He took a deep breath and exhaled loudly. “I want to get out.”
“Really?” I glanced up at his face to see if there was any indecision in his expression, but found a smile.
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “I’ve done my part. I’m at the point now where I want to be home with you. I want to have a nine-to-five job that I can leave at the end of the day. You know, be able to coach baseball and all that shit.”
“Baseball?” I wrinkled my nose. What a boring sport.
“Yeah.” He gave me a squeeze.
“Okay,” I replied with a sigh, like the thought was depressing.
“And I can come home to you every night,” he murmured, pushing me gently until I was lying on the couch. He hovered over me, his lips almost touching mine. “And we can leave the kids with my parents and go have sex in the woods.”
“Kids, plural?” I asked with a little laugh.
“Hell, if we’re going to have one, we might as well give her a couple of siblings,” he said, grinning huge.
“Let’s see how we feel after this one,” I replied.
“Anything you want,” he said, brushing his lips against mine. “I’ll give you everything.”
“In that case, I’d like a pony,” I said in mock seriousness. His chest rumbled with a barely repressed laugh.
“I can make that happen.” He leaned down and kissed my chin, then smoothed his lips down my throat. “Any other requests?”
“I want a house,” I said, since we were dreaming now, wrapped around each other in our warm home while the wind blew outside. Nothing could touch us here in our little piece of the world. “Only one floor, but with plenty of bedrooms.”
“A ranch,” he said.
“No, I was joking about the pony,” I whispered.
“No, that’s the style of house you’re talking about. It’s called a ranch style.”
“Oh.” I closed my eyes as his lips tugged on my earlobe, then kissed the sensitive spot just behind it. “And I want a garden with lots of flowers and food that we can go out and pick in the summer.”
“That sounds perfect,” he whispered in my ear.
As he tugged my shirt over my head and ran his fingers gently over my belly, I thought that life couldn’t get much better than it was right then. It was beginning to look like the best things in my life had been the things I hadn’t planned for.
Chapter 15
Alex
You never see the big stuff coming, not really. You may think you’ve prepared, you may think you know what’s next, but life has a way of slapping the smug look off your face at regular intervals. Sometimes it’s a love tap, like when you’ve filled your gas tank the night before, but your car gets a flat on the way to work. Other times, the slap damn near knocks you out.
“You should have told them to come tomorrow,” Sarai scolded, leaning toward the mirror as she put lipstick on. “We’ll have to leave the party early.”
“That’s what I was hoping for,” I replied, stepping out of the shower. “This way we have an excuse for leaving.”
My family hadn’t taken the news that we were staying in Missouri for Christmas very well. They’d been understanding because that’s the way they were, but my mom hadn’t been able to hide her disappointment. The next day, Ani had called to let us know that she, Bram, and Arie were flying to Missouri to spend the holiday with us. I think her exact words had been “Buy an air mattress, asshat—we’re coming to you.” Since none of the kids would be in Oregon, my parents had decided to fly down and spend the holiday with my sister’s family in San Diego.
“You picked up the white-elephant gifts?” Sarai asked for the fifth time that morning.
“They’re in the truck,” I replied as she walked out of the room. “I even put them in gift bags.”
I was trying to snap myself out of the pissy mood I’d been in, but it wasn’t working. When I’d let my commanding officer know that I wasn’t going to be re-enlisting, I’d gotten a lecture about priorities with a heavy dose of guilt trip thrown in. I understood the sentiment, and I knew he’d been counting on me, but I wasn’t going to change my mind. My priorities had shifted. Unfortunately, the whole thing had left a bad taste in my mouth, and I couldn’t seem to shake it.
Sarai was blending a smoothie when I walked out of our bedroom, fully dressed and ready to go.
“I’m going to eat and brush my teeth, and then we can leave,” she said, ignoring my comment. “Do you want some?”
I looked at the green slime she was pouring into her glass. “No thanks.”
“It’s just green because of the kale,” she said. “You can’t even taste it.”