“We could use the money to buy a bigger house?” My fingers trail up and down Brooke’s side, wrapping into the shirt of mine she threw on for bed last night. Something I never thought much about, but now that she’s wearing my shirts on a regular basis—in my bed… with me—I doubt I’ll ever wear them again. They’re all hers now, and I won’t miss them for a second. They never looked this good on me.
“But I love your house,” she says, face buried against my chest.
I loosen my grip, running my hand down and squeezing her hip. “Our house, Love. It’s ours.”
I can feel her smile against my skin. “Our house,” she repeats, like she can’t quite believe it. Though it’s been hers all along, she was just too stubborn to recognize it.
“And I love it, too, but it isn’t going to hold all of the Jones babies we’re gonna make.”
She giggles and kisses my chest again.
I start brainstorming reasons why we should never leave this bed.
It’s been raining for a solid week, a normal occurrence for a Georgia summer. I usually find myself grumpy during this season. Rain interrupts baseball. It’s hot and humid, and when it rains for days on end, I feel like I experience a sort of seasonal depression that’s hard to get past, waiting desperately to see the sun again.
But lying in bed with my wife all morning, listening to the steady rain fall against our tin roof and Brooke’s easy laughter as we plan our life together, I’m not sorry, at all, to be stuck inside. It’s like a reward I didn’t earn.
“How many babies are we talkin’? Two? Three?” Brooke asks, trailing her nail lightly across my skin. I’m about thirty seconds away from insisting we practice.
I flip her on her back, covering her body with mine and placing a fury of kisses across her face and neck. “Oh no. Eight or nine… at least.”
She pokes my side, but I don’t relent, nipping at her ear, then leaving a trail of kisses on her shoulders. “You want a whole baseball team.”
“With you? Yeah, I do.” I put my weight on my elbows, hovering over her and loving the fact that I’m out of my sling now and can hold my wife in all the ways I’ve been dreaming about. “A little league team I get to coach, with you rubbing your pregnant belly in the stands…”
“We definitely won’t fit a whole baseball team in your—I meanour—house right now.”
“New house. Put it on the pro list.” I kiss her nose. “When you signed up, what did you plan to spend the money on?”
Brooke grows quiet.
“What is it? Something crazy?”
She shakes her head. “I was… I was going to leave Honey Hill.”
“Oh.” I roll over so that I’m laying at her side but pull her close. “Okay… why? Where were you gonna go?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugs, and I can tell this is hard for her. “I was afraid…”
She stops herself, but I nudge her to go on. “Come on, Love. Tell me.”
“You were about to be picked up by Atlanta, and I knew you’d be leaving… probably soon, and I couldn’t do it again, O. I didn’t want to be left behind.”
“Oh, Babe,” I curl around her, wishing I could’ve protected Brooke from everything that she’s carried for her entire life. I want to shield her and tell her how unfounded the idea of me leaving without her is, but I know all I can do is continue to showup. To stay. “That’s never going to happen. I’m not… him. I’m sorry if that hurts for me to say, but I need you to hear me.”
Thunder rolls in the distance, ominously jostling our Tink.
Brooke and I cling tighter to one another, and though I’m glad we’re having this conversation, something inside me doesn’t think we’re through the storm just yet.
“I’m sorry your first experience with a man who should have loved you fiercely made you feel as if you weren’t worthy of that kind of love. As if you weren’t worth fighting for every single day.” She cries silently but doesn’t stop me. I pray she listens. That something sticks. “But I’m not that man, Brooke. I will fight every day for you, and if you’ll let me, I’ll show you exactly what that love looks like.”
“I’m sorry. I wish I wasn’t still so scared.”
“I am too, sweetheart. I’m so unsure of how to make you see it clearly… to know that we are not a temporary thing. But I’ll do whatever you need me to.”
“Just… be with me.” She wraps her arm around my waist and rests her head on my chest, tangling her legs with mine.
I’m about to do just that, spending a little quality time giving special attention to the space between Brooke’s neck and collar bone, when Sumer Morrison’s voice blares through our trailer.
