“Are we ambling aimlessly, or do we have a plan?” I asked. “Because I need you and a bed and alone time, stat.”
He chuckled. “Stat, huh?”
“Immediately.”
“Well, you’ll have to be patient. I’m looking for something.” Ren smiled, the street lights casting his handsome face in shadows and illumination. I was seriously the luckiest woman in the world to love someone so beautiful inside and out.
I wanted to leap into his arms and force him to take me, but I ordered myself to be a grown-up. “Looking for what?”
He grinned wider, tugging me down a side street with a single glowing sign still on at this time of night. “That.”
“Jill’s Quill?”
“Yup.” He nodded. “For your seventeenth birthday present, I bought you ink that teases me every day you slide out of bed and every moment you walk barefoot toward me. I don’t think I ever told you how much that ribboned R means to me. Didn’t really know how. So…I figured, why bother telling you when I could show you?”
Coughing once, he dragged me toward the tattoo parlour and through the glass door.
“Ah, you must be my nine o’clock.” A spritely woman looked up with colourful tatted sleeves and a stretched hoop in her ear. “Sit. Let’s get started.”
Ren didn’t give me time to ask what the hell was going on before he pushed me toward the black pleather couch and took a seat on the plastic wrapped recliner in front of the artist. “You got the design I emailed?”
“Yup.” The artist, who I assumed was Jill, snapped on a pair of gloves and grabbed a stencil already printed and ready to go from the table beside her. “Where do you want it?”
Ren pointed to his forearm. “There.”
“Alrighty.”
I had no idea what it was or how this had happened so suddenly.
Nerves bubbled in my belly the entire time the tattoo gun buzzed.
Afterward, Ren ordered, “Pay the woman, Della Ribbon. This is, after all, your birthday present to me.”
Laughing under my breath, I rolled my eyes at the craziness of my husband. I slipped cash from my purse, waited until Jill rung me up, then turned to face him with a hand on my hip. “Okay, enough of the secrets. Show me.”
With a soul-stealing look, he came toward me, holding out his arm. “It’s not a secret that I love you.”
My eyes locked on his fresh ink.
Blue, the same colour as mine.
A ribbon wrapping around his arm instead of my foot.
A ribbon that looped into a J before finishing in a D, just like mine finished in an R.
He was right.
Telling me how much my tattoo meant to him would’ve been useless.
Because nothing could describe the tidal wave of lust, love, and loss that filled me.
He’d marked himself forever.
He’d take me and Jacob wherever he went.
He was mine, not death’s or pain’s or time’s.
Mine.
The permanent ink said so.
* * * * *
2027
“I can’t believe you’re making me do this.” Ren laughed, hoisting five-year-old Jacob onto his hip.
The past few years had been a whirlwind of Ren teaching his son everything he could. From camping trips in summer, to tractor snow ploughing in winter, and even sitting with him and doing ‘homework’ like I’d done even though Jacob only attended preschool.
Ren was besotted with his son, just like I knew he would be.
And I was besotted with both of them, often drifting into a dreamy trance while watching Ren interact with Jacob—laughing with him, joking, arguing, and even scolding.
Each day, I fell helplessly in love with him.
Which only added another layer to my hurt.
And each month I hoped I’d fall pregnant again, desperate to give Ren the daughter he wanted.
But each year, it never came true.
“Don’t blame me. Blame Cassie.” I stuck out my tongue as Jacob squirmed in Ren’s arms.
“Down. Down.” Jacob pointed at the ground. “Nina has chocolate. I want some.”
“After.” Kissing my unruly child on the nose, I made sure his string tie was neat, his black shirt was buttoned, and tiny Wranglers were hay free. Once he was presentable, I tackled my husband, rubbing at a dirt smudge on his cheek, lamenting over the soil beneath his nails, and tucking his matching black shirt into his waistband to reveal the silver belt buckle I’d bought him last Christmas.
He’d rolled his sleeves up to reveal his ribbon tattoo with our initials in it, his hair obscured by a cowboy hat.
He was a quintessential country boy and had some god-like power that made me find him ever more handsome as the years went by.
However, nothing could hide the fact he was lankier than filled out these days.
That was the reason for the photo-shoot.
To permanently etch us in place, where time and sickness couldn’t touch us. It’d been Cassie’s idea when I’d had a weak moment and sobbed in her arms.
It wasn’t often I buckled beneath the always impending knowledge of our future, but when I broke, I broke big.