“My feet are starting to kill me,” she mumbled.
“I promise to give you a foot massage when we get home,” I murmured into her ear, making her laugh.
“And a back rub,” she negotiated. “Your child is using my spine as a jungle gym.”
Home. Our house in Mapleridge had a wraparound porch and garden where she grew herbs for her cooking.
As the parade continued around us, I dropped my hand to rest on the curve of her belly again.
“Who knew,” she said softly, covering my hand with hers, “that I’d fall in love with a green-eyed girl who’d teach me that courage isn’t the absence of fear, but choosing love anyway?”
“What were the odds?” I replied, and she smiled.
I looked at her, this brilliant woman who had walked away from everything safe to build something real with me, and felt that familiar wonder that she was mine.
“You’re so beautiful,” I whispered, kissing her neck. “Pregnancy suits you.”
She blushed, even after all this time. “You’re biased.”
“Completely,” I agreed. “And I care deeply that our kid is going to grow up seeing their mums absolutely crazy about each other.”
“Me too, baby.”
She paused, her expression switching up as she watched a couple nearby: two older women holding hands while a teenage girl painted a rainbow on their cheeks. They looked at each other with such settled devotion it took my breath away.
“You know what I’ve been thinking about lately?” she said, her voice taking on that thoughtful tone I recognized from our late-night conversations.
I waited, knowing she was gathering her thoughts the way she always did before sharing something important.
“All this research I’m doing on authenticity and moral philosophy,” she continued, her hand absently stroking her belly. “I keep coming back to something.”
“To what”
“To us.”
She gestured between us, then toward Atlas and Carmen, then the parade celebrating love in all its forms around us.
“The way we choose to love one another, even when it terrifies us, even when it costs us everything familiar. I’ve got a hard time believing that it all boils down to just personal courage.”
Her eyes lit up with that spark I had fallen for amongst other things, the one that appeared whenever a new idea took hold in her beautiful mind.
“It’s ethical and it’s moral.”
She turned to face me more fully.
“When we choose authentic desire over imposed obligations, we’re not just living our truth..we’re challenging systems that deny other people theirs. We’re making space for more love to exist in the world.”
I could practically see her mind working, connecting threads the way she did when she was onto something big, so I let her think.
“The ethics of desire,” she said, testing the words. “Living authentically as a moral imperative. I think that might be my next book.”
“The Ethics of Desire.” I said, pride swelling in my chest. “That actually has a nice ring to it.”
She kissed me then, deeper this time, her hand fisting in my shirt to pull me closer despite her belly between us.
Around us, the parade celebrated love in all its forms, Atlas groaned dramatically about our public displays of affection, and baby Zara clapped her hands at the bright balloons floating overhead.
The ethics of desire. I smiled against her lips, thinking about how that brilliant mind of hers could turn our pain into purpose, our love into something that might give other people permission to choose themselves.
