Gordon strokes my hair. “He had to go to work, but he kissed you goodbye and said he’d see you tomorrow.”
The pang in my heart is stronger than I would have expected. I wanted him here with us all, and his absence feels wrong, like having a foot that is missing a sock.
“Reggie’s sleeping,” Gordon says softly. “I think you sucked the life out of him.”
“I think you all fucked the life out of me,” I chuckle.
Gordon tips my face and kisses my lips softly. “I wanted to say thanks for the way you jumped in today. It meant a lot that you would face off against someone like Cox to defend us. It made me feel like you already see us as…” He pauses as though he doesn’t really know how to define what we have.
“You’re important to me,” I whisper. “I know it sounds crazy, and it feels crazy… I mean, I’ve only known you all for such a short space of time, but you… you mean a lot to me. All of you.”
“It doesn’t sound crazy,” Gordon says. His finger trails over the roundness of my cheek and into my hair, his brow furrowed thoughtfully. “I don’t know what it is, but from the moment you walked through the door, I knew that I wanted to protect you. In my bones, you felt like our family already.”
“John says I remind him of Dad. Maybe it’s that.”
Gordon shrugs his big shoulder, the huge dark tattoo moving with the shift of his rounded muscle. “Sometimes you meet a person, and they just fit. Like your soul can feel that they’re good people… someone worth trusting.”
“I get that. I feel a connection with this house and with all of you, that doesn’t really make sense. I’m usually more guarded about people than I have been. Maybe it’s hormones.”
“You doubt yourself, your instincts.”
I look away from his handsome face, the intensity of his eyes, and the serious furrow of his brows, making me feel like I’m suddenly under the microscope. He’s right. I do doubt my instincts because so far, I’ve stumbled through life making bad choices.
Gordon tips my chin again, forcing me to look into his dark eyes. He goes to say something but behind me, Reggie shifts, pressing a kiss to the small of my back. His voice is gravelly when he speaks. “We’re made of three parts, Maggie. Our mind, our heart, and our gut. When we listen to one of those parts, we lose our way. The heart isn’t cautious enough, so it leads us to try and find love where there is only emptiness. The mind is too rational, so it ignores the softer needs of the heart and doesn’t leave room for forgiveness. The gut is instinctive, but we ignore it because it causes quick flashes of reaction so deep inside that the heart and mind can easily swamp it. But it’s the gut we need to learn to listen to. It’s holds the deepest sense of what we need and will give us the quickest feeling about when something is right or wrong.”
Gordon nods, his face softening at his brother’s words. “Reggie is right. I know I’m guilty of listening to my rational mind too much. And my heart is what causes me to react with too much passion. Like with Cox; if I’d listened to my gut, I would have told everyone to get out of that gym before anything happened. I could feel that there was something negative in the air, but I didn’t listen to that deep-rooted feeling.”
“What do you feel in your gut, Maggie? About everything that’s going on in your life right now?”
“I guess I’m not good at hearing that part of myself. If I were, I think I would have avoided a whole lot of heartache and trodden a few different paths in my short life.”
Reggie’s hand comes around my stomach and he rests it there, warming the place where little Peanut is growing and changing with every passing second. “Charles Dickens wrote something in Great Expectations about the chains of our life and how just one day struck out of it would change the entire course. That’s the same for good days and bad. Sometimes our most negative experiences… the things we think we might change if we got a chance for a do-over, are the ones that bring us the greatest joy. I think it will be the same for you.”
“You do?” I turn to face him and smile at the messiness of his soft curly hair and the sleepiness of his light eyes. They never seem to be the same color, changing according to the light and maybe his mood. Reggie nods. “If you hadn’t gotten pregnant, your mom wouldn’t have tried to call your dad. You wouldn’t have come here. Everything would have been different. And when that baby is born, no matter how much of a disappointment it might be that the father isn’t the man you would have hoped for him to be, you’re going to love it more than you love anything else and nothing about how it was conceived will matter.”