“I’m glad, baby. I’m so glad.”
“He came to my choir concerts in high school,” she said wistfully.
I smiled. “He couldn’t stay away.”
“He said he wants to get to know us both.” She looked up at me with hesitation.
“I’d like that. He’s your father, Mia. We’re looking forward, right? Remember the past, but don’t dwell in it. Isn’t that our motto? We’ve all made mistakes, and that doesn’t exclude him.”
“I think he’s wallowing in regret, just like I was. It’s different, but I recognize the symptoms.”
“Like father, like daughter?” I asked with a shadow of a smile.
“Yes, I guess.”
“Well then, who better to help him than you?” I pointed out.
“You’re right. He said it was hard to leave my mother. He said he still loves her after all these years.”
“I guess I can see that. Love can be many things. Pure or tainted, healing or hurting—it’s a fine line.”
“I hope he can heal, like I did.”
“He will,” I said, placing a chaste kiss on her cheek. “He has you.”
She turned in my arms, and I cherished the feel of her.
This is where I want her for the rest of my life.
“Come on, let’s go to bed,” I said.
“It’s eight o’clock!”
“Well, you can never get too much sleep,” I joked.
She gave me a doubtful look, which made me chuckle. I grabbed her around the waist and flipped her slightly before throwing her over my shoulder.
“Garrett!” she squealed.
“I’m telling you, we need to get to sleep. It’s late. The sun will be up in fourteen hours!”
I made a mad dash for the stairs, and she screamed louder, banging her fists on my ass.
“Keep doing that, and I’ll start spinning!”
“Ugh!” she cried out in amused frustration.
I took the stairs two at a time, which made her bounce up and down on my shoulder.
“Oh my God, I’m going to kill you, Garrett Finnegan!” she threatened as we rounded the corner to our bedroom.
I loved the orange we’d picked out for the walls. Since then, we’d sanded and re-stained all the furniture and bought new linens from some crazy home store in the mall that Mia made me walk around in for hours. It looked great, but right now, all I wanted to see was Mia naked against one of those sun-kissed walls.
Letting her slide off my shoulder, I tried to hold back my laughter as I took in her frazzled hair and beet-red face.
“You are so dead,” she said, blowing an errant brown strand out of her face.
My attempt to contain my laughter failed, and it came roaring out of me. I doubled over, clutching my side, as I fought for breath.
“Jackass,” Mia said with a giggle.
Pulling myself together, I clutched her waist and pulled her closer.
“That was the carefree boy I fell in love with, throwing me over the shoulder in the middle of the hallway in front of the entire school. The man staring at me now with the smoldering, made-for-sex eyes—that’s the man I fell in love with all over again. Like past and present colliding, you are the perfect mix of the two now.”
My eyes widened at her words, and like a lightbulb, everything fell into place.
Past and present colliding…
For the past few weeks, I’d been driving myself mad, trying to think of the perfect way to ask Mia to marry me. I’d been convinced that this time, I had to do it bigger, grander, and in a way that she would be proud of. But hadn’t I already done that?
Sitting by the river after I’d proposed the night before our graduation, neither one of us had felt like we’d been cheated of something greater. It hadn’t mattered that her ring was small or that we weren’t someplace public. We’d had each other.
Wasn’t that all that mattered?
I pulled back from our embrace. “Grab your coat,” I instructed.
“What? I thought we were going to bed?”
“Oh, we’ll do that later. I want to go for a drive.”
She looked at me like I had two heads, but rather than disagreeing, she just smiled warmly and followed me down the stairs.
“Where are we going?” she asked as she slipped on her coat and gloves.
As I palmed the ring box in my pocket, I smiled. “I know just the place.”
Epilogue
~Garrett~
Three and a Half Years Later
My consciousness stirred as my eyes slowly lifted. Soft light filtered through a window, and my gaze shifted, taking in the warm sun-kissed color of the walls and the dark furniture.
I was home.
I’d dreamed of her again. This time though, she hadn’t walked away from me in the satin sea of caps and gowns. She’d walked toward me.
I slumped back on my pillow and exhaled, feeling peaceful and relaxed.
It had been a busy week. Besides the party-planning, blueprints had to be completed for the next phase of the housing development I had been hired to design. Semester grades were due, and my sexy wife was nose deep in grading tests and parent-teacher conferences. She loved every minute though. Just as I’d thought, she was an amazing teacher, and her choral students adored her. I was fairly certain a few of those pimple-faced preteens even had a bit of a crush on my beautiful wife, not that I blamed them.
My hands searched the warm flannel sheets and came up empty. I looked to the right and found nothing.
Where was she?
Rising quickly, I tugged on a pair of pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, and then I headed down the stairs where I could already hear the sweet humming sounds of her voice as she sang “Happy Birthday.” Turning into the kitchen, I found her dancing around in one of my old T-shirts, making a goofball of herself, as Asher giggled and cooed. Sneaking up behind her, I slipped my hands around her waist. She yelped in surprise and laughed, relaxing into my chest.
“You weren’t in bed.” I pouted.
“Someone needed to be fed,” she said.
She pointed to Asher whose face still made me melt every single time I saw it.
“Someone is an attention hog. Where’s my breakfast?” I asked, looking around at the mess she’d created.
Mia had learned a few things in the three years we’d been married. She could make a couple of dishes now without lighting the kitchen on fire, but she’d never learned the art of tidiness. The kitchen looked as if it had blown up flour.
“It’s not your birthday, grumpy,” she pointed out, flipping the slightly burned pancake on the griddle.