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My sister is still being a pain in the ass even though she’s a thousand miles away at school. Now, she goes through her niece and nephews to torment me. The triplets, Blaze, Storm, and Skye, just turned four. Their brother Raiden is barely eleven months younger and he’s a complete mama’s boy.
The little shit is always up under my wife, but at least he doesn’t give me any trouble. While his siblings are catching frogs to torture, he’s in the kitchen under his mother’s feet.
That’s where I thought they were now, but I looked over towards the gazebo and saw her in there in that hammock that I forbid her from getting in. She was pushing the baby’s rocker swing with her foot, had a book to her nose, and a plate of something or other on her pregnant stomach.
The kids ran over to her, and I almost had a heart attack when they pulled on the death trap she was lying in. “Where’s your dad?” She tried sneaking out of the hammock while she looked around to see where I was.
“You got caught again.” She almost jumped out of her skin when my voice came from the opposite side of where she was looking. That guilty, impish smile always gets me in the gut. I leaned over and fought my kids to get close to their mother so I could put my hand on their two brothers.
I know that they’re boys because, like with Raiden, I haven’t been sick one day. Their mother, on the other hand, was sick for both his pregnancy and now the twins. As bad as that shit was, it was worst watching her go through it knowing what it felt like.
But she likes having babies, and I like putting them in her, so what’re you gonna do? I know she’s going for another girl because I heard her complaining that her house is overrun by males, but I’ve been conspiring with the Doc to see how I can go about killing off my female sperm.
She laughed and called me an idiot, but I’d pay any amount of money not to have another daughter. The nightmares I have about my kid can’t be sustained. I know if I have another one like her, it’ll shorten my lifespan.
It's not that she’s a bad kid. It’s just that she has this way about her, this attitude that seems way beyond her years. She doesn’t argue like her brothers, and she walks away if she doesn’t like what you’re saying.
If either of us tried to discipline her, she’d lecture us to death while explaining in her way just why she wasn’t the one in the wrong. She’s got my fucking sons trained to do her bidding and hide up her shit.
She rolls her eyes at me when I piss her off and freezes me out until I’m willing to give her whatever the hell it is that she wants. Can you imagine if there was another one like her? I’d walk into the Rockies and never come back.
* * *
AMANDA
* * *
Oh dammit.I thought for sure I’d hear him coming and get out of the hammock before he caught me. Now, I’ll have to sit through one of his lectures because, apparently, when I’m pregnant, the only thing I’m allowed to do without him is breathe.
No amount of assurance from me, our family, friends, or even the doctor can get him to see the light. Quite frankly, I think my first pregnancy was the easiest because he was too sick in the mornings to ride my butt.
And the books, he reads everything he can get his hands on, still stuck in the eighteen hundreds, mind you and tries implementing that mess today. My doctor calls me to complain about him or warn me about what new craziness he’s up to, just to give you an idea.
I try telling him with all these kids, I’m damn near an expert, but he claims I only had three pregnancies and given birth twice, so no, I am in no way the expert that I think I am.
As you can see, the arguments we have are a breath of fresh air compared to what my old life was like before. Some days, I look around at my life and wonder how this fairytale came to be.
I’m human, I know my faults and that I’m not perfect, so how am I deserving of all this love and security? These are the questions I find myself asking whenever things are going too well.
I’m not the kind of woman whose husband buys her a vineyard as a push present. With our fourth child, who was born less than a year later because someone couldn’t wait for the all-clear to get freaky, it was diamonds. I’m a baker; where am I wearing diamonds?
When I posed this question to my sisters and sister-in-law, they all looked at me like I was some form of alien life. I didn’t know then that my husband just wanted me to have the things he thinks I deserve, whether I would get any use out of them or not.
When I brought it up, he said he realized that I’ve always had to be the practical, level-headed one in my past relationship. The one who took care of everyone else while neglecting myself. I can only surmise that he heard all this from my sister, who sees nothing wrong with bashing a dead man, namely my ex.
I don’t know how someone can remain salty about a person who has been dead all these years, but just the mere mention of Dan, which doesn’t happen too often, and she can go on forever. I think she’s still a bit traumatized from the whole situation while I have moved on and don’t ever look back.
I don’t hate Dan. I don’t think I ever did, to be honest, but maybe that’s because I was too close to the situation, or maybe it’s just that I knew him as someone else before all that mess with Diedre happened.
Speaking of which, for a while there, she’d been all over the news for trying to break out of prison and was now in solitary confinement, last I heard. I’m not sure why she was trying to get out, but Thunder swears she was coming after us and talked to someone or the other, and now her life behind bars is even more restricted. I didn’t even know that was possible, and he didn’t say anything to me about it. I heard it from Cody, who is my head of security.
I live a life so far removed from my previous reality that some days, it feels like a dream. But none of the material things can compare to the love I feel from my husband and kids.
My days are filled with laughter, sex, and just mind-blowing goodness to the point that the darkness of the past no longer has any effect on me. I haven’t seen anyone from my past in years and haven’t kept up with their lives.
However, I did hear from Dan’s sisters after his funeral, which I did not attend. We’d been close once when Dan and I were younger, but their family had some kind of falling out, which I never knew the reason for, and the girls all basically went their separate ways.
I didn’t go to the funeral, but I guess they heard I’d had the triplets and reached out with congratulations. They first went through my parents, who asked if it was okay to give them my new number, which I okayed, and that’s when I learned what was going on with Cecile.
