“Yeah?” I heard him say from the other room.
“My water just broke,” I yelled back, breathing through a row of cramps that just hit me.
“Oh, shit…I’ll be right there,” I heard him say. Then I heard him running from room to room. He grabbed our hospital bags and almost missed me on the way out the door.
“Hey, are you going by yourself?” I yelled at him, and he skidded to a stop.
“Shit.” I heard him mutter as he ran back to help me out the door. I couldn’t help but laugh, and that made him laugh too.
“It’s fine, honey. Take a deep breath and relax.” I laughed at him. But then I sobered up and asked him, “Do you think the baby will be strong enough to make it? It is a month before my due date.”
“I hadn’t even thought about that. I was just nervous, excited, happy, and all that. But I think you and the baby will be fine. We do have the best doctor on the case after all,” he said, referring to a friend of his who had become our pediatrician.
I got rushed into the birthing room, and the nurses prepared me. Archer was pushed out of the way and was forced to look at me from across the room. After a few minutes, he was able to make it over to me. He smiled, “Hey, how are the contractions?”
“Surprisingly, not too bad,” I admitted. I had heard horrible rumors about the pain of giving birth. To me, this seemed like nothing much.
I had that thought too soon, though. The next set of contractions made me cry out in agony. “Holy mother of god! That hurts like a bitch!” I shouted.
I heard Archer laugh, and I shot him a look that said, “You did this to me.”
His face became serious. “I’m sorry, babe.” He held out his hand. “Squeeze it if you need to. We are in this together, like everything we do.”
I grabbed his hand, and a few moments later when the next contraction hit, I squeezed his hand. I heard him grunt in pain.
“Push one more time,” ordered the doctor, and I did it as well as I could.
“Congratulations, you are the proud parents of a baby girl. She looks healthy, and we will run a few tests, just to make sure. But here she is.” The doctor handed our small bundle of joy over to me, and I felt the tears as they flowed down my face.
“She’s amazing,” I said as I looked at her tiny fingers and little nails, everything so small. “She looks like I could break her, she’s so small.”
“She is beautiful, just like her mother,” Archer said to me.
“Would you like to hold her?” I asked him.
“I don’t want to hurt her,” he hesitated.
“You won’t.”
He took her. “So, did you decide on a name?” he asked as he smiled down at our new little girl. I could tell by the look of fascination on his face what he was thinking: We created this little girl, and she was equal parts of us both. I thought that was amazing.
“Zoey. After my great-grandmother. Zoey Sarah Roman,” I told him.
“Hey, Zoey. I’m your daddy, and I love you very much. I hope you are ready to see China as you grow up. This is your mother, and she loves you too. You look a lot like her, and you are my peanut,” Archer whispered to the baby.
I laughed, “You can’t call her peanut.”
“Why not?” he asked with mock indignation.
“Because it sounds too masculine,” I informed him.
“A peanut in this sense is cute, precious, tiny, and all ours.”
“Okay, but I don’t want her thinking that is her name for the first four years of her life.” I laughed.
He joined in my laughter. “Hmm…Peanut Roman. Yeah, that name just doesn’t sound that good.”
I was so excited when it was time to feed our little angel. That was how I had begun to think of her. She was so precious looking. Her hair was blonde, but there was so much of it. Her little denim blue eyes looked so much like her father’s staring up at me. I just felt so much love pouring out of me. I felt like we had accomplished something amazing with this little girl. I just wanted to keep her safe in my arms for her whole life. Now, a few of the conversations I’d had with Kimberly in the past made more sense to me. I had felt a semblance of this with my children at school; however, this emotion was intensified about a million times when I looked at Zoey. I thought of all of those women who’d decided to terminate their own pregnancies and what they had missed out on. I knew I was odd in this because the people who had abortions had made that choice for a reason.
But I was so happy that Zoey was healthy. The nurse told me she weighed 4 pounds, 4 ounces, and was 17 inches long. She was skinny, and to me, she looked like she needed to eat. So when I went to feed her and she took my breast, I was happy. She ate eagerly, and I burped her.
I looked up as the nurse came in. Archer had gone to get some lunch and would be back soon.
“Mrs. Roman, we have to keep your baby in the newborn ICU unit until she gets a bit stronger. But don’t worry, you will still be able to feed her every day,” the doctor informed me as he entered the room.
I looked down at my daughter. “What’s wrong with her?” I asked, thinking he meant that something was wrong with Zoey.
“Nothing. She’s as healthy as she can be. But, she’s small, and her immune system isn’t fully developed yet. So it’s best we keep her as isolated as possible,” he explained.
Archer walked in as the doctor was explaining this to me. “Is our daughter alright?” he asked, the concern apparent in his voice.
“We just need to let her get a bit older and bigger. She’s fine, though.”
I cried as I looked down at Zoey, knowing that at night, she would be sleeping in a room surrounded by other small children. I wanted to have her in her own room, or in our room, in the bassinet we had purchased.
“I’m sorry, honey,” I told Archer.
“Why are you sorry?” he asked me.
“Because she has to be apart from us for a little bit. I’ll have to postpone my flight out too. We were supposed to leave in two days to go,” I reminded him.
“So, we will stay in town until Zoey is okay to be discharged and until they say it is okay for her to fly. If the school really wants you, they will understand and will adjust to allow for your later arrival,” Archer said.
“I love you, babe. You really are a sweet man. I still can’t believe how we got here.” I smiled as the memories of our time together flashed through my mind.
He laughed. “We will have some great stories to tell Zoey when she gets older.”
“Oh, no way. I don’t want her to know about Vegas.”
“Why not? It would be a great story for her to share in school, say on show and tell day!” He chuckled.
I pictured it – my daughter, now six years old. She would stand up proudly in front of her small classmates. “I was conceived on a weekend in Vegas. My mother and father got drunk and married too. It was a weekend that neither of them remember too much. But they always tell me how thrilled they are by the result…which is me!” That would be our child, I was sure of it.
He looked at me and asked, “What are you thinking?”
“Just how our child would do a show and tell about how we met,” I admitted.
He laughed. “Yeah, I did too.”
“What did you picture?” I asked him.
“You first,” he demanded.
So I told him what I had imagined. He laughed loudly. “That was way better than mine,” he admitted.
“So tell me yours.”
“Hi, I’m Zoey Roman. My parents are crazy. They met in Vegas and married and had me.”
“Yeah, that is way boring compared to mine.” I laughed.
“You are the more creative of us two.” He kissed me.
We watched as they took Zoey out to place her in the NICU. “You can always come and visit her if you don’t want to wait until feeding time,” the nurse told us.
We both got up and followed her to where they had placed our precious girl into her little bassinet.
I waved at her as she cried until the binky was secured in her mouth. I wanted to hold her and make her happy.
“It won’t be long. She’s a product of us. She won’t let anything hold her back,” Archer consoled me.
I smiled at him. “Thank you, love.”
We kissed, and I knew that my world would never be the same again. But I would do everything I had to get right back to this very spot. I wouldn’t have changed a single thing, not even Jasmine. Because of her, Archer had realized that there were at least two types of woman in the world – the good and the bad. That was how he had explained it to me one night.
“She was bad, so bad, and you are nothing like her. You are the polar opposite. She was crazy, whereas you…well, you’re crazy, but it is a good crazy,” he had said to me.
I had punched him jokingly and laughed. “If I’m crazy, what does that say about you? You married me!”
“Hey, I was drunk!” he had held up his hands and protested.
I couldn’t help it; I had laughed for a long time. My sides had hurt after I had finally stopped laughing.
Then he told me, “I wouldn’t have changed anything either. Well, I would have told Mom and Dad how I felt a long time ago. However, that is thanks to you, too. You’ve helped me in so many ways. I am so happy to be with you.” And with that, Archer had kissed me deeply.
Back to present day, Archer looked at me and said, “I never did explain the ring to you, did I?”
I looked down at the beautiful ring he had given me in his office the day he had proposed we stayed married. It was an amazing and unique ring. I had never seen anything quite as beautiful. The ring was made of titanium on the sides, and two dolphins had been formed and placed around the band. They were not too big, but they a nice size. There was a rose-tinted diamond in the middle of the ring. It was of medium size and so beautiful. My favorite color has always been rose, and I had fallen in love with the ring immediately when Archer had placed it on my finger.
At the time, he had told me, “Tiffany, I want you to know something. First off, you are truly the only woman I ever want to be married to. You are amazing in so many ways. I love the way your eyes light up when you enjoy the simple things in life. The way that you get those dimples when you smile. Yeah, just like that.” He pointed out the fact that I had smiled and the dimples had shown. “I love the way you smile; it makes your eyes light up in such a wonderful way that they shine like a light. It is a light that has shown me many wondrous things already, and I’m sure many more are to come. But that isn’t all I love about you. I love the way you moan when I make love to you, the way you call out my name when you orgasm. I love the way you scratch and claw at my head when I’m licking you. I love so much about you, and I can’t really talk about the sex part right now, or…” he had stopped at that and pulled me down onto the table.
I hadn’t stopped him that day, nor any day since. I loved how Archer made me feel when he made love to me. Well, I would have to wait a bit now and heal from the birth of our child. But I knew that once I felt well enough, he would please me as he has done many other times.
“I wanted a very special ring for you. I had gone out and looked all over town. I was in the last shop, and the guy pulled this out from his back room. Since it fit you perfectly, you never got to meet him. He told me he had gotten the ring a few weeks prior, but he hadn’t put it out yet. It was like he had heard a voice in his head telling him to hold it, that’s what he told me. I forgot to tell you that because honestly, that day, I had a lot more things on my mind. I had just found out that we were expecting Zoey, and that threw me for a loop.”
“Yeah, that was the way I felt too when Kim read me the results of the test,” I admitted.
“I’m just so happy that you came in for that visit. If you hadn’t come to me, I was going to either crash your class at school one day or show up at the coffee shop,” he told me.
“I had to give up coffee, remember?” I said.
“Yep, so I would have showed up to a class at the place where you had quit your job. Oh shit! I may never have seen you again,” he realized.
I had come to this conclusion earlier than him, quite a while back, before Zoey had even been born. But I had never brought it up to him because that didn’t matter now. We were together and happy, and to me, that was all that counted. “Yes, dear.”
“Wow,” he said, stunned.
“Remember, at the time, I had thought you hated me, so I had thought of just disappearing,” I admitted.
“What changed your mind?” he asked.
“Well, there were a few things. First off, I think it is wrong for a mother to keep a child from their father. I had a cousin who had gotten a girl pregnant, but she didn’t tell him about it. He found out when the child was 8 years old, after the child had been raised by another man. It really hurt my cousin, and I couldn’t do that to you. I pictured the same look on your face if you ever found what I had kept from you. I felt horrible about it. I loved you, and I missed you a lot too. So I came to visit you and to confront you, too. I was upset at the time, thinking you had used me. When I found out the truth, I was embarrassed that I had jumped to the conclusion I had at the time. I also convinced myself that my assumptions were due to my pregnancy, and it could have been that. But I’m just really glad that I decided to come see you that day. It was one of the best days of my life. I have never regretted going to that appointment.”
“You know, at first, I regretted that we got drunk and married. I felt that it wasn’t fair to either of us. However, the more time I spent with you in Maui, the less important that became to me. Instead, thanks to Landon and Beth, I realized what is really important to look at. I cared about you a lot, and I loved you. I had a great wife, not a gold digger or anything like that. But a great woman who supported me, even when she didn’t know me very well. We could learn all we needed to know along the way. Why would I divorce a woman whom I loved and wanted to be with? It really didn’t make much sense once I looked at it from another angle.”
“Yes, that was how I saw it too. Of course, I hadn’t told you I loved you either at the time. I was too scared to, and I also didn’t think it was possible to fall in love so quickly. I have never been a woman who believed in love at first sight. Now, lust at first sight? Yes.” I laughed.
“Yes, I know. But here we are now, happily married. A new family, and soon, a new adventure. Just so you know, Tiffany, there is no one else in the world I would rather have this adventure with than you and Zoey.” He smiled and kissed me deeply.
“You know what I want to know? When did you first think you were in love, and how long did it take you to admit it to yourself? I’m only asking because I took forever to admit it to myself. I was scared; I’ll admit that to you now. At the time, I didn’t even want to think about it. Every time the thought of being in love would pop into my mind, I would push it out as quickly as I could. I avoided thinking about it as much as I could. I would say it took me at least three months in the end between when I fell in love and when I admitted it to myself. Then it took another couple of weeks until I felt comfortable thinking about it. By the way, that was after I talked to you in your office. Before that, I hadn’t even been okay with thinking about it much. I always felt sad thinking about us and thinking you were out there playing the field,” I admitted to him.
“I wasn’t out playing the field; I was longing for you, though,” Archer murmured.
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