My eyes filled with tears, and I nodded.
“I need to hear the words.”
“I will marry you, Tackle.”
He stood, walked around the bed, and lay naked beside me. I turned my body toward his, and we kissed.
“I love you, Sloane.”
“I love you, Landry.”
He raised a brow.
“It is your name.”
He laughed. “As long as you love me, I don’t really care what you call me.”
There were many things I was tempted to say, but he’d just proposed and I’d accepted. I didn’t want to make a joke of something I’d dreamed about my entire life.
I leaned forward and kissed him as tears ran down my cheeks. He pulled back and looked into my eyes. “I want you to be my wife, Sloane. I want it so much, it hurts, and that’s the part I want you to know. I understand we need to wait, since you’re on bed rest, but know that if I could, I’d marry you today.”
“What about Thursday?”
“Thursday?”
“There’s a three-day waiting period to get the marriage license in Massachusetts.”
“Is that right?”
“I doubt the justice of the peace would be busy on a weekday.”
Tackle smiled. “Unlikely.”
“You’d probably want to call just to make sure.”
“You’ve thought about this?”
“No, Tackle, I’ve dreamed about this—my whole life.”
Epilogue
Tackle
On the twentieth day of August, Landry Carolina Alice Sorenson made her debut. Sloane and I decided we didn’t want anyone in the delivery room with us other than the doctors and nurses, much to both our mothers’ dismay.
Three hours after her water broke, Sloane grasped my hand with hers as we watched our baby girl take her first breaths.
I cried unashamedly when the doctor placed Landry on Sloane’s chest, and she looked first at her mother and then at me.
“She looks like you,” said Sloane.
I shook my head. “She looks like you, and she’s perfect.”
A little less than two years later, Landry’s baby brother joined our family. Sloane told me that since she’d chosen the name for our precocious and precious little girl, she wanted me to choose the name for our boy.
He was two weeks old when I came to Sloane with the name I’d finally decided on. It hadn’t been hard to come up with, only the order was.
“Bodhi Nils Benjamin Sorenson.”