Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
“She’s a storm,” I said, grinning.
“She’s my storm,” he answered, pride and fear in equal measure, and I loved him more for both.
By noon he’d measured the bedroom wall twice and made a list for the hardware store that included things I didn’t know existed. By one, he’d snarled at the dying-cricket dishwasher and then apologized to it because he thought I wasn’t listening. By two, he’d taken me on a ride down the ridge road at half the speed he usually liked, one palm splayed over my thigh when we hit the straightaways, as if that alone could keep the world from trying anything. We stopped at the creek and he made me sit on a flat rock and eat a sandwich because apparently I was now an incubator he intended to treat like a priceless engine.
On the way back, the sky opened and rinsed us clean. He pulled into the carport and shook his head like a dog, water flying off his hair. He looked younger in the rain, or maybe just lighter. He reached for me and I went, stepping into his chest, into the future he’d shaped with both hands, into the ring that flashed like a secret in the gray light. He said nothing and everything with the way he held me.
That night, we stood at the stove and stirred a pot of soup together because warmth is a language that doesn’t require translation. He pressed his palm to my stomach once more and whispered something against my shoulder that I didn’t catch because it wasn’t for me. He’d talk to our baby like that forever, I knew, passing down a vocabulary of safety and stubbornness and how to look at a world that had tried to hurt you and say: not today.
When we finally went to bed, he curled around me and tucked his chin over my head. The cabin breathed with us, wood easing and settling, night soft at the eaves. I ran my thumb over the ring and felt its promise like a heartbeat.
I had been claimed in ways that once would have terrified me. Now it felt like standing on the edge of a cliff and finding wings. My world, yes. His world, yes. Our rules, written in a language neither of us had been given and both of us were learning, line by line.
The End