“I just want everything to go well.”
“It will,” he says. “And even if it doesn’t, it’ll be perfect.”
I sigh, looking away from his knowing gaze. “He’s nervous. It makes me nervous.”
“That’s because you guys share a brain.”
“I think it’s a good nervous, though.”
“I know it is. It’s how I was.”
I look back up at him. “Really?”
He finishes tying my tie. It looks perfect, of course. He brushes off my shoulders. There’s nothing there, but he doesn’t need an excuse to touch me. “Yeah.”
“Which time?”
“Both.”
I laugh quietly. “I was a sure bet.”
“Both times?”
I shrug. “Sure. I pretty much like everything about you.”
He wraps his arms around my waist, hands clasped over my stomach. He hooks his chin over my shoulder, staring at my reflection with a quiet smile. “We did good, didn’t we?”
“Yes,” I say promptly. Then, “With what?”
“This. Everything. Our lives.”
“Yeah. We did good.”
And we have. We’re a little older, and maybe there are more lines around our eyes and mouths (but I am not losing my hair, no matter what my shit of a little brother says), but look at us now. We’ve beaten everything stacked against us, and we’ve made it this far. We’re still standing.
A lot of this has to do with this man who’s watching me like I could be his whole world. I know that’s not true—not when we’ve got all that we have—but it sure feels like it in this moment.
“Today’s a good day,” Otter says, kissing my ear, making me squirm just a little. “You’re allowed to be happy.”
“I’m not going to cry.”
Otter snorts. “That’s bullshit and we both know it.”
“We don’t have to—”
A loud crash comes from somewhere in the house.
Otter and I both sigh at the same time. We’re very practiced at it.
“What do you think it is this time?” he asks me.
“I’m going to go with ‘we’re trying to be architects because Uncle Ty said we could be anything and we tried to stack everything we own on top of each other just to see what would happen.’”
“I’m gonna go with ‘we’re playing surgery because of that one time Uncle Creed forgot to change the channel and we watched the hospital show that was probably not age appropriate.’”
“They’re so weird,” I mutter, smoothing down my suit jacket as Otter steps back. “And if they’ve messed up their outfits, we’re putting them up for adoption.”
“Nah,” Otter says easily. “You’d miss them too much.”