Page 46 of She Autumn Be Mine

I carried my wife over the threshold of our home, and she was crying before I got the door shut behind us. Not the happy kind. I’d learned every one of Autumn’s cries this past year, and this was the one from the pit of her stomach.

“Hey, sweetheart.” I set her down slowly, keeping her in the circle of my arms. Around us the cabin glowed with candles on every safe surface, flowers, the bed visible through the bedroom door turned down with rose petals that one of Ivy’s sisters was going to get thanked for at a much better moment than this one.

My bride stood in the middle of all that romance in her wedding dress and sobbed.

“Oh, God, Jake, I’m so sorry. It’s our wedding night and I’m a mess.” She swiped at her face. “Stetson’s never slept anywhere apart from me. What if he wakes up and I’m not there?”

“Come here.”

I sat us down on the big leather couch facing the cozy fire in the fireplace, and gathered her against my chest. I let her cry it out. Patience with this particular woman I’d taught myself, and I had one more night’s worth in me. Hell, I had a lifetime’s worth. That was the whole vow.

“Listen to me, little Mama.” I tipped her chin up so she could see I meant it. “Right now, that boy is asleep with my mother and father watching over him. They've raised two babies, hundreds of goats, and never lost a single one of them. He’s not scared—he’s loved. You built him a world so safe he can sleep anywhere in it. That’s not you failing him tonight. That’s you succeeding.” I swiped a tear off her cheek. “We’ll collect him tomorrow morning. He’ll be so happy to see you. I promise you. Tonight the two of you are both exactly where you belong.”

“You can’t know that,” she whispered, still sobbing but she’d stopped shaking.

“I know my mother. She was born to be one, and will be the best grandmother to him, too.”

She laughed, wet and small, into my shirt. I held my wife in the candlelight and asked absolutely nothing of the moment—though my body conducted its own separate meeting about the woman in my lap, and had been since she grabbed my shirt and kissed me like she’d been saving it for years.

But this was Autumn. Firsts mattered. And no first of ours was ever going to start with her crying.

“I’ll do whatever my wife wants. You want to lay here in my arms, I’ll hold you and comfort you all night. Or do you want me to give you something else to think about? Like us. My wife. Because I can make you feel better, pumpkin, I promise you. Everything you’re worried about, we’ll take care of together tomorrow. Say the word, and I’ll help you forget everything tonight.”

She stayed there, her breathing evening out against me.

No answer. That was the answer. A man doesn’t survive years of night missions without learning to read a silence. So I did the hardest thing of my life. I pressed a kiss to her hair, and stood with her in my arms. I carried her to the other room.

“Take the bed, sweetheart. It’s been a big day. I’ll take the couch.”

She blinked up at me, lashes wet. “Jake—it’s our wedding night.”

“And we’ve got about ten thousand more nights coming,” I reminded, and I even meant it, which was the remarkable part. “Baby steps. I told you I’d wait, and I don’t say things if I don’t mean them. Go to sleep. I’ll be right here if you need anything.”

I placed her down and kissed her forehead. For certain reasons, I grabbed a pillow to take with me, holding it in front of my groin.

“Goodnight, Mrs. McCall.”

“Jake? Why are you carrying that pillow like that?”

“This?”

“Turn around.”

At the bedroom door, I did as asked. I turned around, the pillow still strategically placed.

Autumn stood in the candlelight in her wedding dress, hair coming loose from its pins, eyes swollen from crying yet fixated on me. A year’s worth of walls came down so fast I swear I heard the dust settle.

“I did it again, not intentionally. You reached for me and I handed you a reason to sleep on the couch, and you took it, because that’s what you do, you take whatever I give you and never ask for more.” She crossed the room to me. Took the pillow out of my hands and dropped it on the floor like evidence entered and dismissed. “I’m done being afraid of wanting something good.”

Her hands slid up my chest, over the buttons of the shirt she’d already grabbed once today, and her eyes came up to mine, wide open, nothing held back for later. “Tell me what you want.”

A man waits a year, he builds up an idea of how a moment like this might feel. My idea had been small compared to the real thing. And she was asking what I wanted. Nobody in my life had ever asked. There had never been an answer this easy.

“I don’t want the couch, or the pillow, and ten thousand nights from now can wait. I want my wife. Now. I want you—I think I’ve wanted you for so long I stopped being able to tell the ache apart from breathing.”

“Then stay.” She led me back to bed.

“Autumn, are you sure? Because slow is still on the table.”