Nine Months to Bear By Nicole Fox - 56

56

When I walk in the door after work, the smell hits me before I even see what Elena’s doing in the kitchen. Raw beef, metallic and thick. It makes my stomach roil.

“Oh, God.” I press my hand to my mouth.

Elena looks up from the cutting board, knife paused mid-slice. “You okay, milaya ?”

“Yeah, just… the smell.”

“Raw meat bothers you?” She squints at me. “Since when?”

Since this morning, apparently. “I’m fine. Just nervous.”

“Mm.” She goes back to slicing. “Nervous about cooking? Or nervous about who you’re cooking for?”

Both. Definitely both.

“ Here.” She slides a bowl of mushrooms toward me. “You do these. Less bloody.”

I grab the knife gratefully, happy to be focusing on the mushrooms instead of my churning stomach. Or the fact that Stefan will be here in an hour. Or that I have no idea what I’m going to say to him.

Thank you for the article seems insufficient.

I think I’m falling for you seems insane.

“In Russia, we have a saying,” Elena says, interrupting my downward spiral. “‘The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.’ But really, it works both ways. He loves you, so he’ll love whatever you give him.”

“It’s just dinner,” I insist.

“Nothing is ever ‘just’ anything.” She seasons the beef without even bothering to look. “You cook for someone, you’re saying something.”

“Oh, yeah? What am I saying?”

She smiles. “What do you think?”

I massacre a mushroom instead of answering.

“Easy.” Elena’s hand covers mine, steadying the blade. “Like this. Gentle but firm.”

The words make me think of Stefan’s hands on mine at the shooting range. He was “gentle but firm,” wasn’t he? And I barely knew him then. But it’s like his hands knew me. They felt my shakes, my attempts to suppress them, and they knew everything about me that’s ever been worth knowing.

“You’re blushing,” observes Elena.

I blush harder. “Am not.”

“Are so.” She pries the knife away and takes over for me with the mushrooms, dicing in a blur without so much as a downward glance. “When I first cooked for Stefan’s grandfather, I burned everything. I was so nervous, I forgot to add water to the pot. Nearly set the kitchen on fire.”

“What did he do?”

“Ate every last bite.” Her eyes go soft with memory. “He said it was delicious, even though he was lying through his teeth. Then he took me to a restaurant and ordered us real food.”

I laugh despite myself. “That’s sweet.”

“That’s love .” She hands the knife back. “The kind that sees past the burned edges to what you’re trying to say.”

“I don’t know what I’m trying to say.”

“Don’t you?”

The mushrooms blur. My hands won’t stop shaking. “I’m scared,” I admit.

“Good.” Elena squeezes my shoulder. “That means it matters.”

We’re quiet for a while, working side by side. She looks over at my mushrooms and gives me an approving nod that in no way matches the horrific job I’m doing.

“When I was young—younger than you—there was a boy. Yakob.” Elena’s hands never pause as she stirs something boiling in a large pot. “Sweet boy. He brought me flowers every Sunday. Terrible flowers, half-dead, stolen from the cemetery, but still.”

“That’s… romantic?” I try with a teary giggle.

She laughs. “We were all so poor then. But Yakob, he had ambition. Big dreams. He wanted to be somebody important, make something of himself.”

“What happened?”

“I married Stefan’s grandfather instead.” She scrapes a cutting board full of onions into a bowl. “It was a practical choice. Good man, steady work. Yakob was no good for what I needed.”

“Did you love him? Your husband?”

She bobs her head from side to side, neither a yes nor a no. “I grew to. That’s how it worked back then. You picked someone solid and built from there.” She starts on the garlic. “But Yakob…”

“You loved him first.”

“Maybe. Probably.” She shrugs again, but there’s weight in it. “He became a vor eventually. Very powerful. Very rich. Everything he said he’d be.”

I start to ask if she regrets not staying with him, but she waves a hand to ward off the question.

“He died in a shootout. Alone. No wife, no children. Just money and enemies.” She sets down the knife and fixes me with a hard stare. “You know what haunts me? Not the choosing. I made a practical choice, a good choice. What haunts me is the not-knowing.”

“Not knowing what?”

“What would have happened if I’d been brave enough to say yes to the dangerous boy with the cemetery flowers.” She holds my eyes. “If I’d shared his ambition instead of running from it.”

My throat tightens. “That’s not… Stefan and I aren’t…”

Her mouth is twisted in two directions, like she can’t decide whether to laugh at me or cry with me. “If you say so,” is all she says.

But as we continue cooking, I can’t stop thinking about her words. What would have happened if I’d been brave enough to say yes to the dangerous boy with the cemetery flowers?

Stefan isn’t bringing me cemetery flowers, but he’s definitely dangerous. And I’m definitely not brave enough for any of this.

I was raised to be smart, to be savvy, but how can I be those things in a situation like the one I’ve found myself in? None of it makes sense. None of it is practical.

But maybe that’s the point. Maybe love isn’t supposed to be practical. Maybe it’s⁠—

I drop the knife and press both hands to my mouth, bile rising unexpectedly in my throat.

The smell of garlic and onions and raw meat swirls around me, making everything worse. I stumble toward the sink, dry heaving.

“I’ll be right back,” I manage to gasp out.

Elena barely looks up from her pot. “Take your time, malyshka .”

I make it three steps before my stomach lurches. The hallway stretches ahead of me, impossibly long, and I know I’m not going to make it all the way to the bedroom.

The powder room door is mercifully close. I stumble inside, dropping to my knees just in time. My body empties itself with a violence that has nothing to do with nerves or raw meat smell.

When it’s over, I slump against the cool tile wall, breathing hard. My hands shake as I flush, rinse my mouth, and splash cold water on my face.

In the mirror, I look… different. Not just pale from being sick. My skin has this weird glow to it, like I’ve been using expensive moisturizer. And my hair—I run my fingers through it—when did it get so thick? So shiny? I’ve been too distracted to notice, but it’s been weeks since I’ve had to wrestle it into submission.

I’ve known for weeks that this was happening. But the time has now come to prove it. No more running from the truth, no more hiding from what I swore on the dotted line to provide.

My hands shake as I tear open the first box of pregnancy tests that I stashed under the sink. The instructions blur, but I don’t need them. I’ve guided hundreds of women through this moment. Explained the science. The accuracy rates. The best time to test.

I just never thought I’d be doing it all by myself in Stefan Safonov’s bathroom.

The timer on my phone feels like it takes hours. I sit on the closed toilet lid, the test face-down on the counter, trying not to think.

One line: not pregnant.

Two lines: pregnant.

Simple. Binary. Life-changing either way.

The timer goes off. I stand on legs that don’t feel like mine and reach for the test with fingers that seem to belong to someone else. I turn it over.

Two lines.

Clear as day. Dark as ink. Undeniable as the nausea that sent me running.

Two lines.

The test clatters into the sink. My hands won’t stop shaking.

I grab the second test, rip it open, do it again. The same two lines appear.

The third test. Same result. Same unavoidable truth.

I’m pregnant with Stefan Safonov’s baby.

Something about it being proven real now just feels different. I sink onto the bathroom floor. The tile is cold through my dress. Everything is cold except the heat spreading through my chest—panic or joy or something I don’t have a name for.

This is what we wanted, right? What the contract specified. What I agreed to. Signed my name to. We had sex on his desk to seal the deal, literally.

Carry his child. Deliver it. Then walk away.

Except now, there’s an actual child. Not a theoretical child. Not a someday child. Right now, actual cells are dividing in my uterus, rewriting my hormones, changing everything.

“Olivia?” Elena’s voice through the door. “You okay, malysh ?”

“Fine!” Too high. Too bright. Tone it down, goddammit! “Just… just a minute.”

I press my palms against my stomach. Somewhere in there, Stefan’s DNA is mixing with mine. Creating something that’s both of us and neither of us. Something that, according to our contract, I’ll hand over in nine months and never see again.

“What have I done?” I whisper to the bathroom tiles. “What the hell have I done?”