Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
We sat like that for a while and listened to the guitar pretend it was the sound the stars made. He kept his palm anchored to my stomach, not pressing, just there. My body already felt different to me. Maybe it was imagination. Maybe it was my heart making room.
I picked my phone up from the cushion and scrolled to my mom’s name. “Do you want to tell her with me?”
He nodded. “Always.”
She answered on the third ring, voice bright and tired. “Melody? Everything okay?”
“Everything’s… good,” I said, and the word felt new in my mouth, a shape I didn’t have to force. “We have news.”
She was quiet, hopeful already. “Yes?”
“We’re engaged,” I said, because I wanted to lead with the thing she’d understand. “He put a ring on my finger tonight.”
“Oh.” She made a sound that was a laugh and a cry at once. “Oh, baby. I am so happy for you.”
“And…” I looked up at Enzo. He nodded, a small, sure thing, and slid his hand up my back until the base of my skull was cupped in his palm. “And I’m pregnant.”
She cried then, the good way, the way that tells you the past didn’t win. She said a thousand things in one breath and none of them were judgment. When she calmed, she said, “Tell him I said thank you. For keeping you safe. For being good to you.”
Thrasher took the phone like he was accepting a medal. “Ma’am,” he said, strangely formal and utterly sincere. “I’ll take care of both of them with my life.”
“I know,” she muttered full of tears. “I can hear it in her voice.”
After we hung up, after the music wound down to a soft ache, after he carried me to bed and wrapped me in his arms with the care of a man who understood that softness is not weakness, we lay in the dark and talked wedding.
“I don’t want a church,” I said, and we both laughed because there were a thousand reasons in that sentence. “I want the cabin. The porch, maybe. Or the yard. Bare feet if the grass behaves. Simple. Food after. Music. Elaina standing there with me. The club around us. Not a lot of flowers. They remind me of funerals more than brides.”
“Whatever you want,” he stated with a smirk. Then, because he couldn’t help himself, “Except shoes. You’ll wear boots. I’m not letting you step on a nail and start this marriage with a tetanus shot.”
“Bossy,” I challenged.
“Correct,” he accepted.
We sketched the rest in whispers. A day soon but not frantic. A dress that didn’t belong to a religion. A patch ceremony after where they’d put a property rocker on a fresh cut made for me, not to mark or own, but to say protected family in a language of leather and thread.
“What if it scares me?” I asked at the end, because it was a fair and ugly thing that sometimes fear isn’t logical. “Being a mom. Not because I don’t want it. Because I want it and that makes it terrifying.”
“Then I’ll be scared with you,” he said into my hair. “And I’ll block when fear tries to bite. And I’ll put the crib together with the instructions upside down and you’ll laugh at me and I’ll pretend to pout and the kid will never know a world where we didn’t try. That’s the work. Not about not being scared. It’s being scared and trying anyway.”
I fell asleep with his heart under my ear and woke up once to the thick knock of rain on the roof. The cabin took the sound and made it small. The ring cut a cool circle against my cheekbone where my hand tucked under. I smiled in the dark.
Morning came smudged and easy. He was already up when I opened my eyes, coffee steaming, bacon scenting the house because he thought protein made all problems better. He came back to the bed and kissed me like a man who had decided that this day was the first day of every other day.
“Good morning, wife,” he said, cocky.
“We’re not married yet,” I said, even as my mouth curled.
“Technicality. My world, my rules.”
“Is that going on our vows?”
He ticked his head, pretending to consider. “Yours can be ‘my world, my rules’ too. In the house.”
“And outside?”
“I outrank you by seven inches and a motorcycle.”
“You’re impossible.”
“You’re pregnant.”
I laughed. “That’s not an argument.”
“It is now.”
We told Elaina after breakfast. She squealed loud enough that the phone tried to compress the sound and failed, then she cried, then she threatened to kill me if I didn’t let her come dress shopping, then she threatened to kill her father if he tried to make me wear white leather, then she demanded pictures of the ring and the test and my breakfast because she wanted to evaluate my prenatal diet to determine if she needed to move in with us to cook for me. When she hung up, Thrasher stared at the phone like he’d just been hit with weather.