by Jade White
“Something on your mind, honey?” Faina wondered as Amelia joined her at the counter while the coffee pot bubbled and burbled away, the aroma quickly permeating the entire kitchen, down the hall, and even into the den.
For a moment, Amelia was quiet, before she decided that the band-aid approach would be the best way to handle it; just get it over with, quickly and cleanly.
“I think I’m going to take your oldest son away from you,” she stated quietly, tracing the tip of one finger in random, aimless patterns on the countertop. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting. Anger, maybe. Possibly sadness. She supposed she expected to get in trouble, like a kid confessing to shoplifting.
She wasn’t expecting Faina to laugh and reel her into a one-sided hug. “Oh, trust me, honey, I already know that,” she said, still laughing. “I figured that out for myself ages ago.”
“…What.” Amelia couldn’t even get it to sound like a proper question, so intense was her confusion.
Faina laughed even harder, the hug tightening for a brief moment before she let Amelia go to instead fetch a pair of mugs from the cupboard. “Amelia, honey, I have eyes. Two of them, both of them perfectly functional. I have seen the way he looks at you.”
Amelia felt her face getting warmer.
“I’ve known since you two first got close to each other,” Faina carried on blithely as she set about pouring two cups of coffee, “that Beka was utterly enamored with you. Trust me, I would be more surprised if he didn’t want to go with you.”
“And you’re…okay with it?” Amelia asked slowly, squinting slightly in suspicion.
Faina rolled her eyes and pushed one mug of coffee across the counter at her. “I want my children to be happy, Amelia. That’s one of the most important things to me.” She lifted her own mug, taking a slow sip. “If that happiness involves leaving home, then I want them to leave. What sort of a parent would I be if I tried to keep them cooped up here for my own sake?”
Amelia blinked at her before slowly looking down, staring thoughtfully at her coffee. It made sense, she supposed. But could it really be that easy?
“You’ll understand eventually,” Faina told her, her tone gentling. “You’ll have to.”
Amelia looked down at her belly, pressing one hand to it, her fingers spreading. It was true. In a few months, she would have her own child to worry over his or her happiness. Even then, she couldn’t imagine trying to keep her child away from something that would make them happy, so long as it wasn’t dangerous.
“I’ll miss him, of course,” Faina continued, and Amelia looked back up at her. “But we’ll see each other again, and we aren’t going to just cut each other out. He’s not going to suddenly forget he has a family. So if he wants to go with you when you leave, then that’s his prerogative. It’s not something I really have a say in, though I imagine he’ll still try to ask me about it. He’s always been a worrywart when it comes to keeping us all happy. He doesn’t want to disappoint anyone.”
Amelia’s thoughts darted back to the story Aibek had told her about his father, and she nodded slowly. “I can imagine.”
They were both quiet for a moment, lost in their own thoughts as they drank their coffee in silence.
It was Faina who broke the silence. “You’ll be good to him, though, won’t you?” she asked, her voice firm. Amelia stared at her, and Faina carried on. “Don’t get me wrong, he’s going to get the same speech later, but it’s just you and me right now. So I need to ask: you’ll make him happy?”
Amelia swallowed. “As much as I can, yeah,” she answered, her hold on the coffee mug tightening. “Of course I will.”
Faina eyed her for a long moment, scrutinizing her carefully, before her smile slowly returned. “Of course,” she agreed, and she lifted her mug to take another slow sip before lowering it back to the counter. “I know you will. I have faith in you. In the both of you.”
Amelia huffed out a breath of laughter. “Well, at least someone does,” she snorted.
“Aibek does,” Faina pointed out. “And you will eventually, too. Once you’ve had a bit of time to get used to the idea.”
“Are you sure?” Amelia asked her skeptically, one eyebrow arching. She lifted her mug again, taking a deep sip from it.
Faina rolled her eyes and tipped her head back as she drained her own mug before she put it back down on the counter with a ‘clack!’ “Honey, you aren’t the only one in the world who’s ever been worried about a relationship,” she pointed out dryly. “Remember that. It’ll save you a lot of sanity and heartache down the line.”
She turned away then, setting her mug down in the sink to clean it later, before she grabbed a bowl and started readying her breakfast. The conversation, it seemed, was over. All things considered, Amelia was alright with that. She had a lot of things to think about.
EPILOGUE
Nothing happened instantaneously. The lions were gone, of course, but they were only part of the reason Amelia hadn’t been able to go home as soon as she’d arrived on the mountain. She still had to wait for the weather to turn, sitting on her hands and watching a baby bump form. She wasn’t stuck on the mountain forever, though. Eventually, when the skies cleared to a crystal blue and the winds died to frosted whispers, she and Aibek made the trek down the mountain to where the car waited in its makeshift garage.
The first stop was at a familiar hostel, where the owners listened in horror as she spun a tale about being held hostage after she was grabbed from their own foyer. Her backpack and her phone were long gone, but after some searching, they did manage to unearth her wallet and her passport from a drawer in the office.
From the hostel, she was taken to an airport that was so small it felt like she could have fit the entire building and its runway in her old backpack, and she was loaded onto a small propeller plane, which flew her and the other handful of passengers to a considerably larger airport.
By the time she was back in Chicago, she felt like she could sleep for three years. There was no time to rest, though. She had a few people who she knew were desperately waiting to see her again.
When she knocked on her parents’ door, her mother dragged her into a hug that nearly suffocated her, sobbing and babbling and fretting, before finally handing her off to her equally fraught father. All things considered, it was fairly easy to tell them about the pregnancy, since it was a hell of a lot better than her being dead or held hostage somewhere on the opposite side of the world. She…carefully omitted the details about her killing someone and contributing to the deaths of several others, though. Self-defense it may have been, but she thought there were some things her parents were just better off not knowing.
She stayed at her parents’ house for two weeks before she moved into an apartment of her own. She loved her parents, and she knew they would be phenomenal grandparents, but she wasn’t exactly excited at the prospect of all of them living out of each other’s pockets once the baby screamed its way into the world. She was going to need some space.
It was a nice apartment. Her parents were happy to pay for it for the first year, since finding a job would not be an easy task when anyone who hired her would be able to tell she would be going on maternity leave. School, she supposed, could wait for a time. It wasn’t exactly a heartache to say she was taking time off to do absolutely nothing until the baby arrived.
Three weeks later, there was a knock on the door, and when she threw it open, Aibek was smiling at her. She launched herself at him, flinging her arms around his neck and letting him spin her in a circle before finally letting him into the apartment.
He had brought little with him. Just a laptop and some clothing and surprisingly few of his knick-knacks. It all fit into one suitcase. Both literally and figuratively, he fit easily into the apartment. Getting him a job, as well, was unexpectedly easy. The ability to reliably translate English into Russian and Russian into English was very useful, as it turned out, even if his Kazakh was less called upon.
&nbs
p; Adjusting to the city was a bit more of a task.
“Does it always smell like this?” he grumbled, eyeing the open window suspiciously.
“You get used to it eventually,” Amelia assured him, for the twelfth time. It would not be the last time.
All things considered, it worked out splendidly.
*
“This is Beka. Aibek.” Amelia gestured between him and her mother, as if it was in anyway unclear whom she was introducing.
“So, you’re the young man who saved my daughter,” her mother mused after she had given him a rather thorough once over.
“Ah, yes,” he agreed, shifting on his feet. “Me and the rest of my family.”
He stumbled back with a grunt when he abruptly had his arms full with Amelia’s crying, babbling mother as she thanked him in as many different ways as she could think of. Amelia took pictures on her new phone. She took even more pictures when the process was repeated with her father.
*
Technically, it was a soccer pitch, but it was rarely used anymore and there was hardly ever anyone there. It was flat and even and long enough that Amelia could actually build up speed. She was there with Aibek and her mother, getting in as much running as she could before she was too heavily pregnant to manage it. (She felt a sudden pang of pity for wild cheetahs, and she had the absurd urge to try to adopt a whole gaggle of them.)
They played for most of the afternoon, Amelia charging after Aibek and bowling him over because he had no hope of actually outrunning her. He didn’t seem to mind, though. All things considered, he seemed to find it attractive. When he inevitably got tired of being tumbled across the ground, he lounged off to the side and watched Amelia and her mother chase each other in circles, until Amelia was forced to slow down.
When it became apparent that Aibek was pouting about how much slower he was, Amelia swatted him gently on the top of his head with one paw and sat on him. It was pretty difficult to pout after that, and they wound up tumbling through the grass like a pair of cubs until Amelia’s mother needed to get home.
(Grass was another thing Aibek was perpetually bemused over. He had seen it before, of course, just never for quite so long.)
*
Aibek primarily worked from home, barring a few gigs where he was working as an interpreter. Despite that, they didn’t want to make all of their future plans around ‘Well, Aibek is always home’ and box themselves in. Occasionally, they were going to want some free time, and they knew they shouldn’t rely on Amelia’s parents every single time.
“This place has some pretty good reviews,” Amelia mused, scrolling through the website of yet another daycare center. She had checked a dozen already. She always found something that she didn’t like.
“It is close by, I think,” Aibek added, peering over her shoulder.
She hummed in agreement and continued scrolling, looking through pictures of the building and the playground. “It looks clean. Organized. The staff all have good credentials.” Still, Amelia squinted at the website suspiciously.
She was maybe a little exacting. Maybe. Just a little. She was going to consider it a good thing, personally. She just wanted to make sure everything was perfect, or at least as perfect as she could.
“The ‘maybe’ pile, then?” Aibek suggested eventually, his hands on her shoulders. “We can meet with them after the baby is born and narrow things down more then.” Assuming there would be any locations that actually made it through Amelia’s intense vetting process.
“The ‘maybe’ pile,” she agreed, pulling over a notepad and writing the daycare center’s information down. So far, it was the only one written down.
A small victory, but a victory nonetheless.
*
Amelia gave birth at her parents’ house, with her mother and a family friend acting as her midwives. It was the easiest way to mitigate any potential problems that could come about if the human baby decided to turn into a cub at some point. That would be rather hard to explain to a nurse in a hospital. Thankfully, those incidences tended to stop after the first few months.
She was nine pounds and nineteen inches long, and the color of caramel once she was cleaned off. Her head was dusted with dark fuzz, too thin to tell if it would be black or brown, and her eyes were like amber glass when she blinked them open.
Her lungs were very healthy, and both Amelia and Aibek kissed anything resembling a proper sleep schedule goodbye.
She transformed for the first time about ten minutes later, and Amelia decided that bottle-feeding was definitely the way to go because she did not want tiny cub milking teeth anywhere near her breasts, and it seemed like a very real concern.
She looked like she was made of dandelion fluff, caught somewhere between white and beige, and mottled with dark spots and stripes. Like any cheetah cub, she had a grayish mohawk running down her back from the top of her head to the tip of her tail.
“What should we call her?” Amelia wondered as she cradled the cub close. She had transformed back and forth three times at that point.
“Kasey or Alexandra, you said,” Aibek reminded her, staring at her and the cub like they had descended from Heaven specifically for him.
They lapsed into silence for a moment, just watching their cub. Eventually, she shifted back to a human form again, but she was no less beautiful.
Amelia yawned emphatically enough that her jaw popped. Unperturbed, her baby merely squirmed slightly, tucked against her chest.
“Kasey,” she decided, her voice drowsy. “Her name is Kasey.”
She didn’t protest when Aibek picked the infant up, cradling her close and carrying her to the guest room to put her in her crib. Tomorrow, they would head back to their apartment. Until then, tossing them out immediately after the birth was not something Amelia’s parents were keen on doing.
She also didn’t protest when Aibek returned, scooping her off of the couch and carrying her to the guestroom, as well. Walking was not something she was particularly keen on herself, just then.
*
Amelia’s dreams that night were peaceful. She dreamed of throwing snowballs and laughing in the chill, and of trees that shed leaves made of rose gold and ruby dust.
There was gentle laughter and a soothing voice, and every so often, she felt fingers stroking through her hair.
She slept like a log the entire night through. If Kasey woke up during the night, then she was tended to before she ever got a chance to wake Amelia up. She wasn’t going to complain; there would be plenty of time later for Kasey to wake her up during the night.
*
Amelia only partially awoke, content to doze for a while longer. She could hear Kasey burbling contently in a different room, and her parents were speaking with Aibek. Presumably, Kasey was with them. Amelia couldn’t make out what they were talking about, but they sounded serious. If there was something wrong, though, she figured they would come wake her up.
She dozed for almost another two hours before she finally rolled out of bed. Kasey was back in her crib by then, fast asleep. Amelia leaned over the side of the crib, stroked her fingers over her daughter’s head, and sluggishly made her way out of the room. She moseyed into the bathroom to brush her teeth before she continued on her way into the rest of the house. Aibek met her in the kitchen. Her parents seemed to have wandered off somewhere, though she hadn’t heard anyone actually leave the house.
“Your mom and dad wanted to give us some privacy,” Aibek explained as she looked around in quiet, sleepy bewilderment.
“Privacy for what?” she wondered, running a hand through her hair. After everything that had happened yesterday, short of actual intercourse, she wasn’t sure how much she and Aibek could get up to that might be considered worthy of needing privacy.
Aibek cleared his throat. He seemed nervous, though Amelia couldn’t fathom why. She was sore from the day before, but all things considered, it seemed to her to be a fairly good day.
And then he reached a hand
into his pocket and dropped down to the floor so he was kneeling before her on one knee.
Amelia’s eyes slowly widened as she realized what was about to happen and why her parents had decided they needed privacy. Aibek withdrew his hand from his pocket, a small box clutched in his fingers.
“Privacy for this,” he explained as he fiddled with the box for a moment, his fingers clumsy, until he pulled the box open and held it up to her. His gaze darted nervously between her face and the floor, as if there was any possible chance that she might say no. It was so absurd an idea that she almost wanted to start laughing, but she thought that would probably give Aibek the wrong idea. While he proposed to her.