AllFreeNovel
Share Us
THEN
Liz placed herself directly in my lap in the ridiculously overstuffed chair that she’d begged to have for nights like this in front of the fireplace in our living room.
“Van,” she said and put both hands around my neck to get her fingers into my hair. “Do you ever think about us having a baby?”
In about seven seconds, maximum, she would feel the response from my dick underneath her.
We’d talked about children before we were married, and it was something we both wanted. I was on board for filling this house with as many kids as it would hold, but Liz settled pretty squarely on two. As she was the one who’d have to carry and birth them, I didn’t feel like I had much room to build a case for my house-full. Nothing about it was a genuine deal breaker for me, not back then and not now. As long as she stayed in this house, I’d be a happy man. She’d always been a little rocky; a little unsteady when it came to emotions. She’d tried to hurt herself when she was younger, but it was only once. She said she was treated for it, and she’d never done it again, but the emotional scars were always there, just beneath the surface. Even I could see them. Sometimes she went through bouts of deep, deep lows where she cried all the time, over everything and nothing. I tried everything husbands were always told to do to help their wives out of those moments, but none of it ever worked. She didn’t seem to see the flowers. She wasn’t interested in getting dressed to go out for dinner. When I cooked for her, she sat across from me at the table and just pushed her food around her plate with her fork. She looked tired all the time, so I’d let her sleep when that’s what she wanted to do. I’d run baths for her in a massively oversized tub that I’d had installed in our bathroom after I learned baths made her feel better. I’d wait beside the tub with a towel, so I was there when she was ready to get back out.
At some point, she’d just wake up one day better. She was back to herself. She would get dressed, she’d put on makeup, she’d go back to doing the grocery shopping and the cooking, the house ended up cleaned every few days, and she seemed happy again. It just came and went in waves that were inexplicable to me. Sometimes it was overwhelming and exhausting. Sometimes she was hard to love, but I couldn’t fathom not loving her. Loving her even at her most difficult was still better than not having her.
I’d been ready for a baby from the moment that I married her. So, if she was ready for a baby, I was more than willing to do my part to make sure it happened. She knew babies were difficult and they sometimes strained marriages and relationships, but we both wanted children. If she believed she was finally in the mindset to move into that part of our lives, I was more than ready to do whatever she needed of me. And while I thought that just meant being present for sex when she said she wanted sex, nothing about that was true. Liz went through the effort of changing her diet, tracking cycles for the best days to try. I was suddenly told that some people believed certain positions led to creating a certain gender. Turned out there was even a right and a wrong kind of underwear for men to wear when they were trying to conceive a child, but I didn’t even think twice about any of it. I was prepared to do anything she asked of me, even when she went so far as to tell me that using my own hands when she wasn’t around was off limits because we needed potency. She was so excited, and it was beautifully contagious.
I wasn’t keeping track the way that Liz had been, but it couldn’t have taken more than a few months of some intensely mind-blowing orgasms before she was screaming from the bathroom. And my semi-fucked up head went somewhere sketchy anyway. I nearly broke the door down trying to get into that bathroom to her. She couldn’t keep her hands from shaking when she held the pregnancy test out toward me, cradling it in her palms like the thing itself was a gift from the heavens. I’d never seen a single human who could look stunning when they cried, but Liz did. Usually, you think of puffy eyes, splotchy skin, and a snotty nose. Liz though, just the balls of her cheeks turned slightly pink. The color in her lips brightened. Her eyes looked bigger, deeper; like they were finally opening to let me see beyond them, to the otherwise unreachable things that went on inside her mind. She looked like she came to life when she cried.
“We’re having a baby?” I asked, like a dumbass, while I took the test that answered that question for me from her trembling hands. She could only nod her head before the pools of tears spilled over and began their course down her pink-tinted cheeks.
“Are you happy?” I asked, because her emotions were a true rollercoaster. And just when I thought I had a handle on understanding them, those motherfuckers would pull an immediate one-eighty. A sob shook her whole body and she tried to say yes, but she mostly just choked on the word. Her arms were around my neck a second later and I scooped both arms around her waist to lift her right off the floor in that hug. She buried her face in between my neck and shoulder like she was trying to burrow inside me while I held us both there.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
trista
I woke up to what smelled like bacon and had never been more confused in my life. Kyle didn’t come in to cook for us. Memphis didn’t cook. I still got out of that bed like it could’ve been on fire for the smell of bacon though. I caught sight of myself in the full length mirror in the hallway and wondered if I should go back and put actual clothes on. I’d gotten used to sleeping in just the black button-down shirt of Jersey’s that I’d taken and claimed as my own, but it covered everything well enough. And there was bacon somewhere in that house screaming my name.
Utah moving around Jersey’s kitchen like he’d been in it for the last few months was more than my brain could process this early. He laughed when he spotted me, standing dumbfounded at the end of the hallway.
“Yeah, bacon gets everybody up,” he said, and his eyes roamed up and down my entire body. “You’re like a walking cliché.”
“What?” I asked and also looked down at the front of my body like I was suddenly unaware of the way that I looked.
“Are you also spraying his cologne on your pillow before you go to sleep? Writing his name inside hearts in a notebook?” He asked and laughed at himself.
“I don’t think I’d like you very well if you weren’t also the source of the bacon.”
“You feeling alright?” He asked and left me just as fucking confused as I was when I woke up.
“Uh, yeah?”
“Panic attacks are hard on people,” he said, like I should be experiencing a hangover of some kind. He pushed a plate full of food across the island toward me.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Breakfast?”
But I looked at that plate the same way I would have if he’d shoved a live snake across the countertop at me.
“I didn’t poison it,” he said with a laugh. “Why would I let you try to dig my heart out of my chest to ground you during a panic attack if I just planned to kill you the next day?”
“I don’t know. Jersey asked me on a date just to throw my ass into the trunk of his car when he picked me up for it.”
“And that’s the guy you’re in love with?” He asked and laughed again.
“Be careful with that word,” Memphis said from behind me. “They’re both super skittish about it. Is that bacon?”
Utah choked on nothing for the second time in her presence before he cleared his throat and forced himself to look away from Memphis. I looked at her too. We hadn’t been here all that long, but we were both comfortable with the fact that we were women. I slept in Jersey’s shirt. She slept in volleyball shorts and a tiny white shirt that showed her belly button and usually her nipples through the thin fabric. I had those body parts too, so it didn’t bother me to see them on her any more than it bothered her that she could probably see my ass cheeks from time to time. It had only been her and me in here. Kyle didn’t just drop in unexpectedly. Utah was the only one struggling to handle it. And he cleared his throat a second time before he turned back toward the stove.
“Some kind of Indiana allergy going on over there, big guy?” I asked and took my bacon with me to walk right up behind him. “Or is it maybe something from Tennessee?” I asked just barely loud enough for him to hear it. The way that he glared at me was probably the cutest thing I’d ever seen a grown man do. I couldn’t even remember what I’d found so frightening about him yesterday.
