Page 107 of Into the Mountains
A small, gold ring rests there, catching the sunlight at different angles.
“Yes,” she says. “Together.”
I place the ring on her finger and she throws her arms around me, pressing her lips firmly against mine, feeling my heart wanting to burst from my chest as it fully belongs to her and hers to me. Forever.
SIX YEARS LATER
“Come on!” she yells, emphasizing the last word. “We are going to miss it.”
“I don’t think we are going to miss anything, honey. Considering, we are the ones who are throwing the party.”
Charlie is sitting at the edge of our king-sized bed, out of breath as she tries to reach over her slightly rounded belly to tie her shoelaces.
“I know, but part of me hasn’t fully trusted Hudson to keep it a secret and my hormones slash anxiety are telling me that he’s spilled the beans to the whole town. Which even if he only told one person, that’s practically telling the whole damn town because no one has anything better to do than gossip about what’s between—”
I stop her rambling with a kiss, because if I know anything from her pregnancy hormones lately, it’s that when she starts rambling, she isn’t exactly sure how to stop it.
A voice comes from the bottom of the stairs. “Stop trying to make her go into labor and get the hell down here, already!”
We roll our eyes at the same time. “Hudson,” we say in unison.
I help her tie her shoes the rest of the way and pull her up to her feet. “Ready to go?”
“Yeah,” she says, placing her hand in mine. We make our way carefully down the stairs. It’s been a long time since I’ve handled anything pregnancy related, and I’ve probably been overly cautious, but I’d rather be that than completely clueless. The pregnancy books say that a present and attentive partner helps bond with the baby as well as the mother, and if I can help my wife in any way through this, I am going to do anything I can. Ethan has been great too. He’s been reading the books with me, not afraid of the anatomy or all the things that he’s learning will happen to his step-mother’s body when she gives birth in a few short months.
“Ma, finally!” Ethan comes around the corner from the kitchen, a fully grown Sable wrapped around his neck.
He comes around to the other side of her, his head practically an inch over hers. I’m constantly shocked at how much he has grown. Both physically and mentally. He’s smart. He was always smart, but he can give Charlie and I a good run most nights. He’s tall and he’s picked up basketball of all things. A sport I knew absolutely nothing about and neither did Charlie, but we sure as hell read up on it and learned all we could the second he told us he was trying out for the high school team. We embarrassed him a lot for the first few weeks as we made a sad attempt at trying to use all the basketball jargon in way too many sentences. He’s been a good sport about it and knows we are just being supportive in the way we know how to. He secretly likes it, but he’s a high-schooler now, which means parents are embarrassing.
“Ready to find out if your sibling is a boy or girl?”
“Definitely another boy.”
“Oh?” Charlie asks. “And how would you know?”
“Gimli loves to snuggle against your stomach. And he only likes boys, so obviously, Ethan Jr. is in there.”
“Let’s get one thing straight, we are not naming him Ethan Jr. I get confused enough with the amount of cat names I have to remember. I can’t have two people with the same name.”
“Speaking of, he is definitely going to need a kitten friend to grow up with,” he says, drawing out the last word like that’s going to convince me.
“I think the six you somehow tricked me into when you were eight is plenty.”
He just shrugs his shoulders, but I know my kid. He’s not letting this subject go that easily.
When we get outside to the backyard, we are met with a mix of traditional blues and pinks on tables that have themed food and cookies with “He or She?”
Hudson greets us at the bottom of the porch stairs. “Dude, we said we just wanted something low-key.”
“In Blue Grove? This is low-key.”
All I can do is accept the effort he’s put into a party we didn’t necessarily want and go with it. “Is this okay?” I turn to Charlie to make sure she isn’t going to go inside to find the baseball bat I know she has hidden in the hallway closet. I can picture her running out here with it and chasing Hudson around the yard.
Instead, I find a bright smile on her face as she takes it all in, a single tear escaping down her cheek. I wipe it away.
“This is…perfect, actually. I thought I’d want to do this with just them, but this is better.”
“Yeah?”
