Page 45 of Enslaved By Magic

She was three months in before she realized. She’d ignored the signs, dismissing them as simply getting used to the human condition again. Even when her clothes started to feel tight, she’d simply assumed she’d been eating too much fast food during her travels and had tried to switch to healthier options—it didn’t help.

It was the impossibility of it that threw her at first. She couldn’t get pregnant! She’d even explained it to Luke when he’d worried about birth control and condoms. Her body was held in stasis. She didn’t age, and if she didn’t age, then a fetus couldn’t grow inside of her. It just couldn’t happen.

Except it had. It was Luke’s, of course. There hadn’t been anyone since him, and when she finally saw a doctor, they’d been able to pin down the general time of conception to around the time she’d left. Apparently, when her body had become mortal again— she had been in a fertile time and his seed had been there waiting. The odds of it all coinciding so perfectly… she couldn’t help wondering if the child was meant to be some compensation for all the years of hell she’d gone through.

She was terrified and happy at the same time. The doctor assured her, smiling with a slightly patronizing expression, that it was normal to feel both at once. But she sat there in her lab coat, with her cold hands and beeping machinery and had no idea what Amari was going through.

Knowing she was carrying his child made her long to see him even more, but she couldn’t go rushing back now that she was pregnant. She couldn’t go back because she needed him because then she’d never know for sure that she could stand on her own two feet. How could she be happy in a relationship when she didn’t have that faith in herself? How could she be sure what she was feeling was love, and not gratitude and dependence if she went back now?

But having a baby on her own was inconceivable. Worse, how could she keep Luke’s child from him—if he even wanted a child with her. After three months she couldn’t even be sure that he still wanted her, let alone an unplanned baby, and he’d been so concerned that they use protection—maybe he didn’t even want children.

She paced the floor of her dingy motel room as thoughts flew through her mind so rapidly she barely had time to consider one before an even worse one had replaced it. It was only when she finally stopped and forced herself to draw a deep, shuddering breath, that she realized she was clutching her slightly rounded belly protectively.

Barely showing with her clothes on and she was already instinctively protecting their child. She knew then that her choices needed to be about her baby—the child she’d dreamed of one idle day in a park, but never really expected to receive. Or at least she needed to factor the baby into her plans, but she found that running back to Luke still felt wrong.

She’d had reasons for staying away from him and they were still valid. She was just going to have to make some difficult decisions and that involved humbling herself enough to ask for help. It wasn’t easy for her, but when she really put some thought into it, she realized she had only one option.

---