“And have five to eight kids and live happily ever after.”
“Yes.” Her dark eyes gleam. “Please tell me you want this.”
“I want it,” I tell her. “I want it, I want you, I want it all.”
Emily grabs me tight and kisses me again.The tension between us is building again, so hot, and I’m so ready for all of this with her. I’m floating, because I’ve got Emily, and she’s got me, and we’re real in this absolutely forever way.
Finally, I can let myself believe it.
Epilogue
Emily
We’re driving down a quiet, tree-lined street that we’ve driven dozens of times in the last several months, but I still find myself looking eagerly all around, trying to catalog everything—the other houses, who has toys in their yard, how many people are out walking their dogs.
“Hey, look,” I say, pointing at the yard of a red-brick two story with gorgeous flowering bushes and some less-gorgeous statues flanking their driveway. “Those guys got a third lion statue.”
“A third one?” Jason slows down and cranes his neck. “What the hell? Are they trying to upstage the rest of us two-lion people?”
“Show-offs.” I can’t stop grinning, and he can’t either. Even at the prospect of neighbors building a statue menagerie.
“Just wait until our kids are always trying to ride those things, see how much they love them then.”
My smile gets even wider, if possible, and I pat my stomach, which is now big enough to give me plenty of space to rest my hands. Or an extra-large Burritozilla fromTaco Pete’s, a feat I discovered last week. “I think we’ve still got a while before he’s big enough for that.”
Jason snorts. “Not that long. He’s got Winslow genes. He’s going to be three feet tall at birth.”
I wince. “Good god, he’d better not. I only have so much room in there, and he’s still got two months to go.”
“Should’ve thought of that before deciding to reproduce with me,” Jason says, still grinning at me. He reaches over and squeezes my knee gently as he turns the car into the driveway.
The driveway of our new house.
Or our new but outdated-and-needing-a-lot-of-work foreclosure house.
But officially, as of today,ourhouse.
I make a happy little noise as he puts the car in park, and he shakes his head. “God, you’re adorable,” he says, and leans over to kiss me, almost like he can’t help himself. Which I, of course, don’t mind at all.
“Mmmm,” I say back, against his lips. “That’s a good thing. My attractiveness will distract anyone we meet from noticing our freakish three-foot-tall newborn.”
He looks down at my stomach. “Did you hear what your mother said about you, Arc’teryx?”
“Nope.”
“Petzl?”
“Still nope. Not naming our kid after brands of outdoor gear.”
He leans over. “Don’t worry,” he says in this loud stage whisper to my belly. “I think she’s starting to cave.”
I swat his head playfully. “Come on. I want to go inside.”
We get out of the car, and I draw in a breath as I take in our house again (our house!). It’s a two story, but it looks ranch-style from the street.There’s a deep sunken backyard, so that the lower level—where three of the five bedrooms are located—opens out from these gorgeous french doors onto a huge patio. A patio that is cracked and in desperate need of weeding. And okay, maybe the french doors aren’t so much existent now as in my mind.
But the house is a great size, affordable, in a lovely older neighborhood (that still seems to have plenty of young kids) in a highly-rated school district. We can handle doing some improvements. Especially with Brendan having happily agreed to work with Jason on it, and the deal for the streaming rights for that whole insane venture in the works.
We get to the door and Jason fishes a key out of his pocket. “Would you like to do the honors?”
