She moves her gaze from the ring to meet my eyes. God, how they find me. I’m forever found in her, and though I’m prepared to wait, I hope and pray that I won’t have to anymore. “Will you marry me? Not today, and not in Vegas, but in a church if you like, or at Mabel Shores in the Hamptons—”
“Or the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens during the cherry blossom season?”
“Yes, there.” She has excellent taste. And then it hits me what she’s said. “Is that a—”
“Yes.” She nods. “It’s a yes.”
***
Alayna loves being engaged.
She’s worn the ring a month, and she still shows it to everyone. Even our doorman has been forced to fawn over it. The other night, I double-tipped the Chinese take-out deliveryman because he stayed for seven minutes after I’d paid just to listen to her go on about her diamond. If I didn’t know her as well as I do, I’d suspect she only said yes so she could wiggle her finger in front of people.
But since I do know her, I understand her compulsion to cling on to the object of her affection and parade it possessively. It’s behavior that drove others away from her, which is something I can never understand. I thrive on her attention. I respond to it in kind. We tangle ourselves together with our need to belong to each other. And our love grows stronger through it. More sure.
Along with my twice-weekly meetings with Dr. Alberts, we see a couple’s counselor every Monday. Dr. Lucille Parns. She insists that we call her Lucy. For Alayna’s sake, I actually succumb to the nickname. I’d worried at first that Lucy would frown upon my and Alayna’s attachment. Call it unhealthy. Surprisingly, she doesn’t. Instead she nurtures the aspects that have worked as strengths in our relationships. She encourages our high-level infatuation and our sex life as a means to connect.
Not that Lucy would have any impact on our sex life. I can’t keep my hands off Alayna, and fortunately, she can’t seem to keep her hands off me either.
Despite what we have going for us, Lucy does expect a lot of work. She focuses on our lack of communication and trust. It’s a mystery to me how I can be determined to share everything with Alayna now, and yet, when Lucy presses us, it’s still so hard to be that transparent. “Old habits die hard,” she reminds us. Then she assigns us a new exercise that sounds easy and proves to be a struggle.
Tonight, our assignment is full disclosure. From me. Though Alayna has figured out the basics of my games with Celia and my scheme regarding her, I’ve never told her all of it. Alayna’s not even entirely sure she wants to hear it.
But Lucy has insisted on it. “Alayna’s already forgiven you,” she’d said. “Use that knowledge to erase any fears you have. But there’s no way for you—for both of you—to put this fully to rest without letting light into every corner of this darkness.”
So this is the night we’ve chosen for my confession—exactly one month after she accepted my proposal. My chef prepared a dinner that we ate together by candlelight on our brand new dining table. We still don’t have living room furniture, and summer’s quickly flying away, so after our meal we take advantage of this warm evening and move to the balcony.
The new outdoor furniture is better cushioned than the set I’d had before, yet I can’t get comfortable in my seat. Alayna offers me a drink, but I turn it down. I don’t want to suppress any emotions that come from this confession. It may not be easy, but I want to feel all of it with her.
She angles her chair to face me head on and curls her feet underneath her. She doesn’t pressure me to start, and we sit for several long minutes in silence. Then I begin.
I start with the emotionally closed-off young man I’d been, the man who wanted to understand the relationships he was missing out on because of his lack of feeling. I tell her how he experimented on people he knew. How he experimented on his closest friend and turned her into a hateful, bitter woman.
I tell it all—how I’d kissed Celia, how I’d fucked her friend, how she’d fucked my father, how she’d gotten pregnant. All of it.
Alayna doesn’t interrupt. She listens intently, her expression changing with the particularly disturbing details. It isn’t until I tell her about the night of the symposium, the night I’d first seen her and my life instantly changed, that the tears start. They’re sweet tears that fall quietly down her face. They make it harder for me to go on to the part where I betrayed her. But I do. I tell her all the things I thought and felt, and how I convinced myself I was doing something good, but I always knew that it was wrong.
I end at The Sky Launch, when Alayna realized the truth. It’s the worst part and the best part. It was the moment I almost lost everything. But it was also the moment that I was finally free to love Alayna in the way she deserved, and in that way, it was the moment I gained everything.
I don’t tell her that the whole thing was Celia’s game. I will, one day. But tonight is for my faults, my mistakes. No one else’s. Admitting my own role as victim shifts the focus away from that.
It takes over two hours to complete my story, and when I do, I’m exhausted. Mentally and physically. And I can’t hide that I’m down. It’s been an evening of recalling my sins. I’m humiliated. I’m ashamed.
Alayna stares at the skyline past me, a breeze blowing her hair behind her so her face is clear and visible. Still, it’s hard to read her thoughts as she takes everything in. I start to think that maybe now I need that drink, but then her eyes swing to meet mine and she speaks.
“It’s not on the agenda for me to disclose anything,” she says, “but I have my own confession.”
I’m not worried about anything she has to tell me. The things she thinks are her flaws are the very aspects of her that I adore most. But I am intrigued.
She clears her throat. “It could be easy to listen to what you’ve said and focus on the heartache that you say you caused. But the part that’s missing is that your experiments were done on grown-up people. Adults who are, in the end, responsible for themselves. You hurt Celia. She had a chance to walk away, and she didn’t. She’s culpable for what she became after that. That’s all her, H. Not you.”
I tilt my head and study her. “You had a chance to walk away, too.”
“I did. And me coming back to you—that’s all me.” Her lips twist into a smile. “Though you did do a damn good job of making yourself impossible to resist.”
Weakly, I return her smile. It’s a small comfort against the weight of my past.
Alayna gets up suddenly and crawls onto my lap, straddling me. My cock stirs automatically from our point of contact, but I ignore it. She wraps her arms around my neck, and my own hands settle around her waist.
“Here’s my confession, H. It’s a difficult one to admit because I don’t want it to sound like I condone the things you did.” She takes a deep breath. “But, honestly, I wouldn’t have given you the time of day if you hadn’t manipulated me. No matter how you chased me. Nothing you could have done would have made me start any sort of relationship with you.”
My eyes narrow. She’s told me before that she was as instantly attracted to me as I was to her. It was in her face, in her body language from the moment we first interacted. Surely if I’d approached her in the conventional method of courtship, I could have won her attention.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she says, apparently picking up on my confusion. “I was attracted to you at first sight. You pulled me to you inexplicably. I was instantly fixed on you. And that made you everything that I should stay away from. I’d been well for a long time before you, Hudson. I’m pretty sure I could have stayed on the wagon. It would have been difficult, but I would have avoided you like the plague.”
She moves her hands around to caress my jaw. The soft flutter of her thumbs against my stubble sends shocks to my groin. “Then you waved money in front of me. And I convinced myself I needed that money enough to break my rules and do the thing you asked of me. If you hadn’t done that, Hudson, if you hadn’t played me…” She shakes her head at
wherever her thoughts trailed off to. “Honestly, I don’t think there’s any other way you could have won my attention. Unless you held a promotion over my head in exchange for spending time with you, and that would have been just as shitty.”
She leans down and kisses me softly then leans her forehead against mine. “I would never have given myself the chance to fall in love with you if you hadn’t forced me to. It doesn’t excuse you. But it’s the truth. And for that, I have to say that I guess things happened how they should have. If I had the chance to rewrite it all, I don’t think I would change a thing. This is the path that led to me with you like this. It’s the reason I came back to you so easily. Because I realized I’d rather live through your betrayal and end up with you than never to have gotten you at all.”
She kisses me again, deeper this time. Her tongue pushes through my lips and wars aggressively with mine. I’m moved. Not just my cock, that is now hard as stone, and not just by what she’s doing now, but by everything she’s said. She’s way too forgiving. Way too open-minded. But I’m so fucking grateful that she is because now she’s mine.
Her kiss grows more frantic, and I know what she needs, but as I’m about to take the reins, she stops me. “Let me, Hudson. You told me things that were hard for you to say. Let me show you how much it doesn’t matter. How much I love you anyway.”
So I do. I wait until she asks me to touch her breasts before I cover them with my palms. I let her unbuckle my belt and release my cock. She’s the one who lifts her skirt and pushes aside her thong underwear. Then it’s her who positions herself over me and slides down on me. She’s tight, but she pushes her hands against my chest and leans back until she’s seated comfortably. I fill her so perfectly like this, her pussy pulsing around me as she moves up and down.
I lean in and tug at her nipples through her shirt and bra with my mouth. Alayna tilts her hips forward, and I can tell she’s found the right angle when she starts to moan. She speeds up, talking in breathy gasps as she rides. “I love you, Hudson Pierce. Every part of you. Every flaw, every scar. Just like you love me.”
She tightens, and I can feel she’s close. “I love the way you take care of me.” Her words are a struggle now. “And the way you accept my jealousies and insecurities. I love your cock and the way you fuck me. And the way you make love.”
She’s bouncing up and down in a frenzy now, and we’re both on the edge. Just as she clenches around me, she says, “Did you say that I can’t come when I’m in control? Because I’m coming.”
I start to laugh, but then I’m coming too, the dark disappearing in a flash of white as my orgasm steals my vision. We soar together like this, riding the wave of our simultaneous climax, climbing higher and higher as we fall deeper and deeper into each other. I’m lost in her and found in her all at once.
And as I am every time we touch, every time we speak to each other, every time our eyes meet—I’m made new. There’s a past that led me to this moment, but it’s not holding me back anymore. Even in the dark of this New York City night, the only thing before me is sun.
Epilogue
Three years later
Click. Click.
The camera sounds each time I take another shot. It’s the only noise in the quiet hospital room. Click. I look at the photo counter—eighty-seven. The memory card had been empty before we arrived. I’ve taken eighty-seven pictures. What can I say? I’m a proud father.
I move the camera’s focus from the bundle to Alayna and take another. Click. I lower the camera then and study Alayna. Her eyes are closed, but her breathing is irregular so I know she’s only resting. She looks wiped, and rightly so. It’s been a long road to this moment. Though we’d wanted to try for a baby as soon as we got married, she’d just had a birth control injection, which lasted three months. Then it was more than a year of trying before we could conceive. Her doctor said it was common to have trouble after injections. Common or not, it wore on her. And me. Alayna obsessed about the reasons she wasn’t pregnant. I wondered if it was a consequence of my past. Or karma, even. It felt like a miracle when Alayna finally walked out of the bathroom and showed me the stick with the faint plus sign in its display window. It had been her birthday. There wasn’t any gift I could give her that could compete with the one we’d made together.
The pregnancy itself went well. She had the typical issues—morning sickness, sore breasts, moodiness. I’d wanted her to quit working at the club and leave Gwen in charge. Alayna had wanted to stay managing until she delivered. We compromised on part-time, and Alayna’s last day was a month before her due date. It gave us time to finish the nursery, which we’d decided to decorate in a children’s literature theme. Dorothy and the Tin Man make their way down the yellow brick road on one wall. Peter Rabbit scavenges Mr. McGregor’s garden on another. And the baby bedding features Alice in Wonderland characters.
Despite the last few weeks off, the whole thing has been tiring for Alayna, as to be expected. She’d barely gotten any sleep the last few nights. Then her contractions started just after midnight yesterday, which meant no more sleep for either of us. She labored through the day, and the baby wasn’t born until two-thirty this morning. I wish she would let the nursery have the baby so she could get some real sleep, but Alayna’s insistent on keeping her here. Not just in the room, but in her arms. She won’t let go of the sleeping bundle, which is understandable—and adorable—but every time the little creature stirs, so does Alayna.
I shift the camera back to our baby—my baby. Her face scrunches up and relaxes as if still getting used to the feel of air on her skin. I take another dozen or so rapid shots, attempting to capture each and every twist of her features. She’s amazing and beautiful, and there’s nothing like this bubble bursting inside my chest at the wonder of her.
Then why am I still holding this camera and not her?
Quietly, so as not to disturb my wife, I set my camera on the table and reach for my child instead. Alayna moves slightly at the sudden absence from her arms, but her eyes don’t open. Hopefully she’s finally drifting off.
Good. Daddy and daughter bonding moment to commence.
I smile down at my sweet girl, pushing away the blanket to better see her face. Her color has paled since she was bright red and squalling in the nursery during her bath. I’d studied each and every part of the tiny creature then—counted her toes and fingers, discovered the dark birthmark at the small of her back. Then had been the examining. Now, I’m simply swept away with infatuation.
I stroke her impossibly soft cheek and trace the curve of her small puckered lips. Instinctively, my body begins to sway to a melody I hear only in my head. I hum a bit. The words dance in my head, and a few lines slip out in my awkward tenor voice, “All of me loves all of you.”
There couldn’t be a more fitting motif for the moment. I’m completely and totally in love.
“Keep singing,” Alayna says from her bed, surprising me.
I feel my neck warm. “You weren’t supposed to hear that. And you should be sleeping.”
“But I’m not sleeping. And I did hear that. So keep singing.”
It’s near impossible to deny any request of hers, but this one I do. “Maybe later. Right now, since the easy part of all of this is over,” I meet her glance, “we should get to the hard work. It’s time to pick a name.”
We’d thought of many over the course of the pregnancy, and when we’d learned we were likely having a girl, I thought we’d finally settle on something. Alayna wanted to use her mother’s name—Louise—for a middle name, but she could never agree on a suitable first name. “I need to see her first,” she’d say. “I want her to have a name that fits her.”
And so here we are with a perfect, beautiful, nameless child.
Alayna’s tired eyes narrow at my remark. “You think all this was easy?”
I gesture for her to scoot over so I can join her on the bed. “I meant for you. It was extremely hard for me to hear you call me those thing
s that you did—especially near the end. But I was trying to not make a deal of it.”
“Hudson!”
I really don’t think it was easy. The doctor had used that term, supposedly in comparison to other births she had attended, but as far as I am concerned, labor at all is hell. I’ve always known my wife is strong and capable of anything, yet I’d never imagined the exertion and endurance that would be required to push a seven-pound, three-ounce human being into the world. I’d also never felt so helpless. Of all the things I can do for Alayna, this thing she had to do primarily on her own.
I settle into the space she’s made for me and kiss her forehead. “I’m teasing and you know it, precious. I’m grateful and proud of everything you went through to get our baby here. It’s the best gift you could ever give me, and there are no words to express how amazed I am with you.”
Her face softens, and her eyes start to water. Again. God, I love this woman, but pregnancy turned her tears into overdrive. Today, I understand it. It’s natural to cry when in pain. And when the doctor first placed our scrawny, naked baby on Alayna’s chest, I admittedly shed a tear or two as well.
Now, however, I’d prefer we’d not cry—because if she starts, I’m sure to follow. I glance at the clock. “As much as I could go on with how much I adore you, Alayna, it’s now almost seven. Our families are going to ascend on us soon, and I’d love to have a name for her before they do. Though Baby Girl Pierce does have a certain ring to it, I’m certain she’d be made fun of at school.” I lay a kiss on our sleeping daughter’s nose and return her to her mother’s arms before grabbing the tablet off the side table.
Alayna looks adoringly at her bundle and then leans her head against my shoulder. “Then look up the baby name site and let’s get deciding. Otherwise your mother will take it upon herself to come up with a name and that’s not happening.”
We’d made a conscious decision not to have any family invited to the hospital until the baby was born. Too much drama, Alayna had said, and I agreed. Since the baby was born in the middle of the night, I’d waited until six a.m. to make the phone calls. Mirabelle and Adam have to get both their four-year-old daughter, Aryn, and their one-year-old son, Tyler, dressed and ready before coming over, and my parents are slow-moving in the morning, so that will delay them. I figure that gives us until around eight to have our last minutes alone with our daughter before she meets the rest of the Crazies, as Alayna likes to call my family.
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