by Vivian Gray
Kenna laughed at my eagerness and then crawled up the bed, taking long strides like a jungle cat. When her hips were over mine, she reached down to grab my length and positioned it at her opening.
“I have a condom in my pocket,” I said, lifting myself up to grab my jeans from the floor.
Kenna pushed on my chest and shook her head. “I’m clean.”
Oh, right. She was already pregnant. We didn’t need protection from that.
I nodded, and Kenna smiled. Then, she sunk down onto me in one fluid motion.
“God, Kenna,” I said with a choke, followed by a long groan.
She placed her hands on my chest and circled her hips around me, teasing me. She circled one way and then the other, occasionally stopping to lift herself almost all the way off and then drop back down, our bodies slapping together. Each time, I grunted, and Kenna smiled, biting her lip.
After a few minutes of this, my need was too strong. I needed her. I dug my hands into the soft flesh at her hips, my fingers biting into the skin and getting a firm hold. Then, I thrust up into her.
Kenna’s head rolled back, and her lips parted. I did it again, pushing up into her with one movement, and she moaned. I picked up the pace, beating out a rapid rhythm, my hips bucking up as I pulled her down more firmly onto me. She ran her hands through her hair, whispering my name as she gave herself over to the sensation.
She leaned forward, planted her hands on my chest, and began grinding down into me with everything she had. Her forehead was creased, her lips pursed, and the muscles in her arms tensed and strained as her lower half danced on top of me.
I was close. So incredibly close. Pleasure washed across me in warm waves, moving up my chest and down each of my legs. I felt the desire pulsing just below the surface, but I wasn’t ready yet. I wanted it to keep going.
So, just as my body was poised at the edge of the cliff, ready to make the leap, I lifted Kenna off of me and laid her on the bed next to me. Her mouth opened in surprise, but before she could say anything, I made my intentions clear.
I hooked each of my arms behind her knees and lifted until her ankles were resting on my shoulders. As I pushed into her, she let out a long, low moan. In this position, we could both feel each other entirely. I moved slowly, savoring every second, every inch. I looked down into Kenna’s face as we made love.
And that’s what it was – love. For the first time in my life.
Her stormy blue eyes were locked on mine, and I didn’t look away as I neared the cliff again. As my body prepared to release, I kept looking at her as pleasure rippled out from my hips, sending warmth to every part of my body. We stared into each other’s eyes as we trembled in a simultaneous release, Kenna’s body tensing and clenching beneath mine until we both fell back on the bed, lazy and exhausted.
By mid-morning, we were still lying next to each other in bed, and Kenna was beginning to doze, the day before catching up with her. Just before sleep took her, she reached out and stroked my face.
“Are you going to stay with me?”
I leaned forward and kissed her forehead, letting my lips linger against her skin for a few seconds, and then I nodded. “As long as you want me to.”
She smiled. “Good. How does forever sound?”
“Perfect.” I laughed.
“Perfect,” she mumbled.
And then, laying in the circle of my arms, she fell asleep, and I followed closely behind.
Chapter Fifteen
Kenna
Six months later…
Walking around a shopping mall all day while seven months pregnant was moving higher and higher up on my list of worst experiences I’d ever had. With every step, I felt the weight in my stomach pulling downward, threatening to take me with it any minute. My feet were too swollen to wear anything other than sandals, and sandals offered very little in the way of arch support. My hips ached, my lower back ached, my knees ached. My entire body ached. But I still had three more stores to hit before I could go home.
We were two months away from having a tiny newborn living in our house, and Trigger and I still hadn’t bought any clothes or supplies.
He had set up a crib in the nursery and a bassinet next to our bed, but that was a far cry from everything we would need. I’d begged him to come with me, but he insisted he was busy with Broken Mavericks’ stuff.
“Can it not wait until another day?” I asked, hating how whiny I sounded.
I just didn’t like going out by myself anymore. When I left the house with Trigger, people smiled at us and cooed about what a cute couple we were and how precious our baby would be. When I went out by myself, old women gave me the side-eye like I might be some unmarried tramp who would assault their husbands with my sexuality when they weren’t looking.
Though, to be fair, I was unmarried. And I knew if I told the women the baby had been conceived during what was going to be a one-night stand, it would have confirmed their tramp theories. I didn’t really care what they thought, but it was a lot nicer to have people smile at you than glare.
Trigger shook his head over his morning bowl of cereal. Every morning, no matter what, Trigger needed to have his bowl of cereal. I’d even tried making him a hot breakfast of scrambled eggs and pancakes, and still, he preferred cereal. It was baffling, but everyone has their faults.
“No, I’m sorry. It has to be today.”
“I can wait and go shopping another day,” I offered.
“I’m pretty busy the next week or so,” he said. He reached out and kissed my hand before moving to the sink to rinse his bowl. “Really, go on without me. I’ll help you unload the car when you get home and set everything up. I’ll even rub your feet while you watch that ridiculous reality television show about housewives.”
I resisted smiling at him, not wanting to let him off the hook so easily. “And ice cream.”
“Are you making demands?” he asked, eyebrows raised.
I raised an eyebrow in return. “I’m seven months pregnant, and you are sending me to the mall alone. I think that warrants a pint of rocky road ice cream.”
He laughed and rolled his eyes. “Rocky road ice cream, trashy television, and a foot rub. Anything else, my queen?”
I twisted my lips to the side of my mouth, thinking, and then shook my head. “No, that will be all, peasant.”
Trigger crossed the kitchen and wrapped his arms around my waist, pulling my body against him as much as he could, considering the giant beach ball-sized belly under my shirt. “Also, not to make things worse, but your mom called this morning and wants you to stop by her place before coming home.”
When Trigger and I moved into a small two-bedroom house together, Mom had decided to stay in the house we’d shared most of my life. I was nervous about leaving her, but she had been sober for a few months and was working really hard to stay that way. Trigger was able to help her get into a drug counseling program that was doing way better than all of the free rehab programs we’d tried in the past.
She would still call and ask me to check in on her every so often, even search the house for secret stashes for accountability. I knew it was important that I was there for her and that she knew she had someone to turn to if things got bad, but I still hated doing it. I’d spent countless years taking care of my mom, and now that I was getting further along in my pregnancy, closer to being a parent every day, I wanted to focus on my own family.
I groaned and let my forehead rest against his chest. “Worst day ever.”
When I looked back up at Trigger, he was smiling a strange smile.
“What’s with the grin?”
“Nothing,” he said, flattening his mouth and shrugging. “You’re just cute.”
I grabbed my bulging stomach and jiggled it slightly. “Even with all this?”
He leaned down and kissed the bump. “Especially with all this.”
After two hours at the mall, I’d managed to secure an activity center complete with flashing lights and built
-in rattles, a convertible highchair that would work from infant to toddler-aged, and a baby carrier so we could take him on walks – we’d found out the baby was a boy at the twenty-week ultrasound, but we still hadn’t settled on a name.
Nice salespeople helped me load the goods into my car, and then I’d huffed it back inside to shop for clothes. He would be born in winter, so we needed lots of warm material, fuzzy socks, cute little hats with animal ears on top.
I loaded my arms with as many outfits as I could find, ranging in sizes from newborn to twelve months, deciding it would be better to stock up and avoid having to make a repeat shopping trip while the baby was still small because we’d run out of clothes that fit.
I called Trigger twice while I was at the store to ask his opinion on baby shoes, but when he didn’t answer, I decided to buy them both. Part of me was annoyed he hadn’t been able to come with me, but I also knew he had been neglecting his brothers a lot over the past six months.
He had moved out of the clubhouse and started living with me, and we spent most of our time together. Dean had taken to dropping by the house once a week in order to make sure he saw Trigger at least that often. It was good for him to hang out with his MC buddies and have some guy time. I just wished it could have happened on a day where I wasn’t going to be buying a truckload of baby gear.
After stopping off at the bathroom to pee – usually, I would have waited until I’d made it to my mom’s house or home to use the restroom, but the baby was laying on my bladder, and I didn’t have a choice – I gladly left the mall, my arms loaded down with bags of clothes and pacifiers and bibs and headed towards my mom’s house.
By the time I got to her house, I was exhausted. My legs were sore from a full day of walking, and I knew a nap was in my future. I had never been a nap person before. Not least of all because I worked three jobs and didn’t have time for it. But ever since being pregnant, I napped at least once a day, sometimes twice. Something about carrying around a human being all day makes you sleepy. I was anxious to get in and out of my mom’s as fast as possible.
Unfortunately, she had other ideas.
“I made brownies and a vanilla cake with cream cheese frosting and lemon tarts,” she said, gesturing to the spread of desserts in the middle of the rickety kitchen table.
The countertops were strewn with backing supplies, and the air was thick with floating bits of flour. Mom found that baking relaxed her and curbed her desire for a hit, which meant that somedays when the cravings were bad, she used up her entire pantry making every dessert in her cookbook.
I grabbed a slice of vanilla cake, foregoing a plate and fork and deciding to eat it with my fingers, and plopped down at the table. “How have you been?”
“Good,” she said, nodding a little too fast. “Really great.”
“It looks like you’ve been busy.” I gestured to the sweets in front of me.
Her lips tucked to the side of her face. “Yeah, the cravings come and go, you know. At the clinic, they say that is very normal. Sometimes, people experience cravings their entire lives. It could be twenty years since I last had a hit, and I’ll still want one.”
I nodded, still uncomfortable talking about drugs with my mom. In her previous attempts to fight the addiction, I’d always chosen to pretend as though drugs didn’t exist. We didn’t talk about it, instead referencing her “issue” in vague terms. But now her therapist told her it was healthy to talk about it openly. Addiction lives in secret, so being open and honest takes away its power.
“But baking has been helping?” I asked, my not so subtle way to ask whether she’d had a relapse.
“Yes, absolutely,” she said firmly. “It helps a bunch. Still clean.”
We ate in silence for a few minutes, the sound of our chewing filling the kitchen, and then mom clapped her hands together and bolted upright. “I bought something for the baby.”
Before I could say anything, she darted out of the kitchen, and I heard her pad down the hallway into her room. Even though I’d moved out three months before, she still hadn’t moved into the master bedroom. She said she preferred her smaller room, but part of me wondered whether she didn’t expect me to move back one day.
I pushed the thought away as she returned with a blue-wrapped box with a bright blue bow on top. “It’s just a little something I picked up.”
“You didn’t need to get us anything,” I said.
Trigger had more than enough money to get everything the baby would need, whereas my mom was still living paycheck to paycheck. I knew how vital every penny was to her.
“Well, technically I didn’t get it,” she said, smiling. “I made it.”
My brows knitted together in both confusion and concern. I had never seen my mom make anything in my entire life. She never helped me with school craft projects or kept a scrapbook or cross-stitched. Even baking had been a recent hobby picked up only as a way to curb her cravings.
I ripped the paper off the box and opened the lid. Inside was a pile of pale blue material. As I pulled it out of the box, I realized it was a crocheted baby blanket. The yarn was silky soft, and each row was neat and even, and the whole thing was edged in a scalloped stitch. It looked professional, like a blanket you could buy at a store. My mouth fell open.
“You made this?”
She nodded. “I learned to crochet as a little girl. It took a bit of practice to pick up the habit again, but I think it turned out pretty well.”
Mouth still open, I nodded. “It’s beautiful, Mom. Thank you.”
“I just want the baby to know how much I love him.” She beamed. Then, she reached out and stroked my cheek softly. “You are going to be such a wonderful mother, Kenna.”
Tears burned the back of my eyes, but I held them in. Since getting sober, my mother and I had become a bit closer, but it still felt strange to get emotional in front of her. I swallowed back the emotion, waiting a second as my throat relaxed, and then smiled.
“Thanks, Mom. This is great. I’ll put it in his crib when I get home.”
All of a sudden, she looked at the clock and then jumped a little. “Speaking of, you should get home. You’ve had a busy day, I’m sure.”
Her sudden urgency to get me out of the house was confusing, but I was exhausted and excited about the prospect of ice cream and a foot rub from Trigger.
“Thanks for the cake and the gift,” I said as my mom all but pushed me out the door.
“I have enough sugary treats in that kitchen to feed a militia. Bring Trigger with you next time you come so he can eat some, too,” she said.
Hearing my mom talk about baked goods and watching her wave to me from the front porch as I got into my car, it was almost possible for me to imagine she had been a traditional mother. That she had never done drugs, and our lives had always been like this.
Of course, they hadn’t, and it would take more than a slice of homemade cake for me to forget the damage she’d wrought on my life, but still, every day it seemed more possible to fully forgive her for what she’d done to me.
I was one block away from home when Trigger finally called me back.
“You almost home?” he asked, his voice sounding tight and strained.
“I’m at the end of the block, why?”
“Okay, see you in a minute.” He hung up without answering my question.
I shook my head. “Strange,” I mumbled under my breath.
***
Trigger
Even when I told Kenna I loved her, and we made love that first night after the fight at the clubhouse and Buzz attacking her, there was a part of me that expected everything to fall apart. It was a beautiful night, and we had made all these beautiful promises to one another, but every morning that we woke up next to each other, I expected the familiar feeling of claustrophobic to rise up. I expected to begin to resent the time I spent with Kenna instead of my brothers and to slowly begin to pull away from her.
Except, it never happened.
&nb
sp; Every day I woke up happier than the previous day, thrilled to spend my waking hours with Kenna. She was a bright spot in my life that never faltered. No matter how shitty of a day I had, as soon as I saw her face, my worries fell away. I loved her more than I’d ever loved anyone in my life.
So, we moved in together. We shopped around town, looking at different styles and sizes of houses, eventually deciding on a small two-bedroom with a large front porch and a backyard. It would be the perfect house to enjoy a morning mug of coffee on the porch while the sun rose, and an evening of playing with our son in the grass while it set.
And we were having a boy. A baby boy. I was terrified of the many different ways I could mess our son up for life, but I also knew that if he were anything like his mother, he would be perfectly fine.