His brow crooks up as he starts to pull the door open “She?”
I bite down on my tongue, realizing my slipup. “Did I say ‘she’?” I feign dumb.
He nods and there’s a sparkle in his aqua eyes as we step out into the hallway. “So you’d want a girl?”
I fight for oxygen and then seal my lips. If I could picture myself with a kid, I picture it as a little girl, all punked out with blond hair and blue eyes. I’m not ready to admit that aloud yet, though. “Can we just go tell your mom about the wedding?” I ask, trying to sound neutral, but my voice comes out more off pitch than I intended. “Before Lila and Ethan let it slip out.”
He looks at me for about five seconds longer and I wonder whom he sees. The girl he met when he was four? Or the one who ran away when she was eighteen? Or this new one who thinks about weddings and babies? “Whatever you want,” he finally says and starts down the hall.
He’s always saying that and I tug on his arm, stopping him. “What about what you want for once?”
He pauses, searching my eyes for God knows what. “I have everything I want right here,” he says simply, and I can tell he means it.
Chapter 12
Micha
The whole baby talk with Ella was a little weird, but it needed to be talked about, I guess. I’d never thought that much about it, but having kids wouldn’t be so bad, down the road of course. It’s not like I worry I’d turn into a shitty father like mine. I think I was always a bit more like my mom than him and I’m glad. But I want to make sure that Ella and I are both in the right place if we decide to have them.
I meant everything I said. Either way, kids or not, I’ll be happy as long as I’m with her. But I think now I really need to talk to her about my future in music and the tour coming up. I should have probably told her right after the baby talk since we were talking about our future. It would have been a good time, but I was scared and nervous of what she would say—or what she wouldn’t say. Music is my passion, my emotional outlet in really hard times, and Ella knows this and I know she’ll be supportive, but what I don’t know is if she’ll come with, and if she does, will she be doing it because she wants to or because she thinks it’s what I want? And if she doesn’t, then that means I have to give it up—give up my dream. And knowing that makes me want to avoid it as long as possible.
With the tour and our future still lingering in my mind, we enter the kitchen with our fingers linked, the fresh aroma of coffee in the air. I feel like I’m seven years old again and Ella and I are telling my mom how we broke our next-door neighbor Mrs. Millerson’s garden gnome because we wanted to see if it was a real gnome. Mrs. Millerson had caught us and told us we had to get her a new one. We thought we were going to get yelled at but thankfully my mom always went a little easy on me due to the fact that my dad bailed out and she’s always had a soft spot for Ella.
But now instead of telling my mom about the broken gnome we’re telling her that we want to have a wedding in five days and how we almost got married without her. My mom flips out at first, more than I thought she would, but her anger turns to excitement when I remind her that yeah, we were going to get married without her but we decided not to.
Thomas, my mom’s boyfriend who’s a little younger than her, is in the kitchen eating a bowl of cereal at the table while all this goes on. He looks a little more cleaned up than when we last saw him, at least he’s wearing a clean T-shirt and jeans without holes in them. My mom is still dressing like she’s younger—her shirt has all this flashy diamond shit on it and there’s some on the trim of her pants. But I don’t say anything about it. I get that she’s happy and even though I still think Thomas is an idiot, especially when he drips milk on the front of his shirt, he seems to make her happy.
“So we’re really going to do this?” my mom asks with a grin on her face as she pours a cup of coffee.
“Do what?” I ask, exchanging a confused glance with Ella, who shrugs, as confused as I am.
My mom shakes her head at me as she sets the coffeepot down on the counter near the sink. “Get married.”
I press back a smirk. “I didn’t realize it was a we thing.”
She sighs, like I’m a silly little child, and walks past us, making her way across the kitchen to the fridge. “I didn’t mean we as in all of us.” She opens the fridge door and takes out a gallon of milk. “I meant we as in you and Ella.” She beams at Ella as she pours milk into her coffee. “The daughter I never had. God, this is going to be so much fun.”
Ella steps back, tensing, shying away because my mom’s enthusiasm is scaring the shit out of her. “What’s going to be so much fun?” she asks.
“Planning your wedding.” My mom glances at Ella and me as she puts the milk back into the fridge. “You two are going to have the best wedding. I’m going to make sure of that.”
I pull Ella toward me and circle my arms around her waist, trying to ease her panic. “You know you have only five days to plan it and then we have to return home, right?” I tell my mom.
My mom clasps her hands together and glances over her shoulder at the snowflakes drifting down from the cloudy sky. It’s early afternoon but with the lack of sunlight it looks like it’s late in the day. “Five days is perfect.” She returns her attention to us. “I can do a lot in five days.”
“And we’re all broke,” I remind her, pressing Ella’s back against my chest. She’s being really quiet and it’s making me nervous. I’m not sure if it’s all the wedding talk that’s freaking her out or the fact that we just had a baby talk.
“I have some money saved up.” My mom collects her cup of coffee from off the counter. “And besides, you can have a nice wedding without spending a whole lot of money.” Her eyes land on Ella. “Do you have a dress already?”
Ella shakes her head and then blinks at my mom distractedly. “What?”
“A dress, sweetie.” My mom looks at me questioningly from over the top of her cup as she takes a swallow. “Does she have one yet?”
I lean over Ella’s shoulder to catch her eye and I’m startled by the layer of water in her eyes. There’s something wrong and I need to find out what. “Yeah, she has one,” I say to my mom and then grab Ella’s hand and lead her toward the hallway, calling over my shoulder. “Mom, we’ll be right back.”
Ella absentmindedly follows me. Once I get her into the hallway and out of my mother’s gaze, I stop us and whirl her around to face me.
“Okay, what’s wrong?” I ask, examining her watery eyes.
She stares over my shoulder at a few framed pictures of my mom and me hanging on the wall. “It’s nothing.”
I place my hand on her cheek and force her to look at me. “It is something; otherwise you wouldn’t be about ready to cry.”
“I don’t…” Tears bubble in the corner of her eyes and her voice cracks. “It’s just that… God, this is so stupid.” She rubs the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Nothing you say is stupid,” I assure her, wiping a stray tear away with my thumb.
She frowns doubtfully at me. “Even when I told you that I was pretty sure we could push to one hundred miles per hour when there was a foot of snow on the road?”
“Yeah, well, we all have our drunk moments,” I say, recollecting the night she’s talking about. How she was a little drunk and a little excited over the fact that some dude told her she had a nice ass. She would never admit that was what was making her all cheery, but I could tell it was and it was f**king annoying.
“Go faster,” she’d begged from the passenger seat with her head against the dashboard as she watched the night sky through the window. “Go, like, a hundred.”
“No way,” I’d replied, shifting into a lower gear as the engine grumbled. The road was dangerous going twenty-five, the car barely able to keep any sort of traction as we slid up the vacant street, heading home.
“Oh come on, Micha Scott.” She sat up and ran her fingers through her hair. She had on a leather jacket and a black shirt underneath it that had a low collar and I could see the curves of her br**sts. The sight made me hard, which pissed me off because another guy had put a smile on her face. “Just try it. If things get too crazy, you can stop.”
I shook my head, ripping my gaze from her cl**vage. “You’re drunk and thinking stupid.”
“Hey, that’s not very nice.” She’d pouted. I hated when she pouted because she looked ridiculously sexy and it made it difficult to deny her anything she was asking for, even if it meant us getting killed. She propped her elbows onto the console and leaned over, putting her face only inches away from my cheek. “Come on, just do it. For me.” She had this amused, drunk look on her face. She was too gorgeous, perfect, beautiful for her own good. If I could, I would have told her that. Told her how amazingly perfect she was and how I could spend thousands of hours writing lyrics about how beautiful she was and it wouldn’t even begin to describe it.
My eyes may have been on the road but all my attention was on her. “Pretty girl, I’m not going to kill us, no matter how hard you beg.”
Her lip popped out even more as she slumped back in the seat. “Fine. Don’t have any fun.” Propping her boots on the console, she’d slouched back against the seat. “And I don’t know why you keep calling me that.”
“What, pretty girl?” I smiled amusedly as she nodded with a frown, her eyelids drifting shut as exhaustion took her over. I took a chance, telling her the truth, knowing that she probably wouldn’t remember it by morning. “It’s because I think you’re beautiful, but I can never get away with calling you beautiful without you kicking my ass, so I settled for a more milder version of the truth.” I sighed as she passed out, her knees slumping to the side and falling off the dash and onto the floor. Then her head lowered down against the console and she wiggled it to the side until it was pressed against my ribs and her hair was on my lap. Smiling, I slowed down the car and took my time getting home. The night actually turned out to be pretty f**king perfect.
“I’ve had a lot more stupid moments than you.” Ella’s voice jerks me from the memory.
“Oh, I doubt that,” I argue, bracing my hand on the wall beside her head. “And I doubt that whatever you’re going to tell me is going to sound stupid.”
She rubs her hand over her face, leaving red lines on her skin. “Part of the reason…” She clears her throat. “I’m just thinking about mom stuff. That’s all.”
“About the journal?”
“No… about getting married… without a mom around.” She wavers. “It’s part of the reason why I wanted to get married here. So we would be close to her.”
My heart sinks into my stomach. Through all of this, I’d never even thought about that. About how she must be feeling about her mom not being around for all of this.