They have each other, as it should always have been, and everything is right with the world, at long last.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Sadie
“If you say ‘that’s what she said’ one more time, I’m going to shove that screwdriver violently up your - ”
“OK, one, don’t threaten me with a good time,” Leo says with a twinkle in his eye, gesturing with the aforementioned tool, “and two, you can’t seriously expect me not to say it when you say ‘insert pole C into slot D’, because it’s such an open goal.”
In spite of myself, I laugh. “I’m the size of a house. Don’t make me sit on you.”
“Woman, I love it when you sit on me.”
I scoff. “If I sit on your face at this size, I’ll suffocate you.”
“And I can’t think of a better way to go.” He winks at me and then turns back to the IKEA drawers we’re building together. In fairness, he’s doing all the work - I’m too big to get down and dirty with the boards and nails - but I’m handing him tools and reading out the instructions as needed, in between finishing off my wall mural of the view of the sun setting over the sea, as seen from Lucinda and Angus’s bench on the cliffs. I just have the base left to do now. It does mean we have to put up with thesmell of paint while we work, but the window’s open and it's not too bad.
Leo’s already finished his, a woodland scene with all of the gang represented as wild animals. Dean and Eli are both silver and black wolves fierce and loving. Liaden is a wise looking and beautiful owl, and Emily is a sweet little rabbit eating berries from a bush. Leo is a lion, because of course he is, and I’m a fox. Each one looks startlingly realistic, but the eyes on each animal are huge and sweet and cartoonish. It works, and it’s an image full of love for our child to enjoy. Leo’s already making up bedtime stories off the cuff to go with them.
Things have calmed down a lot over the past couple of weeks since Peter’s stupid-as-fuck failed robbery went down. My bruises are almost faded, the stitches in my side are out, and the remaining wound is healing nicely, and shouldn’t cause any problems with delivery. Even if I have a C-section. And mercifully, and most importantly, the baby doesn’t seem to have suffered any adverse effects from the fall at all. The midwife has been keeping an eye on us, and Leo has paid for extra scans just to set our minds at rest. Thump, thump, thump goes the little heartbeat every time, right speed and everything, like nothing ever happened.
One thing’s for real damn sure: he or she will have krav maga lessons as soon as they’re old enough.
In spite of everything I now know, I still feel stunned that Peter did what he did. The man I knew was, let’s be honest, a haughty twat who thought he was better than he was, and gave himself the most ridiculous airs and graces. But it sounds like his determination to get to the upper echelons, coupled with a new online gambling habit, caused him to spend more money than he had or could reasonably get. I guess he was trying to impress the Vice-Chancellor as his prospective son-in-law, and in the process, his tastes got expensive, and then risky. I can onlyspeculate, as I’m never going to be able to ask him what the fuck happened. Mostly because I don’t want to breathe the same air as that fuckwit.
His crazy plan really did open a can of worms all over his life. The police went into everything he’d done with a fine tooth comb, and they uncovered that he’d started using cloned cards obtained through some of Jayden’s friends, and taken out loans in my name and a few others. By trying to rob Wishbone, he went nuclear and everything imploded, and several other arrests along the fraud food chain have been made as well. And Peter should probably look over his shoulder for the foreseeable, because I can’t imagine that went down too well in the criminal world.
Liaden, bless her heart, took video footage on her phone of a white faced, shaking Peter being led away from campus in handcuffs by the police. Christ, that was a satisfying clip to watch. On repeat. Frequently.
Detective Antoniou told me, off the record, that Peter ugly-cried like a coward while being questioned. He begged. He tried to turn on the charm. He became snooty. He bargained his arse off. But for the first time, he couldn’t get out of the consequences of his actions. Antoniou estimates that, although it’s his first offence, the seriousness of his crime means he’ll be looking at around five to seven years in prison, depending on the judge.
Leo has tried, visibly, to restrain himself from going all caveman on me, because he knows the fastest way to piss me off is to suffocate me, but I know he watches my every move. I know he double checks every door and window each night before bedtime. I know he’s sleeping less, still seething about the harm that could have come to me and our kid. Perhaps when I was still pre-baby Sadie, I might have chafed against it and told him to calm his tits, but not this time. For all I kicked Jayden Ross’s stupid butt and took care of business, the whole thing has leftme feeling uncomfortably aware of how vulnerable I am at the moment. It was difficult to defend myself, and I was not the only one at risk. It was sheer luck that I didn’t fall at a different angle, and then the baby could have…
So I can’t say I don’t feel immensely reassured and comforted by how hypervigilant he’s being. I’ve found myself curling up closer to him on the sofa when we watch TV, wishing he was sitting with me while I do my appointments, and unable to sleep unless some part of me has physical contact with him. My foot on his leg, or his arm slung around me. Anything at all, as long as I can feel that he’s there.
Leo’s welcomed how touchy-feely and demonstrative I’ve become, to the extent that I wish I’d done this more right from the start. I think it’d show him just how much he means to me, more effectively than anything I could say. It’s clearer every day that physical touch is his love language, and that this is how we were always supposed to be. Right from the moment we met in that coffee shop just before my interview at Wishbone.
I should have grabbed him with both hands then and there, and just ran with things. We could have had years of happiness before today, and I wasted so much time with him for fuck all.
I’m not going to waste one single second more.
“Can you pass me the diagram again, Pumpkin?” Leo asks me, taking another screw out of a small plastic bag and smirking at me. “I want to make sure I’m screwingjustright.”
Absently, I hand it to him as my mind turns over my last thought. Just like when we kissed at Em and Eli’s wedding, I feel like a bucket of cold water has been thrown over me once again, but this time for a very different reason.
It’s all so simple.
I love him to absolute death.
He loves me, unwaveringly, as I am and without ever thinking I’m something I’m not.
We’re having a baby together, a permanent commitment that I chose to stick with before I even got to this point because some part of me knew the score.
I’ve been so worried for so long about how stable our friendship is, and how stable it would then be if we ended up breaking up, that I completely missed how rock solid we are as a couple.
I don’t need to try to reinforce and maintain our friendship because it’s given way to something even better and much stronger. And it’s not going anywhere.
I look at him, at his curly hair, securely tied back in a ponytail while he works. At his muscular arms covered in all those colourful tattoos. At the full lower lip he’s chewing as he concentrates on building our baby a chest of drawers. At the hands that have held mine through the best and worst times of my life, and, incidentally, have brought me undreamed-of pleasure. He feels my gaze, because he does a double take and chuckles. “What? Do I have something on my face?” He wipes his mouth. “Damn tacos.”
