“I think I understand.” I felt my head tilt as I tried to figure out what he meant. “But...”
“Open your eyes,” he said, as he walked around behind me. His arms circled my waist and he rested his head on my shoulder. “I mean, I literally want to build a home with you. Right here.”
Having my eyes closed so long, it took a second for them to adjust. As soon as they did, I was able to take in the scenery. The wide, grassy hillside overlooking the back half of the one hundred acres he’d purchased for his parents.
“Right where we are standing we could build a house,” he told me. He’d obviously thought a lot about this, and I could see exactly why he’d picked this location. His arms slipped from around me and he walked a few feet to my right. “Our kitchen. Where you cook fantastic meals, and I probably just make a mess.” He smiled, moving to the left. “A living room, where our friends and family come to hang out and where you force me to watch those terrible movies.” He paused, before grabbing my hand with his. “And, maybe one day it will be where we play with our kids and they force us to watch terrible cartoon dinosaurs and singing princesses.”
My anxiety quickly turned to admiration and hope and every other feeling that you get when you actually start to envision the future with the person you love. Tiny versions of Reid and me running around the very property where we’d grown up was something that I used to think about, especially when I was pregnant, but after the miscarriage and when he left I thought the possibility was gone. But now, seeing him here and hearing all of the big plans he had for us, my heart melted. Reid was the reason I could never see a future with anyone else. He was my future.
“And over here,” he said, pulling me to the left. “Our bedroom. Where we go to sleep and wake up with each other as much as possible, and where a whole lot of other fun stuff happens,” he said, waggling his eyebrows, which earned a chuckle from me. He tugged me closer to him and kissed me softly. “I know my job is less than ideal for building a life together, but if we actually have a home somewhere to call ours between the traveling and training, maybe it won’t be so bad.”
“I love it,” I said, practically jumping up to kiss him again. He locked his arms around me and held my body to his as I covered his lips and the rest of his face with peppered kisses. “I love you.”
“You mean it?”
“Yes! I want to build a life with you, and the fact that you want to have at least part of it here means the world to me.”
“I’d never want to take you away from your family,” he confessed. “Besides, my parents are going to be here too, and we might need some help with all the kids, you know?”
“We might,” I laughed. Yesterday, he’d hypothetically proposed a marriage, today, we were having a brood of hypothetical children. It was terrifyingly fantastic and I loved that he wanted to do it all with me.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about what you went through back then,” he told me, his eyes dropping to my stomach for a brief moment. “I think you’re right about the timing not being right and how everything worked out the way it did for a reason. But now, it’s different. We can handle it. We can make this work and we can be parents if we want to be. We could... we can have whatever we want out of life.” His admission had left me speechless. I know I might have had concerns that he was a guy with Peter Pan Syndrome, a big kid who just liked to ride his motorcycle, but I could tell he was ready to grow up. He was ready for a life with me. I was ready for a life with him.
“That sounds amazing,” I finally said, my voice breaking through my anxiety. “I want all of that with you.” I paused. “How will all of this work with racing?”
“I’m not quite sure yet, but I know that I can train here as long as the weather allows. If I have to go back to Texas or wherever, we can go together. If you want. If not, you can stay here and design our home.”