I shake my head.
“Then today you practice speaking French,” he says, resolute.
“With who?”
“With Madame Allard downstairs. She loves you and thinks we’re going to have a baby soon.”
My eyes go wide and I press both hands to my stomach. “I have not gained that much weight.” I look down at my hands and ask, “Have I?”
He laughs, and bends to kiss me. “You don’t look very different from when you arrived. Tell me how you say ‘I’m not pregnant’ en français. You can go downstairs and tell her yourself.”
I close my eyes, thinking. “Je ne . . . suis pas . . . uh”—I look up at him—“pregnant.”
“Enceinte,” he says. His eyes move over my body, and I stretch under his gaze, wondering what the chances are that he will take off his clothes and make love to me before he goes to work.
He pushes away, but I can see the tight bunching of his dress pants where he’s hard beneath his zipper.
I palm him, arching my back. “Ten minutes.”
I mean it to sound playful, but his eyes grow a little pained. “I can’t.”
“I know.”
“I’m so sorry, Mia.” His eyes search mine. “I knew I would be busy, what was I thinking? But you’re here and I’m wild for you. How can I regret it?”
“Stop,” I tell him, curling my hand around the shape of him. “It’s the best decision I made in a long time.” His eyes flutter closed when I say this, and he pushes into my palm before lowering himself over my naked body.
“It is strange, isn’t it?” he asks quietly, pressing his face to my neck. “But it isn’t fake. It’s never really been pretend.”
In a wild burst of color, images from the past several weeks pop through my vision, each one bringing such a surge of nostalgia, so much emotion. The disorienting first two weeks with him gone nearly every waking minute. The awkwardness of the first time we made love after we arrived. The renewed heat between us the night I dressed up as his maid. I would no more be able to serve Ansel with an annulment than I would be able to swim all the way home in a few weeks.
“What are we going to do?” I ask, my voice disappearing on the last word.
My sunshine Ansel returns as he pulls back with a smile, as if he knows only one of us at a time is allowed to consider the darker side to our impulsive—and wonderful—adventure.
“We’re going to have a lot of sex when I get home from work.” This time, when he pushes away, I can tell he’s determined to get moving. “Let me see the naughty side again.”
The comforter flaps over me with a burst of air, and when it settles, he’s gone, and all I hear is the heavy click of the front door.
IT TAKES A while for Madame Allard to get around to asking me whether we’re having a baby—she’s determined to cycle through her thoughts on the new puppy in the building and the fresh grapes at the corner market—and then even longer for me to convince her that we are not. Her joy over my simple sentence,“Madame, je ne suis pas enceinte,” is enough to make me want to try to order lunch in French.
But the far less approachable grouchy waiter with the wild eyebrows at the corner brasserie makes me reconsider, and instead I order my favorite—soupe à l’oignon—in my standard apology-glazed English.
I wonder how many of the people in Ansel’s life assume that I came back here with him because I got pregnant. Even though he was gone for only three weeks, who knows what the people in his life assume? And then I wonder: Has he told his mother? His father?
Why does the idea of being pregnant right now make me laugh, and then make me feel a tiny bit tingly inside? Enceinte is such a gorgeous word. Even more gorgeous is the idea of being full—full of him, and the future, and this thing building between us. Even if a baby isn’t growing inside me, genuine emotion is.
So is a glowing hope. Immediately, my stomach drops.
Impulsively, I pull out my phone, texting him, Do your parents know you’re married?
How has it never occurred to me to ask him this yet?
He doesn’t answer while I eat, and it isn’t until nearly an hour has passed and I’m a mile away from the apartment, wandering aimlessly through curving alleys, when my phone buzzes in my bag.
My mother knows, not my father. And then: Does this bother you?
Knowing he’s at work and I may only have his attention for a second, I type quickly: No. My parents don’t know. I just realized how little we’ve really talked about it.
We’ll talk about it later, but not tonight.
I stare at my phone for a beat. That’s certainly cryptic. Why not tonight?