“You can’t fix my body image issues by having sex with me.”
“Strongly disagree,” I said.
She laughed, and I turned her around carefully and pulled her into me, her cheek against my chest, my chin on her head.
“You’re beautiful,” I said. Into her hair. “September and now and when they’re here and in ten years. That’s not me trying to fix anything. That’s just the truth.”
She pulled back and put her hands on my face—then her eyes went wide, yanking her hand back and laughing. “Oh no…the paint,” she said.
I saw the yellow on her hands and immediately realized it was now on my face. “Shit,” I muttered, laughing with her. “Somehow, we always end up making a mess.”
She shook her head, smiling wide. “Oh Nash…none of this is messy. It’s perfect. All of it.”
I looked at her.
Paint on her hands. Paint on my face, apparently. Her hair loose and her cheeks flushed and my ring on her finger and her belly round with everything we’d made together.
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
She went up on her toes and kissed me once, careful of the paint, then pulled back and started looking for her leggings. I found them by the unpainted wall and handed them over.
She got dressed. I got decent. She looked at the yellow paint on her palms, then at the wall, then back at me with a hapless smile.
There were two handprints, side by side, at about shoulder height…imprinted on the otherwise perfectly painted wall. It was funny—it should have been embarrassing, I guess, but it reminded me of the twins. Nothing else. Just the sign of what we were building together.
“Is it wrong that I want to leave them?” I asked.
Maggie snorted. “Like a sex trophy?”
“Jesus,” I shook my head. “No…like…our mark here.”
I lifted my hands and pressed them to the wall next to hers, higher up.
She laughed. “Now it just looks like I had my way withyouin here.”
“I mean, you kinda did.”
She huffed, but then she slowly exhaled. “Yeah…” she said. “It’s perfect. I’ll paint flowers around them or something.”
“Of course you will.”
She reached out and squeezed my arm, then she turned, snapping her fingers. “Well…get back to it,” she said. “The nursery’s not gonna paint itself.”
She left me there to look at the handprints on the wall—to think of how damn lucky I was. A few minutes later, I heard the door open downstairs, then Reid’s voice…then his kids, then Nell. Maggie laughing, talking quietly with Reid’s oldest, Maya, who was actually starting to seem better too.
She’d come into my life out of nowhere, and I never thought I’d deserved her…but now she was here. We were together. We were in love.
Maggie Laine had healed a part of me that desperately needed healing without ever knowing it…she’d made my family whole.
And I was going to spend the rest of my life thanking her for it.
epilogue
MAGGIE
When you have twins,you kind of end up just…handing one baby to someone and dealing with the other, all the while hoping you handed off baby to the right person.
Lucky for me, our little girl was extremely outgoing and didn’t mind being held by just about anyone…and our little boy would let me know if something was wrong. Plus—Nell watched them both like a hawk, like it was her personal duty to make sure everything was okay. Gerald watched Nell, Nell watched the babies…we watched Gerald.
