“You think?” she crossed her arms and glared at me.
Ignoring that, I continued, “And it would have been better if you expression hadn’t been caused by your brain ricocheting around your skull, but no one knows that’s why you look like that. In that photo they see a beautiful woman in a rare moment where all the problems we experience daily in real life aren’t weighing her down. They see a man with the same expression, but they don’t know that it’s because that man is holding the woman’s daughter, and loving every second because he loves her. They don’t know that the baby was smiling up at the guy at that moment, too, and that because of both of those females, he was so happy he felt like his heart was going to explode.” The tears started building up in her eyes again, but I wasn’t done. “But I know all of that, because I felt all of that, and I get to share that moment with the country. So, I don’t regret it – in fact, I fucking love it.” I finished, my heart feeling like it was going to burst out of my shirt it was beating that fast.
Throughout my speech, all the happiness and frustration that were warring against each other because I wanted her to know and feel the beauty that I was, I’d forgotten that we were giving Jarrod a ride to the reception, and that he was still in the car with Liv, watching all of this. Apparently Jose forgot that nugget of info, too, because she jumped up at me, wrapped her legs around my waist, and kissed me. It was a natural gravitation – like her ass was a magnet to my hands – because as soon as her lips touched mine, I was holding her by the butt, leaning her back against the vehicle, and kissing her like my life depended on it.
“Kids, there’s a baby watching,” Jarrod’s deep voice rumbled, but what he was saying didn’t register through the Jose-haze taking over.
That was until a cranky and teething Olivia started crying, and it was the full-blown wail that babies do so well that makes the world stop. When Jose had first given birth to her, we’d gone to a baby class where you meet other parents and learn about babies in general. The pro-parents – the ones who’d already done this at least once before – and the expert who ran it told us that it was healthy to let the baby be held by other people. Obviously they had to be ones you knew and trusted with your child, not just some random person on the street. It had been hard to do it, in fact it still was, but apparently it made for a less anxious baby and helped their socializing skills as their cognitive functions grew. As her mother, Jose had her a majority of the time, but Liv loved being held by the people she knew and recognized them from a young age, which was pretty damn impressive to me. So, as she cried, she held on to Jarrod, rubbing her face into his chest while trying to hug him with her tiny arms. Seeing a man as big as him, one who topped me by at least six inches, holding a little human was a sight to behold, but it also tugged at your heart. I wasn’t capable of not going into panic mode when she cried, I just hadn’t learned that skill yet, and I also hadn’t learned to not get the gut cramps either. So, I did what I always did, and moved to go to her, Jose following close behind me.
I don’t know how Jarrod the giant did it, but I’d only taken four steps toward them when she stopped crying, leaned back and listened intently to whatever it was he was saying. As I got closer, I heard the soft, deep rumble of his voice as he sang to her, but I couldn’t make out what it was. It was Jose who recognized it before I did, grabbing my arm and digging her nails in. “Is that Brown Eyed Girl?”
Listening more closely, the words began to make sense, and she was right, he was singing the Van Morrison song, except he’d changed it to green instead of brown. Just as he got halfway through it, he switched to another song by the same man, Have I Told You Lately, seamlessly blending the two together. I swear Liv didn’t blink once, too mesmerized by her buddy. It went against everything in me not to ask for my little princess back, a child who didn’t carry my DNA but who meant everything to me regardless, but I kept control of the impulse and watched every emotion as it flicked across her face. She was loving every second, and I wasn’t oblivious to the lash flutters and baby flirts that she was pulling on him. The man was already wrapped around her little finger, though, so she didn’t have to try too hard to make him smile and stumble over the words, getting a giggle from her. “She’s awful,” Jose snorted, leaning into my side as I wrapped my arm around her. “She totally loved every second of that mistake.”