"You know, at least until that parasite gets out of you."
"It's a baby, not a parasite."
"It literally feeds off of you and needs you to live. It is the definition of a parasite. You can name your parasite and you can read it stories and you can play it classical music, so its brain develops right. But it is still a parasite."
"You're ridiculous. What are you going to do if you ever get pregnant?"
"Have them induce a coma until the thing claws its way out of me, I should think."
Liv shot me a look behind Astrid's back, one that was oh-so familiar. The exasperation mixed with affection. Astrid had always brought that out of her.
It was good to know some things never changed.
Especially seeing as so many things already were.
Moving out of the apartment was a long time coming, though.
I knew it had to happen ever since the day after I got home from handling the sniveling little shit who had made her life a living hell to find her sitting in the living room, staring at the ceiling.
"What's the matter?"
"Can you please tell Astrid that I hate her a little for bringing them more to my attention?" she asked, wincing a little as one of the dogs let out a sound that seemed like it might be dying. In a dog's world, not seeing their owner for more than a few hours was pretty much the same thing.
"C-Can d-do t-that."
And after I did that, I started looking around on my phone. Not around Annie. I wanted to keep it a surprise, didn't want her to get too much in her own head about it.
As it was, it had taken three days of convincing to get her to agree to letting the apartment across the hall go.
There was no reason to keep it. We never even went over there.
I understood her need to feel secure and independent, but in the end, her frugal upbringing had been what had won out. There was no reason to pay bills for a place you never went to when that money could be piling up in a savings account.
It had been too soon to tell her the truth. That she wouldn't have to worry about money, about security, about her savings versus her spending ever again.
Because I planned to keep her mine.
Put a ring on that important finger to make it official. And then everything that was mine - which was likely considerably more than she imagined it was - would be hers as well.
We had to ease into all that, though.
Moving out of the apartment was the next important step.
Luckily, her annoyance with the loud neighbors was enough to make her agree almost immediately when I'd said I had bought a house and wanted her to live with me there.
Really, if it weren't for the dogs, I don't think she would have been quite so keen to take that plunge just yet.
But that was okay.
I was willing to let that be the deciding factor.
Though I knew it was much more than that.
I felt like I had been waiting so long for the next phase of my life to start. All the while being wholly unaware of what that might look like, what I wanted that to look like.
It wasn't until Annie that it all seemed to click.
And I knew what I wanted.
The house.
The dog.
The kids.
The happily ever after.
They weren't things I would be allowed to have before. Or at least, that was what I had thought.
Then there she was.
Sweet.
Adorable.
Open.
Accepting.
She made it all seem to simple, so attainable.
The dogs were my excuse, but the truth was, I felt like we'd already wasted enough time. We needed to get things started.
We needed to build that happily ever after.
I figured it was a little too soon for the ring. I understood that Annie's mom had instilled a lot of independence in her. Then Thomas had fucked with her ability to trust, had yanked her roots out for so long that she didn't think they ever could be replanted.
But they could.
I was about to show her how.
It might take some time. To help her adjust. To feel completely safe, stable, to realize she had finally found the place where she belonged, the person she belonged with.
The house was yet another on the same street as a bunch of my brothers. Pretty soon, we were going to own the whole damn street. It was a nice little craftsman bungalow with a steeply pitched roof, farmer's porch with tapered columns, Douglas fir trim, old, wide-plank floors, and a quarter acre fenced backyard with a giant weeping willow providing character and shade.
It was in good shape already, but could use some updating, some minor fixes to bring it to its former glory, just a little neglected for a decade or so thanks to aging owners who weren't in the best shape for keeping a house up.