Connor rests his hand on the base of my neck, my pulse thumping in my veins. He searches my gaze once more, the room dissolving into subdued chatter. The storm hasn’t settled, but the roar isn’t blistering.
“What happened?” I ask beneath my breath, and I reach up to his eye.
Connor clasps my hand before I can touch, authority always in his stance. “After Beckett shoved Eliot, Eliot threw toy blocks at him. I was a casualty of war.”
My lip quirks. “Obviously.”
He absorbs my smile, and his grin truly appears, maybe for the first time since I’ve arrived. “You take pleasure in my wound?”
“Yes,” I say without a beat. “A three-year-old chinked your armor.”
His grin only grows. “But I’ve won the war.”
I roll my eyes, about to pick up the blocks, but Connor seizes my arm just as I shift slightly. My chest collapses at his soulful expression, clear and decipherable, one that says, talk a little longer.
I need you, Rose.
I swallow, and his breath heavies like he can’t imagine me spinning around. Like he can’t imagine me leaving for work. Like he’d rather go through this day with me and only me.
He peruses my unoiled posture, Ben falling asleep on his chest. “And you?”
“And me, nothing.” I could easily leave his grasp, but I don’t want to. I like the strength of his firm hand on my arm. I like knowing I have the power to say no, and he’d listen in an instant.
His brow arches, eyeing my demeanor more outwardly so I see that he sees my anxiety. “Your body says otherwise.” He’s aware the news will fall today, and maybe that also prodded him to call me, to ask me to return home, so I wouldn’t battle these sentiments alone.
“Then stop staring at my body. I can pluck out your eyeballs if you can’t restrain yourself.”
“Rose—”
“I’m here to help you,” I remind him. “This isn’t about me.”
“We’re on the same team, Rose,” he says, forcing this truth. “You can try to argue, but you won’t win.”
Translation: I will aid you on the battlefield until death do us part.
I begin to surrender, letting his hand slide to my cheek. He kisses my forehead, and I ask him, “Is there something more with you?”
“My father called.”
I freeze. “What?”
Connor hardly reacts, but Jim Elson has had no relationship with Connor, not after his mother was granted full custody of their son in their divorce. And Connor and Jim were distant before that instant.
I remember that Katarina Cobalt gave their son her last name from the very first moment he was born—breaking common tradition.
Connor says that his father never cared to have any claim over him, and it was fine—he never wanted to be claimed by anyone. “Our lack of feelings are mutual,” he’ll always say.
So now…why now? I glare, ready to unleash fiery hell upon his father. “Should I break out my knives? A match? Lighter fluid?”
“Hypothetical arson this early in the morning,” he says with a rising grin, like he’s not surprised I’m weaving exaggerations already.
My eyes narrow. “I wasn’t trying to surprise you. I’m trying to plan a flaming ball of destruction.”
“Focus your energy on someone worthwhile. Jim Elson is no one. He called to ask me about lawyers. Someone discovered him online, and he wants to protect himself from being publically profiled. It’s a task I never wanted to add to my list.”
Connor can easily shove those responsibilities onto other people, but needing to use his resources to help Jim Elson would be grating for him. He’d only do it to put the situation to bed and avoid exacerbating the issues.
“RETURN THAT, YOU THIEF!” Jane shouts, in a tug-o-war with three-year-old Eliot for her stuffed lion.
They all start yelling over one another, and Beckett solves the issue before we can, yanking the stuffed lion towards Jane.
Eliot falls on his ass, but he rolls over and acts like nothing happened. Tom is supine on the carpet, acting like he’s dead.
He does this.
He’s not dead. He’s grinning.
My tense breath is like daggers in my ribs, and Connor kisses my forehead once more, our children out of hand, but his attention partially on me. “They’re terrible,” I mutter. I love them all. It lifts my carriage—and then my phone rings.
I smooth my lips together, eyeing my purse in the center of the room. I can’t even recall setting it down. I’d rather ignore the call and stand opposite Connor, but without heels, I’m much shorter than his six-foot-four height. I want to be at equal footing in all ways.
Maybe we are. His hair unkempt, his eye bruised. My blouse astray, skirt crooked. His father’s phone call. My impending one.
Our vulnerabilities at the forefront in the same moments.
At the same time.
Connor starts, “I can answer—”
“I have it.” I leave him, and he follows, setting Ben on a bouncer. I dig through my Chanel handbag and find my cellphone.
My throat constricts, and I rise uneasily. “The doctor is calling.”
Connor edges close, until I have to crane my neck to meet his eyes. I don’t feel shrunken. His power and fortitude transfers through my veins, and his hand glides up my arm, resting on my breastbone. My raging heartbeat pounds against his palm.
I’m frightened by the worst, and he can see and feel just how severely.
“‘Nothing will come of nothing,’” Connor whispers a quote from Shakespeare’s King Lear and adds his own words at the end. “You’ve at least tried to do more than nothing.”
I’m on the second to last cellphone ring. “And what if nothing comes from something?”
“What if,” he says like the phrase has stalked him in the past.
I answer the phone, and I’m dazed by the doctor’s words. I listen, trying to ingest every syllable, but the result bludgeons me. “I understand,” I say strictly before ending the call and dropping my phone to my purse.
The embryo did not take.
I’m not pregnant with my sister’s child. I only have one more chance to get this right.
One chance.
I can’t prepare. I can’t do anything but wait.
Connor clutches my cheek, forceful. Commanding. “Rose.” He murmurs French softly in my ear, but I can hardly process. I’m supposed to be here helping him. I think I must express this aggressively, my palms on his chest, fisting his dark blue shirt.
“We’re a team, Rose,” he repeats again.
“Then we must both be losing.” My eyes sear as blistering tears build.
He shakes his head. “This is not our worst.”
This is not our worst.
Eliot suddenly bounds over to us and chants, “Kiss, kiss, kiss!”
My nose flares, chest collapsing and rising so heavily. Connor has me pressed close, my arms locked as tight as my unbending body, never loosening my fierce grip on his shirt.
“Kiss! Kiss!”
Connor’s fingers slide assuredly from my cheek towards the back of my head. He leans down and tilts my chin up. His lips nearly brush mine as he murmurs, “I hear your heart.”
Tears slip from the creases of my eyes—and before I turn my head away from him, away from our children, he shields our faces with his cupped hand.
I murmur just as softly, “And what sound is my heart making?”
His words dive deep into me. “It beats—it beats.” He whispers against my lips, “It beats in equal time with mine.” He kisses me, raw and smooth sentiments cutting and flowing through us.
We never leave for our closet, to the darkest, dimmest depths. We kiss in the open, with nothing but his hand as the sole barrier between our children and us.
He breathes assuredness and self-belief, filling me completely.
This is not our worst.
< 32 >
April 2023
Sugar Loaf Bluff
Winona, Minnesota
RYKE MEADOWS
Daisy steps on and off a small boulder at the base of a limestone rock pinnacle called Sugar Loaf Bluff. I tie a figure-8 knot at the end of my rope, wondering what she’s thinking. We’ve been in Minnesota all week because of me.