No one ever taught her what making love meant. Ziva never wanted this. Life under her ribcage, swelling and making its nest in the bottom of her belly like it was its place, its home right under her navel. In six months her womb will have swelled and his baby will tear her skin and insides to get out, do draw its first breaths of this world down its throat, to get the first caress of the frozen world we live in. And she will scream because love hurts and it will scream because the world hurts. She wants it to have his honeyskin and blue mixing with green eyes covered in a forest of ink-dipped lashes. It will be ugly with folded eyelids and wrinkly, inside-stained skin. She shall feel numb and aching all over afterwards and her memories of how it happened will be dull. It will be hot-fogged summer and their baby will be beautiful because it’s half his.

---

She remembers when he put it there. Breathed life into her. It had been one of those days. One where she was depressed and numb over things life refused to explain and he had offered her a ride home. She probably should have trusted her gut. It told her no but butterflies suffocated that tiny voice with their soft, persisting cotton wings.

She had sat next to him in the car and the longing inside her, the love she felt for him and had felt since three years back spoke up. She had asked him if he wanted to grab a drink or something. Or something. Or something. And oh he’d smiled with his full set of wintry gravel-teeth that always reminded her of the snow she never saw as a child. She never knew snow could be so heated and make her feel warm in all her secret places. Naturally he’d said yes, turning both of their boring everyday lives over with a joyful puff of his breath and an answer that made her head dance around the car’s heat cave, wondering what would happen next. Her heart had been bouncing off the walls inside her shell of bones, which she thought was empty and sucked dry after her eternity in Africa. All the way to the bar she’d watched neon street lights match the colors of her soft emotions, all stabbing lights of yellow and red and blue; their own personal rainbow.

He’d pulled into the lot and her head had screamed how she shouldn’t leave the car because that was the last safe place there was, step over the edge and fall into nothing and everything. The last place where her heart could say no and not root in and under his skin. His dimples had made her ache with lust and love and she’d gotten out, barely aware of anything but him and his close proximity. She’d tried. To stay away from him. To not get involved. To squeeze that last flicker of the wonderlust she felt, eating up her breath every single day under her aching heel. Now she’d sat across from him in a tiny booth in a crowded bar. She was surprised it fit them both; two lives and one love.

---

She remembers everything. Every little detail. No blurry-grazed edges or softness in her skull or alcoholic jelly tendons. It was the memories and the night when one became two and two made three.

She had drunk beer. He’d had white wine. She’d laughed at his choice of drink and he’d stuck out his tongue and ordered a beer for himself. She’d taken over his wine; placing her lips where his had been, unaware and aware at the same time as the alcohol softly roasted her belly and her excitement fogged up the glass. Then they had talked. Really talked, words and meaning swirling around them, their invisible strings bringing them closer together both physically and emotionally. She told herself it was alcohol that poured her soul out but knows it wasn’t. She’d told him private, personal things she’d kept hidden under lock and key in her shut being for a long time because she wanted him to know. She had wanted him to know her, why she’d acted the way she did since she’d come home from Africa. She noticed the irises of his eyes had a darker blue edge around them and his hand had been twice her size, all fleshy fingertips and mapped palms that created walls around hers. She’d never felt so safe in her whole life.

Then the greens in his eyes had become greener and she had once again thought of the neon colors that splashed around them; their own personal rainbow. He’d drunk more than her and his laugh made her belly quiver with laughter, too. It was a wonderful sound, really. She had been so aware of everything. The leather of her seat, the edges of the wooden table scratched by drunken fingernails, his skin and his hair and his cells. All of it mixed in a puddle of nothingness and crashed down on her, stirring up alcohol in her veins and the love in her heart and the lust in her bones.

They’d danced. She had worn her heart on her tight sleeve and he’d taken it and pressed it in the cavernous space of her throat. They had been so so so so so so so close she could feel the outlines of his wingbones and count his ribs with her white knuckles. His hands had been all zealous heat, fingertips following the outline of her jaw. When he’d grazed her pulse under her goose fleshed skin in her neck he’d lingered and she had realized they were as close as one could get without making love with heaven floating under and over. Perhaps they were making love. She never did find out the definition. It was as close to making love as she’d ever gotten and the taste was bittersweet sweat over her skin.

---

She didn’t know how they got there but suddenly they were at his place. It had all smelled of Tony; a musky wood smell that reminded her of survival. He’d pressed her against his wall without turning on the light and kissed her. His lips had been soft and ragged and dipped in spirits and her own had parted in surprise under the weight of it all. She had felt like a set of branches bending but never breaking under his hands. Everything was Tony then. She couldn’t tell her lust-swollen limbs from his and they shared one breath, tongues soft and wanting and needing and craving around each other. He’d fit so perfectly into her willowy turning hipbones and her hands had melted into the crooked curve of his sweat-smeared neck. Then there’d been clothing that was lost in the ocean of his home and she vaguely remembered the moon painting their shadows in dark milk on his wall. They had looked like one black smear on a white, pure canvas created by the artist named life.

Then she had all his weight on her and he was shivering it was everything wonderful and aching and adrenaline and lust lust lust sang through her veins making they twist about each other. She probably would have bruise-grazed skin stretching and aching all over later but she did not care. She had tasted herself on his skin. He’d looked at her then; smile looping all over his face that had been half engulfed by gray shadows.

‘I love you, Ziva.’

She’d been so shocked, so very shocked. She was to become his lover she knew and it all went so fast. She was barefoot and baresoul on the highway, deciding which way to turn, to the gaping headlights or to run the other way down the dirt road. She’d caressed his nose and placed her hand on his chest. They were naked to their souls and they were vulnerable, new and fresh as dew and just as breakable as sun-kissed ice.

‘I love you, too.’

She said it in one exhale, one quiet push of her lungs expanding her ribs and touching his heart. Inwards she saw how alcoholic his eyes and breath and mellow limbs were but she did not care. Then he had smiled again and she had pressed her on-fire fingers into his bumpy spine and he heaved and … oh.

---

When dawn wrapped around the sky in the morning, all icy yellow arching through his window showing everything too clearly and they weren’t one anymore, she had put on her passion-ripped clothes and walked home. She ignored the vomit in his toilet and his drunken sleep noises and erased every trace of her and their love last night. She had cursed over her breath and had wrinkled clothes and carcass soul and no shoes. She hadn’t cried when her feet were kissed by early October cold. She hadn’t cried we she got home and let the shower wash the physical evidence of her dream and his drunkenness off. She hadn’t cried when he didn’t remember anything two days later at work. She hadn’t cried when she sat in her living room, a vast space in her mind and around her, and came to the decision not to tell him. She hadn’t cried when she got the test and found out she and he had planted life under her navel. She hadn’t cried when she watched her baby for the first time and was surprised by its size. She did cry when she had told him which was today.

---

It’s Christmas Eve. She isn’t celebrating because this isn’t her holiday. She threw up this morning. Stomach syrup and breakfast burned her throat to blisters and she realized he must know. She is nervousness in the flesh. She has to tell him, she knows. She took a part of him and made it hers and it’s growing with her and she has to tell him because she wants him to claim it back, for him to take her and it in his heat-dipped palms and make them feel safe. She spreads her hands like a tentative butterfly with sparse wings over her belly. She wants him to know about it. About the person inside her that will grow up and be half her and half him – created after the most clichéd and wonderlovely three words there are. Half-carved in his features. She wonders if s/he will have his blue-ringed eyes. She wants to tell him that their two racing heartbeats made one that night and that the moon was their only witness of two bodies and lust. She wants to tell him that. She needs to tell him.

She is walking through the snow. The cars going by spoil the snow and she looks into the lives of families. Lights in yards, multiple cars in driveways. Love in a living room – Christmas embracing the families in them. She is so jealous her heart aches. Heaven is enormous over her head and when she exhales it is white against pink. Her locks slowly get covered in sugary flakes and she wonders what her baby will like being born in summer – all warmth. She wonders if Tony will be there – all warmth.

She loathed her baby but now she loves it. She loathed it because it was like having a shard of him inside her; a constant reminder of his drunken gaze. She loves it because it’s like having a shard of him inside her; a constant reminder of his drunken ‘I love you.’ She loves it for reasons she cannot explain. It’s more and greater and bigger than love. It’s not tangible; it’s something deep in her insides that heats her soul. The baby will touch life one day and it will breathe her air and she will caress its milkskin stretching over sweet, soft childfat and kiss the fragile bow of its cherry lips. She will protect it from harsh realities and life’s sour breath. She wants Tony to love it, too.

---

Two knocks. That’s all it takes. He opens the door and is surprised she notices, it’s written in soft-curved ink-letters all over his face. He shoots a glance into his apartment and she notices a woman’s coat hanging next to the door. It’s red and woolly and Ziva wonders if he’s given her gifts, too; all womb-wrapped life.

But he smiles, oh he smiles and wrinkles around that mouth she has trouble looking out without getting weak in her knees. He asks her what she wants. Jokes about her timing. She is feeling a sick-cloud filled with nervous butterflies in her belly about to tear apart his life and throw the bits and pieces into the air like black snow. She doesn’t want to tell him here, right now. She doesn’t want to tell him what they did and what they made. But she does. She tells him all. It goes quickly and she refuses to look at him; refuses to look at the disgust and horror he must feel. Her hands cradles their fragile baby folded in her womb, protecting Tony from himself. All is eerie quiet. She thinks he stopped breathing and she looks at him. Opens creased eyelids and expects awfulness. She is right. His hands are clenched rocks with nails breaking fragile palm-skin and he is tense all over. And his eyes they stare at her belly, see through her protecting fingers; accusingly, disgusted, horrified. Then he looks her in the eye and she thought she knew torture after all those month in the Hell over Earth that was Africa. But this is nothing like it, the torture of it all. His gaze on her is heavy everywhere and it punches her and soaks her in acid. It’s an almost hateful look and she takes a step back, wobbling at cliff’s edge. He just looks at her. Bores tiny empty holes all over her body except for her belly. Then he walks inside and slams his door.

---

She is numbness when she walks home. Ice in her bones and frost caressing her heart. She can’t close her eyes because all she ever sees is his disgust over what they created. She watches the families behind their tables in their breath-bubble of happiness and love once again and she starts to cry. It hurts everywhere this time and she has no one to kiss the pain away and cover it in band-aids that will make it never ever come back. She is alone in her own one and a half life.

When she gets home she doesn’t bother to put the lights on. She walks to her bed and curls into a ball with bony peaks of nothing and sorrow. She wonders why love got inside her heart and inside her belly. He tore those walls down; those safe walls she always wanted to last. She is left with gaps she wants to fill with alcohol but doesn’t because she doesn’t want to hurt any more lives. She wraps herself in despair and crumpled sheets and folds into her belly. She falls into a broken sleep; unconsciously humming sweet-edged lullabies to her (and his) unborn baby.

---

Two knocks. That’s all it takes. She is awoken and tangled in sheets and sorrow-sweat. Confused and dazed and hollow-minded she stumbles to the door. It’s cold out and snow is everywhere and so is he. Tony. He’s standing before her, teeth clenched under his frozen-grazed lips.

‘Can I come in?’

Her throat is threaded in after-sleep drought but she still manages to nod her head, stepping aside, him and cold rushing in. It’s not like she can get any more frozen.

‘I’m sorry.’

His words are quiet and she can barely catch them in her tiny hands. But he says them and she silently wonders what for.

‘For overreacting, it was just a shock. I didn’t meant to hurt you, you must know that, Ziva.’

The way he says her name. The same way he said it that night. She wonders if their baby recognizes it, too. She just nods.

‘After you left it all came back to me. That night. I don’t remember it all but I remember parts. I remember I told you I loved you.’

She is breath-starved in her lungs.

‘I think a part of me always remembered. I just … didn’t know if it was real. I wanted it to but I didn’t know.’

He is laughing now.

‘I guess it was, though. Wow.’

He looks at her belly.
She looks at him.
He looks at her.
She finds words.

‘I think he’ll like being born in the summer.’

He stares at her.

‘I mean, it’s warm and all. I think he’ll like that. Or she.’

He nudges his lip and looks out her window. Her words stretch into eternity, his silence wrapping around her heart. Then he nods.

‘I like summer.’

She smiles.

‘I do, too.’

He walks up to her, awkward hands and words and feelings finding a steady place to grab a hold of. She holds her breath as he touches her belly and their baby inside of it.

‘Wow.’

He laughs then and it’s a wonderful sound. He presses his fingers so, so softly onto the semi-stretched skin that contains evidence of both of them. He carefully kisses her lips. They taste like promises and forgiveness and a future.

‘Wow.’

---

Later she is in his home. They sit in his couch and darkness press onto the windows; shutting the cold breath of winter out. He’s got a Christmas tree and it’s in neon colors like their emotions, like their own personal rainbow. They are talking. About everything. His hands are soft walls, one over her hand and one over their future. He kisses her key bones, discovering the map of her body he always wanted but never could look into. She is happy. She is well. He is well. S/he under her ribcage; protected under lock and key and Tony’s soft hands, is well. As Tony’s palm melts into Ziva’s knuckles and snow caresses the windows with soft pearls she realizes what making love really means. She realizes that she has made love, that they have made love and that the Love they made is placed inside her belly.