by Hazel Parker
“So you know what’s going on,” Grandpa said. “Mary was diagnosed with ovarian cancer six months ago. She didn’t want anyone to know except me; she wanted all of you to live your lives and not worry about her.”
“Stupid…” my father said behind me. Guess not everyone agrees with the decision.
“She’s in the end stages now,” Grandpa continued, displaying surprising poise. “It’s...tough, but it’s time. If you all want to speak to her individually, then now is the time.”
“Yes, please,” I said.
I didn’t have anything planned to say. But as Grandpa nodded, as Nick took a step back, as my father left the room, things started to click in my head.
The call she had given me. The advice she had given me. The things she had picked up on…
She knew all along. She had to have known everything. She always did things her way, knowing how to navigate around her husband’s wishes to make sure the grandkids got what they wanted.
As soon as everyone left, I shut the door and walked up to grandma. I kissed her on the forehead, sat beside her, and took her hand.
“You knew all along, didn’t you?”
My grandmother could no longer laugh hard, but that didn’t mean she was completely incapable of laughing.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Brett, I really don’t,” she said. “But I do know how you love that girl, and I know you feel pressure from the family will to get married.”
I bit my lip, trying my best not to cry. I wanted to stay strong for my grandmother; she didn’t need to provide emotional support to me at a time when she was the one dying.
“Brett, you have to understand,” she began. “I nearly died years ago when someone attacked us for reasons none of us have ever known. I even lost a daughter in the process.”
My eyes went wide. I had an aunt I had never known…
“Your grandfather and I responded in different ways. He responded by trying to control as much as he could, the better to make sure none of you ever got involved in a life like he had. I did my best to love and understand everyone. In doing so, I’ve come to recognize that you grandkids are trying to live up to rules that aren’t fair to you.”
She chuckled.
“I’m not perfect. Sometimes I find myself as judgmental as grandpa. But with this...Brett, you love that girl, right? Chelsea?”
There was zero doubt. There was no time needed to think of the answer.
“Yes.”
“Then I don’t care what I should have known or what led to your marriage,” she said. “If it’s meant to be, then you put yourself in a position for a lifetime of love.”
That was all the affirmation I needed to hear. But it just made it all the more tragic to me that she would not live to see her great-grandchildren, to see Layla and maybe even Leo get married, to…
“I see the grief on your face, Brett,” she said compassionately. “Do not grieve more than you have to. I have been married to the same man all these years. I have had four wonderful children, three still with me. I have four grandkids. And now, I go knowing that two great-grandkids are on the way. I have seen love, I have seen great sorrow, and I have seen everything in between. That is cause for celebration, not grief.”
Even in her dying breath, Grandma had a way of supplying the best kind of advice possible.
“Go and love your wife,” she said. “I know you just got married; why else would you be wearing a tuxedo like that here? Treat her well. And treat your child right.”
“I will,” I said. “I promise. I love you, grandma.”
I kissed her on the forehead, told her I would go and get Nick, and walked out the door. I wandered the corridor and went outside, looking up at the stars. She always knew. Even if she didn’t know the exact details, she always knew. And she allowed it. She encouraged it. She supported it.
If ever I had doubts about our marriage being accepted—not just in the legal sense for the will, but in the social, familial sense with the rest of the Ferraris—that question had been answered.
Three hours later, Mary Ferrari drew her last breath.
Chapter 24: Chelsea
Three Days Later
I got back to the Bay Area the very next morning; even though my father and Izzy had plans to stay in town for another two days, they also came back with me. None of them had come for the gambling, the neon lights, or the nightlife; they’d come to celebrate us, and now, we had to go back to support the mourning Ferraris.
When I first saw Brett, it was about ten in the morning. He looked like he hadn’t slept a lick. I asked him if he needed anything, and all he said was, “Just be with me.”
And so, for the next two and a half days, I did just that. I stayed with him. Alf shut down Ferrari Wines for the week, meaning none of us needed to go to work. The funeral was planned out a week ahead. For the time in between, the only thing that would happen was a chance to grieve, reflect, and give thanks for what Grandma Ferrari had meant.
For me, she had given me a feeling that I was welcomed into the family. I had never gotten the explicit feeling that I wasn’t welcome, but for obvious reasons, there was always the fear that I wasn’t good enough, that I wouldn’t be embraced as Izzy might have been. Mary Ferrari, though, had treated me almost as a friend.
What she meant to Brett, though, beyond what I already knew, remained a mystery. He wasn’t quite catatonic, but he was silent, withdrawn, and mostly passive.
Until that night.
I was about to make dinner, but I had very little energy. The one downside to the emotional joy of marriage was that there was a sort of comedown from it, a sort of weary exhaustion in which one only wanted to just eat pizza, binge-watch terrible TV shows, and eat ice cream for dessert. I was at that point.
“Do you mind if I order some Tony’s?” I said, referencing the nearby pizza joint.
“Whatever you want, babe,” Brett said, perhaps his most common response over the course of the last few days.
I smiled and squeezed his hand, knowing that his lack of energy was completely justified. I picked up the phone and dialed the number. A ring tone came.
“Do you know what my grandmother said the last time I spoke to her?”
I immediately hung up. This was the moment I had waited for since he left Las Vegas. Brett had my full, undivided attention.
“She knew,” he said. “Well, she didn’t know the exact details, but she just sort of knew there was something unusual about us. She knew that I was feeling financial pressure, and she knew there was a baby. But...she still supported us, Chelsea. She still wanted us to get married.”
Call it just a gut feeling, but somehow, I felt like I already knew that. I didn’t have “evidence” or “proof” of this but looking back on the way she had spoken to me at Voltaire’s, it felt like it made sense. She wouldn’t have engaged someone else like that if she didn’t think I was suitable for the family.
“She gave us the ring. She knew you were pregnant. And the whole time, she knew she had ovarian cancer that would kill her. She knew...she knew that she wouldn’t live to see our child. And she gave her blessing.”
He laughed.
And then, to my surprise, he cried. I put my arms around him and just held him. It felt like three days’ worth of tears were pouring out now, three days in which he had tried to avoid the pain by deflecting, ignoring, or fighting the pain. But now, in my presence, for whatever reason, something had finally triggered in him the release of all of this.
And I felt, as his wife, all I could do—all I should do—was just be there for him, just hold him as he let it out.
“Oh, shit,” he finally said with a tearful laugh. “Didn’t think I’d be the first one to cry in our marriage.”
I kissed him on the cheek, and then a couple more times.
“I can’t even begin to express...to think, she must have known how much stress and pain I was under.”
There was one thing that I had to k
now, one thought that hadn’t come to me until now, but one that made a little too much sense.
“Was she the one to arrange everything?”
Brett shook his head.
“She had too much faith in me to do that, more faith than I had in myself,” he said. “No, it was an uncle of mine who did it. But...still, she may not have arranged it, but she made it OK. She made it such that...you’re accepted, Chelsea. There’ll be no doubts about us from anyone in the family. And if there are, no one’s going to disrespect her legacy by admitting to it.”
He sighed, dabbed away his tears, and kissed me on the top of the head.
“I know this is all so fast. I know things are bound to change. I know...shit, I learned last night for the first time I had an aunt who died when she was a kid. I know we’ll learn things as we go. But one thing that will never change, Chelsea? I love you. I really do. No contract, no deal, no act is needed for that.”
“It’s OK, Brett,” I said. “Of course it’s fast. It’s faster than anyone I know. But that hasn’t stopped me from feeling the same way about you. Maybe without this deal in place—”
“That doesn’t mean a thing to me,” Brett said. “Fuck the deal. Let’s tear it up and just be married because we want to be, not because we were obligated to be so anyway. If you decide at any point that you want to walk out, I will let you.”
Maybe this was an inappropriate reaction, but I laughed. And then I kissed Brett on the lips to let him know that I wasn’t laughing at him, but at that idea.
“The only place I’m walking is where you and I go together,” I said. “No, it’s not normal. But who cares how we got here? I’m happy with you. I anticipate being happy with you for a long time. And if anything, it’ll make a great story to this and other kids down the line.”
Brett smiled. He pulled me in for a kiss. And this time, the kiss did not stop.
Slowly, he leaned forward and pressed on top of me. I wrapped my arms around him as my lips encased his, our passion growing and our arousal increasing by the second. This wasn’t like the sex of the first month, though, which was more of a youthful buzz that we wanted to get high on every day; this was more tender.
This was love.
He gently took off my shirt, and I removed his. I unclasped my bra for him, our bodies all but one unit. It dawned on me as he suckled on my breasts that this was the first time we’d be having sex since we got married.
Funny how that worked. When we dated, we couldn’t wait to get each other naked and play with each other. Then we got married, and we decided to wait. Obviously, circumstances dictated that, and I had a feeling we wouldn’t have to play the waiting game much more as our marriage progressed.
Brett made the first move, making his way down between my shorts, kissing my thighs, and then pulling them down.
“No fair,” I said. “I wanted to please you first.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “For all that you’ve done for me the last few days? The least I can do is this.”
Well, I wasn’t complaining per se…
Brett kissed the other leg, his kisses like footsteps toward my clit. I shivered on the couch in anticipation. Call me crazy, but knowing I had a ring on my finger and that this man about to go down on me was in it for real love and not for a contract made the whole situation that much sexier.
And when his lips brushed against my clit, his tongue rolled over, and my body quivered like an earthquake had hit it, yeah, I knew it was much better.
“Oh my God, Brett.”
He paused for a second, letting the initial touch wash over me. I looked down at him, locking eyes with that fierce gaze of his. And keeping his eyes on me, he lowered his lips down onto my sex, dancing and twirling his tongue into a rhythm of pleasure that coursed through me.
I arched my body into his, closing my eyes at the intensity of the pleasure. I could barely contain myself, could barely remain on the couch due to the extraordinary amount of heat coming from me. I held onto his head for dear life, just squirming and writhing in place.
“I want you so bad, Brett,” I said. “I want you inside me so fucking bad.”
But if Brett heard me, he wasn’t going to let up until I had come. Luckily for him, the whole “we’re married now” thing, along with his slow but steady increase in speed, had done what was necessary. I could feel my clit swell, the proximity of orgasm drawing nearer and nearer.
I felt it hit that point just mere minutes later, that point where I knew so long as Brett did not stop, I would finish. I pressed my hands into his hair, pulled him in close, and held on as I got closer and closer.
“Yes, yes...oh, fuck yes, right there.”
Brett had given me many, many orgasms over the course of our relationship, a fact that I was, to say the least, rather grateful for. But when this particular one hit, it was one of the best ones I’d had in the entirety of our relationship; I actually let out a shriek of pleasure, so loud that neighbors probably heard. Did I care? Not in the slightest; I was so enraptured by the warm, tingling feeling rushing through my body that I could only think about my husband—my husband!—right down there in between my legs.
“OK, stop, stop,” I begged when the pleasure became too much.
He sat up, wiped his lips of my juices, and smiled with pride at me. Damn, he was so fucking sexy. And damn, that man knew how to use his tongue.
“Come here,” I said, sitting up and taking his hand, leading him to the bedroom. “I’m going to rock your world like you’ve never felt.”
I hadn’t even shut the door when Brett already had his pants off, revealing his throbbing, hard cock for me. I tried to go down on him, but he actually guided me to the bed instead.
“What? For how you got me off—”
“Oh, I’ll get off, don’t you worry,” he said. “But why not make sure you can have a little bit of pleasure too while we’re at it?”
Fuck, I knew I married the right man.
We tumbled onto the bed, him naturally falling in between my legs. For a few short seconds, we just kissed and pressed our bodies against each other, not in a particular rush to move toward anything else. But patience was pretty short when we were that close to sex, and seconds later, he was inside of me.
The sex we’d had over the previous several weeks was wild, hot, erotic, and thrilling. We tried different places, we had sex in different positions, and there was almost nothing that we didn’t try. We role-played, we took turns dominating, and we generally just ran through the whole gamut of options.
But none of that compared to the feeling of intimacy and closeness that came from being married, from knowing that the man inside of me was going to be mine forever. There was no need to role play, because the person across from me was as good as it got. There would later be a time for dominance and submission, of course—we weren’t vanilla all of a sudden—but for right now, the emotional connection was the best type of sex there could have been.
As a result, Brett didn’t need to go for very long before I came again. But instead of begging him to stop because the pleasure got to be overwhelming, I just rode the ride for as long and as far as I could go. Sure, I could have tried a few different things that might have made it a little more objectively pleasurable, but subjectively, nothing was going to top this.
We rocked the bed. We kissed and tongued each other. We tried a variety of things that felt like a blur, but the one thing that did not feel like a blur was the love I had for Brett. He was mine.
And I was his.
It was when I looked into his eyes and whispered his name while on top of him that he started to reach climax. I said his name more, begging him, yearning for him to give me his seed. Of course, it would make no difference right now, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want him to feel the most intense kind of pleasure right now.
“Come for me, Brett,” I said. “Come for me, baby.”
And finally, with the last gasp and the last twitch of his cock, Brett finished.
He pulled out, rolled over, let me fall forward, collapsed onto me, and kissed me on the lips.
“By the way, you know I was completely serious earlier.”
“Hmm?” I said, barely of half a brain to understand what he was referring to.
“The contract,” he said. “The deal. We’ll tear it up. We don’t need an agreement to love each other or one to tell us how to. Let’s just love each other.”
That was a deal I was more than willing to make.
“Then I’ll start here by saying I love you, Brett.”
Brett pecked me on the lips, then kissed me gently, his body like one with mine.
“And I love you, Chelsea.”
Epilogue
Seven Months Later
Chelsea’s hand squeezed mine so hard that I thought she’d shatter it in her grip.
She had, though, a little bit of a good reason to be holding on so tight.
“Push!” the doctor commanded.
Chelsea, having been in labor for what felt like an eternity now, was completely past the point of exhaustion. I was sure if a doctor offered to perform a C-section, she’d take it without anesthesia—not because she was so tough, but because she was so exhausted, she wouldn’t feel a thing. Of course, it wasn’t me doing this, so what did I know?
“Baby’s coming!”
Chelsea shrieked as she pushed more and more. I held on to her hand and waited nervously, my heart beating so fast and with such force, I thought that it was going to burst through my chest and beat on the ground.
And then I heard it.
Crying.
The most beautiful sound in the world.
“There she is,” the doctor said warmly. “It’s a girl.”
Chelsea started crying. I teared up. There, in all of her newborn glory, was our daughter, Clara Polozzi Ferrari. The doctor wrapped her up and handed her to Chelsea, and the two of us looked into our newest family member’s eyes.
I had experienced a lot of things in my life that I thought were profound and maybe even a little bit holy. I had thought that I knew what it meant to live for something or to have a calling or purpose. But I knew right then, looking into little Clara’s eyes, that I had found my everything. Nothing else mattered. She was the center of my universe.