I was supposed to be finished at the hospital at three, but it wasn’t until six that I was walking out the door. That we were walking out the door.
Heath had been a silent shadow.
Until the kids talked to him and every ounce of his ice melted with them. He smiled, he laughed. Told jokes. He transformed.
It was utterly beautiful.
And it somehow turned ugly and rancid on my insides. Not because I was jealous of those little children getting a part of Heath I’d never get, no, I was glad they got that. No, it was for an entirely different reason.
A reason that sent a conversation from six years ago hurtling into the forefront of my mind.
“Can I ask you something?”
“I thought we’d discussed that you don’t have to ask me to ask a question,” he replied, voice light and teasing.
I smiled into his chest. “Oh, yes, well my mind has been somewhat occupied since then.”
The tenderness between my thighs served as a beautiful reminder of this.
I didn’t think anyone in the history of the world had been introduced to sex as thoroughly and as often as I had in the course of this weekend.
I was talking to try to chase away the ever lighting of the previously pitch black sky. I usually liked sunrises. Loved them. As a girl who slept little, I was usually always up to see them, to welcome a new day, a new adventure.
I didn’t want a new day.
And no adventure could top the weekend I spent with Heath.
I didn’t want it to.
But it would.
Every day had a sunrise. And it just so happened the one coming in a handful of hours was going to signal the end of something bigger than the fricking sun itself.
To me, anyway.
Hence me trying to distract myself. Trying to fill myself up with as much knowledge about this man as I possibly could.
“Does everything you went through as a kid make you not want one?” I whispered.
His arms tightened around me. “Fuck no,” he said. “My parents controlled me when I was helpless. Until I got old enough that I didn’t let them. They don’t get that. They don’t get to take that shit away when they’ve already taken shit from me to turn me into what I am now. I want kids. Want a chance to be the father I never got. Give my sons and daughters the mother I never got. Want a family, ‘cause I never had one. Want to make a life I never had. Not gonna continue any fuckin’ cycle.”
I blinked away tears at his words. That didn’t work. They fell onto his bare chest.
He clutched my chin, bringing my head up to face him even though he couldn’t see me in the dim moonlight. His thumb wiped at the wetness on my cheek. “You don’t need to cry for my past, Sunshine. ‘Specially when my present is this fucking great.”
I swallowed roughly. Present. That’s what I needed to focus on. Not that empty future that dawn would bring.
“How many kids do you want?” I asked, deciding to give myself a luxury I’d never have after the sun came up.
A fantasy of the future. An impossible future. One where Heath finds his way back, finds his way back to me. He doesn’t look at me with fresh eyes and decide that I am just a girl that gave him distraction on a lonely weekend. He tells me this weekend carried him through the years.
We pick it up where we left off.
There’s marriage.
Children.
A family.
Ours.
And every morning is spent waking up in Heath’s arms.
“However many I can fit into a minivan,” he said.
“You would drive a minivan? Isn’t that like humanely impossible for a man like you?”
He chuckled. “A man like me?”
“Yes, a manly, strong, Marine type man.”
“Well, this manly, strong, Marine type man would happily drive a minivan if it was full of my kids. My family. Manliest thing I could ever do, I’d think.”
My heart swelled the size of Jupiter.
I imagined myself sitting next to Heath in a minivan. It was a comforting thought. Even though before then, the idea of any kind of conventional, cookie-cutter ‘American Dream’ sickened me and every decision I made was purposefully done to move me as far away from that life as possible.
But I wanted the dream with Heath.
A lot had changed about Heath since that conversation in the early hours of the morning. I had been responsible for some of the changes. But the harshness of his path was responsible for the rest. He may have looked different, sounded different, spoke crueler, acted colder, but he hadn’t changed that dream. For a family.
It was unmissable in the way he interacted with those children.
It was still haunting me as we walked out into the crisp air of January in L.A.