Six months later, eight something (but who cares about the time?) on a Sunday morning . . .
Eden was still sleeping, her eyelashes shivering against her cheeks, her mouth parted and smushed against her pillow, her hair swirled every which way above her head, as if some guy with a camera shouting “Now sexy! Now pouty!” and an actual wind machine had styled her. One creamy shoulder and just a crescent moon of pink nipple peeked saucily from the sheet.
She was a side sleeper.
So was he.
It made spooning so much easier.
Not that it would have been a chore.
Still.
They were both still conscious of the preciousness of the milliseconds of time they saved getting into snuggle position, which would add up to minutes or even hours over the years, or so they decided, during one meandering, urgency-free conversation, of which they in fact had several over the past few months. Meandering with Eden was as fun as cutting to the chase with her.
For a second, he wallowed in the still-novel luxury of admiring her flushed and only a little drooling pink and white loveliness, striped in shadow and light from the slightly parted blinds.
What a shame it would be to wake her up.
Gabe leaned over and licked her nipple.
And very quickly lay flat again and closed his eyes.
There was a rustle from the next pillow over.
He cracked an eye.
She opened one eye, and then the other.
She smiled sleepily and stretched her arms up over her head like a wanton, letting the sheet slip down.
His head went light. Boy, that view never got old. “Just how I like my women. Sunny side up.”
She rolled over and pressed all that warm nude lusciousness up against him. “Mmm. That’s funny. I like my men over easy.”
“Oh, what a pity. I’m afraid the only thing on the menu this morning is over hard,” he said with great, solicitous regret.
They were shamelessly dorky.
Her hand slipped down under the sheets to investigate the veracity of this.
He sucked in a breath as her hand languidly stroked.
“I might be open to substitutions,” she decided musingly as he stirred, and swelled, beneath her clever fingers that now knew him so well and yet found ways to surprise him.
She burrowed her face in his throat. “You smell better than toast.”
“Yes, but how do I taste?” he said gravely.
She kissed him. Slow, slow. The sheer decadence of being leisurely was still erotic as hell. And she kept up the handiwork under the covers so that mad hunger took over both of them, and it was an effort to pace themselves.
Annelise had spent the night at Caitlynn Pennington’s house, and they were picking her up at ten.
They could do this for the next two hours.
So that’s exactly what they did.
At about nine forty-five they were just about to head to the door to pick up Annelise at Caitlynn Pennington’s when Eden laughed and touched his arm. “Gabe, look . . .”
She pointed to the whiteboard.
Which was crowded with even more doodles and abbreviations than before. Funny thing, though: somehow life itself seemed infinitely roomier. Love somehow expanded the depth and breadth of every day.
But in a square three weeks from the square representing today, heretofore occupied only by a little drawing of a wedding bell, were pink words in Annelise’s handwriting.
Mr. Caldera is my dad!!!!
With an arrow stretching on into infinity, through all the squares.
He’d be Mr. Caldera at school. Right now, he was “Gabe” at home.
He’d be “Dad” forever after that.
This they’d all decided, after a confab, and because Annelise had a sense of ceremony, his new title would go into effect right after they both said “I do” and not sooner.
After which the whole Harwood household, whiteboard, Peace and Love and the Barbies and Annelise’s guitar, everything, would move into Gabe’s big yellow house with the tire swing and room for a horse.
One square per week on the whiteboard featured a sketch that was basically a little circle with a smile and a snarl of hair on top.
That was their symbol for Jasper.
Annelise Skyped with him once a week since he’d left, for a half hour or an hour or so, whatever the two of them could spare, and Jasper had been surprisingly diligent about it. Eden always hovered nearby. Or Gabe. Their relationship had settled into a sort of goofy rhythm. Jasper was a lot like a big kid, and he liked to show her stuff on the guitar, and the songs she wrote seemed to just slay him. He genuinely got a kick out of Annelise, naturally, because Annelise was awesome.
Word that Jasper Townes had a daughter still hadn’t reached any gossip sites.
And it was fine. Good, even. Eden genuinely hoped they grew to love each other in the safety of a quiet relationship. More love in the world was better than less.
“I think my dad Jasper is going to be kind of like Snuffleupagus,” Annelise had told Eden thoughtfully.
“From Sesame Street? That big furry elephant-type beast?”
“Yeah. Only Big Bird can see him. And he’s kind of funny looking, and hairy, but he’s nice, you don’t see him very often, but when you do it’s fun. And then he’s gone again.”
Sesame Street was indeed educational programming.
She was pretty sure Jasper’s role in their lives would get a little more complicated than that as Annelise got older.
For now, it suited all of them. And Jasper was clearly pretty wary of getting on the wrong side of Gabe, so there was that.
So for the past several months, happiness wasn’t an emotional state so much as it was the weather they moved through every day of their lives.
An hour or so later the three of them were heading up to Firelight Falls for that long delayed, longed-for picnic, a backpack loaded with a picnic lunch.
Annelise was taking the opportunity to pretend to be a horse. She galloped ahead of them, tossing her head and whinnying, pausing to pretend to eat a thistle.
“Baby, you might want to pace yourself. It’s about a forty-five minute hike.”
Little did Annelise know, but Gabe and Eden had already looked into getting a horse for her eleventh birthday. A patient one, with a few years on it.
“Hey, Leesy, you know how you can get the best view of the canyon from here?” Gabe asked.
“Stand on your toes?” Leesy asked.
“Guess again.”
“Go up to the tippy top of Whiplash Peak?”
“Nope. Liiiiiiike . . . this.”
Annelise gave a happy little shriek when he swooped down, scooped her up, and planted her atop his shoulders.
“Don’t kick or grab my ears and we’ll be good.”
Eden laughed at them. If she were to make a totem pole of the loves of her life, it would look a lot like that one.
“Hey, I’m taller than you now, Mom,” Annelise called down.
“Well, that was bound to happen sooner or later.”
“HIYA, Thunder! Giddyup!” Leesy commanded.
“I am so calling you Thunder from now on,” Eden told Gabe.
He shot her a quick smoldery glance that told her he was actually kind of looking forward to the circumstances under which that might occur.
“Pretend I’m more like a plow horse, Leesy,” Gabe said. “The sturdy kind. Maybe a little hard of hearing. I’m gonna plod. Don’t kick. We’ll get there.”
She settled in happily.
And as they made their way up the trail to the falls, Gabe steadied Annelise with one hand and reached for Eden’s hand with the other.
And for a few moments all was just sun, and trees, and rightness, and Annelise pivoting her head to and fro, gulping in the view, awestruck. “Wow, Mom, I can totally see forever!”
Eden and Gabe exchanged a glance that was pure contentment, happily possessive, all passion and promise.
“Me, too, baby,” she said.