Lucian Divine(45)

Evey was watching me cautiously. “Wait,” Evey said to the doctor.

My smile faded when the reality sank in. I was an angel; she was a human. I couldn’t get her pregnant. I was paranoid and curious as to whom my wife had been sleeping with.

“What, Evey?” I said rudely. “Why do you want them to wait?”

She jerked her head back, apparently surprised by my tone. Then it occurred to me that I was always with her, so her getting pregnant by someone else without my knowledge would be impossible. I got nervous again. The room started spinning.

She shook her head at me and scowled before directing her attention to the doctor. “What’s the lump then?”

“Just a cyst,” the doctor said. “The biopsy brought back nothing. If it doesn’t clear up in a few weeks, we can have it removed, but it might make more sense to wait until after the baby’s born.”

The word baby and that was it, I was on the floor again.

“Geez, Lucian, get a grip!” Evey yelled.

When the doctor and nurse left the room, Evey jumped off the bed and came over to me. She helped me up and directed me to a chair in the corner. She crawled into my lap. “We’re gonna have a baby.”

She was smiling. Tears of happiness filled her eyes. I knew they were happy tears because I could feel it in my heart. But I was shaking, still in disbelief. “It’s impossible, Evey.”

“I didn’t think angels were possible either,” she whispered near my ear.

“But you’re so young, and your career…”

“Lucian, I’m starting to get the annoying feeling that you don’t want this.”

“I do want this, more than anything. I just can’t believe it,” I said.

“Do you have to see it to believe it?”

I just stared at her for several long moments, then I shook my head.

After we called the doctor back in, they calculated that Evey was very newly pregnant, about six weeks. Evey was paranoid about the six ounces of wine she’d had at the wedding, but I assured her that I’d been around long enough to know a few ounces of wine would be harmless. Back in the day, women drank wine like it was water during their pregnancies.

In the car on the way home, Evey said, “We need to figure out a way to make our situation more normal.”

“What do you mean?”

“We can’t spend every waking moment together anymore, Lucian.”

“Excuse me? I don’t think you understand.” I turned and looked her in the eye. “Wait a minute, are you getting sick of me?”

“No, I love being with you.”

“Well, I’d hope so, because we just got married and we’re gonna have a baby.”

“I just don’t understand how this is going to work. Are you just going to be hovering around me all the time and while I’m in the bathroom for the rest of my life?”

“I don’t hover around you. I give you space. And I’ve never gone into the bathroom when you were in there unless you asked me to.” I raised my eyebrows at her.

“If giving me space means going outside for a few minutes, then you’re crazy. You need a job and a hobby,” she said.

“You’re being irrational,” I told her, even though Zack had basically said the same thing to me once. “If I’m not with you, you’ll be alone.”

“I can be alone! You said yourself you had a light caseload. Other angels cannot be in two places at once, so how do they manage more than one person?”

I was getting more and more frustrated by the second. “That’s when bad stuff happens. Do you want bad stuff to happen to you?”

“We’ll have to take our chances sometimes.”

I was quiet, trying to process what she was saying, trying to process the fact that she was carrying my baby and wanting more freedom from me at the same time. Since the moment Evey and I had decided to be together, I saw fewer and fewer angels out in the open. It was also harder for me to hear Evey from another room. I was losing my ability to protect her. I wondered if humans always felt that way… worried about the unknown, and constantly worried that something might happen to their loved ones. Maybe another angel was watching over Evey, and I just couldn’t see him.

“Hello, earth to Lucian? Don’t you agree that we need more space from each other?”

I looked over at Evey, glaring at me from the passenger seat, waiting for my response.

“If I knew for sure that another angel was assigned to you, I would say okay. I want us to be normal too, but I can’t lose you. And I definitely can’t lose you because I made the selfish decision to be with you.”

“We’re in love.” She squeezed my hand but stayed looking straight ahead. “We’re in love and we are normal, and we’re going to have a baby.” She took her phone from her purse and began dialing.

“Who are you calling?” I asked.

“Everyone. I’m telling everyone we’re going to have a baby.”

I grabbed the phone from her hand. “No!”

I felt her getting angry. “What is your problem? Your erratic behavior is starting to annoy me, Lucian.”

“Oh God, we’re fighting. We’re having our first fight as a married couple.” I was circling our block, looking for a parking space.