where his eyes find mine and stay. His hands don't wait for me to catch up to them. I bite down hard enough on my own lip to taste copper because it's easier than making the sound that wants to come out, and when I finally do make a sound, it isn't the one I imagined on nights I let myself imagine this — it's small and involuntary, and it makes him pause for exactly one second before he keeps going like I didn't make it at all. I stare at the ceiling. I find a crack in the molding above the headboard and follow it corner to corner, over and over, because counting it is the only thing in the room I have any control over. My hands are fisted in the sheet so tight my knuckles ache. I don't cry. I decide that on the fourth pass of the crack — not in this bed, not in front of him — and I hold to it with everything I have left. When it's over he gets up first. I hear the shower running two rooms away while I'm still flat on my back, my whole body a low, dull ache, my throat raw from a sound I never let all the way out. I press my palm flat against my own sternum, just to feel something steady under my hand, because nothing else in the room is. • • • Morning. No note. A maid is waiting at the door at seven with a tray. Her name tag says Elsa. She tells me breakfast's ready whenever, and that Mr. Cross left for the office at six. I eat because I refuse to let this house watch me fall apart on an empty stomach. • • • Day four, I lay his suit out before he's awake — charcoal, the one with the narrower lapel, because I noticed him reach for it twice and put it back both times, like he wanted it and talked himself out of it. He walks in already dressed in navy. He looks at the charcoal suit on the bed. Looks at me. "I have a suit." "I know. I thought—" I don't finish it. He's already at the mirror, fixing his cufflinks. Day six, I make his coffee before he comes down — black, no sugar, the way I've watched Elsa make it. I set it by his plate and sit across from him and wait for something. He picks it up. Drinks it. Doesn't look up from his phone. Doesn't say a word about it, good or bad, like the cup filled itself. Day nine, I hear him searching a drawer for his tie before a meeting, muttering under his breath. I already know where it is. I bring it to him without being asked and hold it out. He takes it. "Thanks." One word. He's already knotting it in the hallway mirror, already gone before the second syllable finishes leaving his mouth. I go back to the kitchen, sit down, look at my own hands on the table, steady, and tell myself it's early. Six days. Nine days. Marriages take longer than nine days. • • • Six weeks after that, I sit on the bathroom floor with a stick in my hand and two blue lines that don't blur no matter how many times I blink. My hand goes flat against my stomach before I've decided to move it there. A laugh comes out of me that isn't really a laugh — more air than sound, more disbelief than joy, and then it turns into something with actual joy in it, real joy, the kind that makes my eyes sting and my chest go tight and my whole body curl forward over my own knees like I'm trying to hold the news inside before it can get away from me. I press the test against my chest. I whisper a name that isn't real yet, just a sound I test in my mouth. I picture, without meaning to, without being able to stop myself: Julian's face the day I tell him. Not the wedding-day face, not the closed, checked-out face from the bedroom — a different face. Soft. Undone. A man looking at me like I just handed him something he didn't know he was missing. I picture him reaching for my hand across the table the way he never has. I picture him home before six. I picture, God help me, a version of him that loves me because I gave him this. I sit on that floor for twenty minutes just being happy. It's the first time since the wedding I've let myself be anything at all. • • • I hear his voice through the wall on my way to tell him. I stop with my hand still on the door frame. He's on the phone. Easy. Unbothered. A tone I've never once gotten out of him in six weeks of marriage. "—as long as it's an heir, it doesn't matter whose." The test is still in my other hand. My fingers go loose around it without my permission, and it hits the carpet, and I don't bend down to pick it up. I don't move. I don't make a sound. Whatever is happening in my chest doesn't have a name yet — it isn't sadness, sadness would be gentler than this, this is something that starts in my throat and drops straight through the floor of me, taking everything down with it: the charcoal suit, the black coffee, the one-word thanks I'd been rationing like it meant something, the softened face I invented for him twenty minutes ago on a bathroom floor. He laughs at something the person on the other end says. An actual laugh. The sound I have been trying to earn since the day my mother's hand met my face in a living room that stopped being mine the second she said the word contract. I look down at my own hand where it's still hovering, empty, where the test used to be. It stops shaking. I think of my mother's voice — no man's lining up for you as it is — and the three women at the reception with their champagne, and I understand, finally, that none of them were ever the real danger in any of these rooms. I think of Elsa's tray at seven a.m., the schedule instead of a marriage, the crack in the ceiling I know now by heart. Every piece lines up into one shape, and the shape has a name: I was never the point. I am the vessel. Whatever grows inside me is the point. I pick the test up off the floor. I wipe it clean with the hem of my dress like it's something worth protecting, because it is — just not for the reason I let myself believe twenty minutes ago. I stand in front of the bathroom mirror and look at a woman who spent a wedding night biting through her own lip to keep quiet, who laid out a suit that got ignored, who made coffee that got swallowed without a thank-you until day nine, who just spent twenty minutes designing a fantasy out of two blue lines. That woman is finished tonight. I start planning my exit before I've said a single word to him about the baby.