“I guess we really have no reason to keep quiet now.” He snorted and slipped his hand under my shirt so he could rub my stomach. “We’re going to be shoved in the public eye come the new year.”
“Yeah, that’s going to be… interesting.”
“We don’t have to.”
“No, we do. We made a deal.”
“I love you, Jules.”
“I love you too, Ash.”
“I can’t stop shaking.” Ash pulled his hand free from under my shirt and showed me it was trembling.
“That was intense. It’s no wonder you’re still amped up.”
“Can we stay like this for a while?” he asked softly, sliding his hand back under my shirt.
“We can stay like this for as long as you want.” I kissed his forehead and resumed stroking his hair.
Ash pressed a kiss against my chest and threaded one of his legs between mine.
I held him close and tried to project calm to him by breathing steadily.
My opinions of his dad hadn’t changed, but I understood that Ash wasn’t ready to say good-bye. As much as his parents had hurt him, especially his father, he still needed them.
Would this be a turning point? I wasn’t sure. His dad wasn’t a nice man, and he’d only agreed to accept us because it benefitted him. At least Ash would get a relationship with his siblings out of the deal. His dad and stepmom might be lost causes, but hopefully, his brother and sister would accept him as they got older.
Even if they didn’t, Ash would always have a home with me. We might not have parents who gave a shit about us, but that was fine. We’d make our own family, just us and hopefully our siblings.
Ash was my everything, and we’d face whatever the future had in store for us together.
Things between us might have started rocky, and we might have hurt each other because we’d been dealing with our own trauma, but all that was ancient history.
Ash was mine, and I was his.