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“Check this.”
“What am I checking, exactly?”
“I deleted his number.”
He stopped the car in front of my house and killed the engine.
He handed me back my phone. “I’ll take your word for it. What changed your mind?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m in love with this guy, and he has this idea in his head that I will run away with my childhood sweetheart.”
Wolfe shot me a dirty look. “He is tragically in love with you, too, and I don’t blame him for being adamant about keeping you.”
There were many more dates between Wolfe and me after that day.
We went to the movies and to restaurants and even to hotel bars, in which we both didn’t drink—me because of my age and pregnancy, him out of solidarity.
We shared a bowl of french fries and played pool and argued about books. I found out that my husband was a Stephen King fanatic. I was more of a Nora Roberts fan myself.
We stopped at a bookstore and purchased each other books to read. We laughed when Wolfe told me he nearly kicked the Hatch’s out of our house that time they visited us because Bryan had an erection as impressive as a baseball bat while I played the piano.
Andrea, my cousin, called. She said that she’d been thinking, and she reached the conclusion she could no longer not speak to me just because my father didn’t approve of the husband he himself chose for me.
She asked for my forgiveness.
“I wasn’t being a good Christian about it, doll.” She snapped her gum in my ear. “Come to think about it, I wasn’t even a good manicurist about it. I bet you bit into those nails like nobody’s business without me reminding you to stop chewing on them.”
I told her the truth—forgiveness cost me nothing, and more than that, it enriched my soul.
We met for a cappuccino the following day, and I bombarded her with all the twenty-first century questions that sat on my tongue.
Some days later, Wolfe announced that we were taking a weekend-long trip to visit Artemis. I wasn’t in a condition to ride her, but I enjoyed taking care of her and making sure she was doing okay.
A month ticked by.
A month in which my husband called every morning to wake me up and every night to tell me good night.
A month in which we didn’t fight, or cuss, or slam doors.
A month in which he did not withhold any information from me, and I did not refuse his every request, simply because he’d made it.
I let the EPAs escort me to school, didn’t break protocol, and still managed to make a handful of friends. Wolfe worked hard but always made sure to put me first.
I still wasn’t wearing my engagement and wedding rings—I left them at his house the night he went to the black-tie gala with Karolina Ivanova.
But I never felt as if I belonged to someone else in my entire life more than now, ring or not.
We fell back in lust just as you do into a rabbit hole—fast and frantic. Wolfe, I found out, was quite fond of having sex in unusual places.
We had sex in his office and in a restroom at a wedding, on the bed in my old room when my parents weren’t home and against his bedroom window, watching over the pristine street.
He fingered me under the table during an official black-tie dinner and thrust himself into me without warning when I bent down after a shower to open the bottom drawer in the bathroom and retrieve my blow dryer.
I loved every second of us in bed because no one ever needed to wonder when it was time to retreat back to their spot, their wing, or their house.
We always fell asleep together and woke up together, insulated in this new, exciting thing called us.
The morning I woke up with a small, visible bump in my lower belly—it felt hard and tough and exciting—my mother walked into my room and sat down on the edge of my bed.
