Page 62 of Yours, Now and Always
AMELIA
Breakfast felt like the calm before the chaos. Not quiet—god, no, not with our brothers and our daughters—but warm. Full. One of those slow, grounding hours where everyone’s talking over each other and somehow it still feels like peace.
Colin and Tim made sure I ate. Luna and Sarah talked non-stop about the book they’re writing. Gage didn’t take his eyes off me. And everyone else made it feel like today mattered.Like I mattered. Like this whole wild, holy thing we’re doing is something worth stopping the world for. Maybe that’s why I didn’t fully notice the ache in my body or my nerves until now when Gage and I are alone in our bedroom after breakfast.
I’m elbow-deep in my dresser drawer, yanking out lace and mesh and every carefully packed fantasy I had of being a soft, sexy goddess under my dress today becausenone of that matters now.The betrayal by my uterus means the thong I originally picked is dead to me, and what Iactuallyneed is the emergency pair of black seamless boyshorts IswearI packed. The ones that don’t roll, don’t pinch, and won’t make me want to commit a felony mid-ceremony.
I wish I could be like one of those women in tampon commercials. The ones who float through life in white linen with a smile on their face. Joyful even, while their life is being sucked out of them via their uterus.
I am not one of them.
My periods are heavy and painful. They require black leggings, primal screaming into pillows, and a man emotionally equipped to survive the rage in my bones. I don’t glide through life. I stomp. I whine. I fling myself onto the couch dramatically and refuse to leave. Sometimes I bleat like a goat. For emotional effect.
Gage is across the room packing his suit to take it to one of the cottages to get ready for the wedding with his brothers. He’s all calm focus and quiet hands while I’m two seconds away from losing my sanity over missing underwear. And all I can think is:men. They have no idea how easy they’ve got it. No cramps. No blood. No hormones pushing them to cry and commit murder in the same breath.
I slam the drawer shut. “They were right here,” I mutter, throwing open the next one and digging through more underwear. “Ipackedthem. I had a whole system to make sure I didn’t forget anything.”
Behind me, Gage doesn’t even pause his slow, methodical folding. “You sure you didn’t leave them in your overnight bag?”
“No,” I snap, eyeing him in the dresser mirror. “Did you move them from the piles I had laid out?”
That gets his attention. He looks up. “You think I moved your underwear?”
I pause. Because evenIknow I’m being irrational. But I dig my heels in anyway. “Yes.”
His lips twitch. “I value my life, Princess.”
I glare at him and then at the drawer. “This is how women end up burning kingdoms down.”
He chuckles. Of course he finds this funny. Of coursehe’spacked, dressed, calm, and carrying the energy of a man who doesn’t have to shove a pad into underwear today. This only serves to irritate me more.
I spin to face him. “This is how it begins.”
“How what begins?”
“Irreconcilable differences. This is how people spiral into it.”
He straightens, fully focused now. “By the wife misplacing her underwear?”
“By the husband forgetting which milk his wife drinks. Step one: he stops loving her enough to bring the right milk for her morning coffee.”
“You think I don’t love you because I brought the wrong milk?”
Hedidbring the wrong milk. Which means that not only am I a hormonal, slightly unhinged woman today, but I’m also an uncaffeinated one.
“I wrote you a list. I texted you the list.AndI texted you while you were shopping to remind you about my oat milk.”
“I offered to go buy it this morning.”
He did. But we’re not talking about that.
“And now I don’t have the underwear I need to survive this day.”
My husband is the most patient man I know, and I watch every bone in his body work overtime to hold the line.
IknowI’m being absurd. But there is nothing like a woman possessed by a period demon. I am unable to let this go.
“One morning without coffee won’t kill you.”
