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“Wait,” comes her voice, soft and light like a warm summer breeze and the scent of sunflowers.
I turn, wishing I could scoop her up and never let her go, hoping that she isn’t going to throw the flowers back at me.
“I love you too,” she says, her gold-flecked eyes glistening in the artificial light of the hallway.
The sensation in my chest of everything breaking and being put back together in a whole new way so I can actually breathe without being in pain is miraculous. I take two large strides towards her and scoop her up into my arms, kissing her and spinning us around.
Her blue dress fans out behind her as her hands come around my neck and thread into my hair. Her soft lips feel urgent against mine, wanting more than a kiss and still hesitant, holding back.
“Danielo,” she says, holding my face and looking into my eyes. “You have to be okay with the fact that we will never have children.”
“But we’ll have hundreds of nieces and nephews the way my family is going,” I respond. It’s true. Alisa is due any day, Meerah expecting twins and it won’t be long before Sophie announces she is expecting. I’m not supposed to know, but I saw the way she turned green the last time I made her a mug of coffee and remembered Alisa having a similar reaction in the early days. “You’re all I need. Beautiful, magnificent, you.”
Kissing her again, I lower her gently to the floor.
“Where were you going?” I ask, realising she was on her way somewhere when I turned up.
“Work,” she laughs. “I know we didn’t talk much last time we were together, but I do have a job–even if I hate it.”
“Quit,” I say, and I mean it. I don’t want her to live a single day doing anything she doesn’t like.
She shakes her head with a wry smile. “It’s not as simple as that, big boy,” she says, tapping my chest. “I have bills to pay.”
“Move in with me? Let’s travel. Let’s do whatever you want to do for the rest of our lives.”
She laughs again, “Slow down, I can’t just drop everything and run off from the real world…”
“Why can’t you?” I ask, genuinely confused. “What would make you happy right now?”
She looks as though she is about to argue before she twists her mouth to one side and says, “Triple chocolate ice cream with caramel sauce.”
I blink. “I wasn’t expecting that, but let’s do it.”
“What right now? For breakfast?” she squeals as I pull her towards the stairs.
“Yep, we can have ice cream for breakfast every day if that’s what you want.”
“I mean…” she trails off as I look back at her with curiosity. “There are other things I’d like for breakfast too.”
“Yep,” I agree. “That’s why we are having the ice cream on the way to my place. You can call work on the way.”
“And tell them what? I’m being kidnapped by a Mafia enforcer and taken for ice cream.”
“Garduña, and no, to tell them you quit.”
As we push through the glass doors into the warmth of the bright Chicago sun, she laughs and my heart soars.
Everything is going to be okay.
Epilogue
Sienna
Four years later
“Sophie, a walk will do you good,” I tell my best friend who is so pregnant right now I think she would sell her soul for ice cream and a foot rub. “I read it makes the baby move down.”
“I want it out, not down,” she grumbles.
