It seemed that she had what she wanted now. She hadn’t been entirely certain of herself as her eyes paced the ceiling of her room, as she mulled over the fact that this was not entirely hers to bear. But looking at him now, his knees apparent in her peripheral vision as she studiously trained her eyes on some minute, insignificant detail just off to the side, she no longer wanted to share. Her mouth was drawn in a tight line of discomfort as she realized that she would have to follow through with this decision. Her eyes rolled to the door longingly before she finally looked at him, drawing in a deep breath before her eyes met his face.
There was no easy way to do this; there could be no easy way to do this now. She had built it up inside of her mind, inside of her heart like the single stone that was holding back the tide of this pain. She looked at him with some measure of emotion, for the first time in weeks. In the previous days, she had simply ignored him or grimaced at his presence, although he had suffered her silence and tried to smile and share some particle of comfort with his words. But those had been a lie, too, a lie born of his love for her.
He loved her. He loved her. She had hoped for it before, had worked to see it in the smallest ways that he looked at her, in the ways that he changed. But he had never said it before. She had wondered, although she knew that he held some sort of mote of affection for her. Now, there was no doubt. She could hardly remember anything in the hours and days after the fall – but her first bright, coherent memory was of him. And it was plain on his face and in his soft, coaxing words, the way he moved with a gentle ease that was tense with an undercurrent of worry underneath.
That was what made this so hard for Geneva. There was an answering love that unfurled an entirely new ache in her chest. She wanted to spare him this, but she couldn’t. This knowledge did not belong to her entirely, not really. It had taken the both of them to love, and the both of them to suffer this loss. She wished that she could shield him with the blessing of ignorance, but there was no backing out now, not when he looked at her with that sad expectancy.
She didn’t know how to begin this. Was there any proper way to do it, really? Geneva wanted to reach out, to take his hand as she told him this. She didn’t want him to be alone – because she had isolated herself so perfectly in the last two weeks that it truly felt as if they were miles away from one another. But she didn’t know if she could. She didn’t know if she had the strength to bend and not break. She loved him, but some bit of self preservation, a private bit of shame, kept her rooted to the floor as her lime green eyes glowed with longing and derision.
There was no easy way to do this, and so she began without further preamble. “Before the fall…” she said, her voice flat and colorless as new parchment. “Before I fell, I was pregnant.”