“Is it her birthday? Is that why we went to the restaurant and Daddy gave her a present?” I smile, offering up a silent thank you to Alyssa for trusting me take care of such a wonderful little boy.
“Unca Braydon, why is Melly’s dress on the floor?” Jacob shrieks and I wish the earth would open enough to swallow me whole. I should have known better than to strip as Xavier led me to the bedroom, but in that moment, no one existed except the two of us.
“She might have dropped it. I bet she wanted to get out of her fancy clothes as soon as she could.” Braydon seems to be the quick thinker out of all of us. I wonder if that’s a skill he’s had to hone over the years to get him out of trouble. “Should we go for a walk and see if we can find your dad and Melly?”
“Yeah! Can we go to the park, too?” Jacob squeals.
“Maybe for a little bit,” Braydon replies. His voice grows louder when he continues speaking, “I bet they went for a walk since it’s such a nice night. Maybe we’ll see them while we’re down at the park playing.”
Xavier and I are both biting our lips, trying to keep from laughing as we hear the front door close again.
“Way to go, Melanie! You almost got us busted by the kid,” Xavier teases. His fingers dig into my sides as he tickles me, causing me to squeal as I jolt out of the bed. “Get dressed so we can go for that walk we’re supposedly already on.”
“Does Braydon need that quick tongue often?” I laugh, rummaging through the drawers for something I can wear on a walk. I find one pair of shorts I left here and grab one of Xavier’s t-shirts.
“More often than you’d know.” Xavier pulls out a pair of khaki shorts and a tight black t-shirt. Seeing the way the cotton pulls across his broad chest, I want to stay in the bedroom and strip his clothes off again.
We both finish getting dressed and duck out the back door of the building so we won’t run the risk of Jacob seeing us leaving since we’re supposed to already be on our walk.
“So, are we going to move your stuff into my place tonight or wait until the weekend?” Xavier inquires as we walk, hand-in-hand, down the road adjacent to the complex.
Maybe I should be hesitant to move in with Xavier, but I’m not. I can’t imagine spending another night apart from the two men in my life. We’ll have to talk to Tyler about getting out of my lease, but I’m hopeful that it’s one of those times when being best friends with the leasing manager will work in my favor. Otherwise, I’m going to be paying rent on an apartment I don’t live in until my lease is up.
“I can do most of it while you’re at work,” I say, tilting my head to rest on his shoulder. “And a lot of the stuff will be donated to Goodwill, so I’ll call and set up an appointment for them to pick up what I’m not keeping. No sense in having three households worth of furniture.”
I want to ask him what he wants to do with everything in storage, but I know that will spoil the moment. Some of it may have been our furniture at one point, but all of it is the past. It’s time for us to set a steady course into the future, burying the bad memories and everything associated with them.
“You’re not fighting me on moving in?” Xavier asks, genuinely surprised. I understand that feeling, but I think that we’re finally on the same page. There’s no more fighting what we feel for one another and personally, I can’t wait to dive into a future with the man I love.
“Nope. I intend on spending every night for the rest of my life sleeping next to you, so it’s pretty pointless for me to have a place of my own.” I look up into his sapphire eyes, satisfied to know that the fine lines at the corner are no longer caused by his overwhelming grief.
What we share might not be conventional and there will be people who criticize us for moving on together so soon after Alyssa’s passing, but we’ll be the ones who know the truth. If it hadn’t been for the wish of a dying woman, we might have both lacked the courage to ever fight for what we wanted.
Epilogue
I feel like the king of my castle as I watch Melanie putting the final touches on our first Thanksgiving dinner. I told her she didn’t have to go to all the trouble, that we could go out to eat, but she insisted on hosting her first holiday meal now that we’ve settled into our new home.
It wasn’t a month after Melanie moved into my apartment that we realized we needed to find something bigger. It’s not that we were cramped in the apartment, but it never felt like home to any of us. It was a stop-gap, a place she helped me find while I decided what course my life was going to take.