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“Cozy nights together. Teasing me. Bringing me dinner. Talking about work and plans and then snuggling up on the couch before we snuggle up in bed?”
He ponders a moment, downing two chicken nuggets at once. After swallowing, he nods. “For a little while, anyway.”
“Only a little while?”
“Then we’ll add kids. Baby monitors. PTA meetings. Park days. School events. Also, actually, probably we’ll shake things up well before all that. Since you’re getting better at not burning water, some days you can be the one to bring me dinner. And in eighteen days, we’ll be doing more than snuggling, in various locations, so I guess our life is going to have all kinds of seasons.” He smiles, as though he knows every last one is going to be winter.
I can picture it. Us. That. Our lives together. Unfolding and changing and growing but always, always leading right back here, to something like this. Warm, I say, “We’ll need a bigger couch when we have kids. So we’ll all fit.”
“If you promise never to let me sleep on it, I’ll get you the biggest couch I can find.”
“I hereby promise that I will always lure you to bed. In one way or another.”
Joy, so subtle yet so full, touches my Wynn. He murmurs, “Hey, sweetheart?”
Through a full mouth of food, I mumble, “Mm?”
“I adore you. I think our life is going to be the best thing I have ever built for or with anyone, and I can’t express how much I’m looking forward to the project.”
Heart swelling, I say, “Me neither. It’s going to be the prettiest journal I’ve ever made, and the fullest scrapbook I ever start.”
His lips settle against my temple, and peace swells as the future I’ve chosen stretches before me. For the first time in my life, it feels right.
Chapter 18
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Let me eat cake in these trying times…
December
Wynnter squeezes my arm, breaking me from the frozen terror that was my body’s physical response to my mother walking into the bakery we chose to host our wedding cake taste testing at. Cloudy skies are all that lie behind her beyond the bakery’s front windows when I look for my father, but…still.
She’s here.
She came.
She really came.
“Baby?” Wynnter murmurs, voice impeccably soft.
Fighting for a breath, I whisper, “I’m okay.”
“I’ve got eyes on you, and I’m right here. We are all right here.” His hand unlatches from around my arm to plant against my back. A steady, large, firm nudge forward sends my feet a step in the right direction.
Slipping away from my comforting giant, I meet my mother at the storefront. “Mom.” I swallow the lump in my throat. “You came.”
Dragging her eyes off the elegantly floral decor, she folds her hands together against her pencil skirt. “Yes. Well.” She scans me, returning her attention to my face after taking in my outfit from my turtleneck dress to my knee-high white boots. “You look nice.”
“Oh, thank you.”
“You left a lot of your things at home.”
I fiddle with the gold necklace I’m wearing. I got it at Goodwill last weekend. It’s a little bird, and it’s beautiful, and it’s real gold, yet, for some reason, I’m self-conscious about it. “I couldn’t fit everything in my car.”
Her hands tighten together, and she opens her mouth, before closing it, thinking, and trying again. “I do not care for the way you left. At all.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I was angry. And I was so lonely. And I… I couldn’t do it anymore.”
