“You’ve never done that before.” Then he hesitates, slowly adds, “At least not around me.”
Because the truth is, I have done something like sleepwalking before. After my miscarriage, when I was possessed.
I push both of those dark, looming threats to the back of my mind.
“But you do look tired,” he says, gently running his fingers over my cheekbones.
“I didn’t sleep very well.”
“I slept like a log. I could have kept sleeping but I had a dream about you.”
I raise my brow. Dreams are never good. “What was the dream?”
Fear flickers in his eyes. “That you drowned,” he says after a weighty pause.
Dread sinks into my bones. Fuck. “In the ocean?”
He gives his head a tiny shake. “No. Maybe, I don’t know. It was so vague, just that I knew you drowned. I woke up and didn’t see you, so I panicked. Thank god I looked to the beach just in time. You were so far away. I ran like hell.”
“I didn’t drown,” I try to say. I look away from his gaze, staring at the water, the chlorinated bubbles from the jets. “I wouldn’t have gone further…I wasn’t trying to…I’m not crazy.”
“Hey,” he says, sharp enough that I jerk my head up, meeting his eyes. “I know you’re not crazy. Don’t even think like that. This was just…this was just probably nothing. Let’s hope it stays nothing.”
I swallow. Oh god. I hope he doesn’t change his mind about having a baby now. This is exactly why I didn’t want to tell him about the woman. I don’t want him to think that something bad is happening or that something bad will happen. I just want things to be normal.
He leans in and kisses me, soft and sweet. “I bet you’re just all sorts of mixed up. We had a lot of sex last night, even for us, and some of it blew my fucking brain into another dimension. And deciding to start a family isn’t nothing. It’s a big deal.”
“You still want to?” My voice sounds so small.
“More than anything in the world,” he says, kissing me again. “Now, when we get out of here, what do you want to do? We have a whole day. We could travel up the coast to see your uncle and the twins?”
I shake my head. I feel like a brat not stopping by when they’re so close, but I want to keep this little bubble with just the two of us. “I’d rather not.”
“That’s fine by me. We can just stay here at the hotel. Eat, drink, fuck…”
I can’t help but smile, wrapping my arms around his neck. “That sounds more my tempo.”
The rest of the day passes at a leisurely pace. After some time in the hot tub, we slowly got ready (perhaps falling back into bed for some more baby-making practice). We started with a walk down the side streets past the shingled houses and weather-beaten vacation homes, flanked by cypress trees permanently bent from the wind. Then we had some coffee and cinnamon buns at this really cool café before we ended up at Mo’s for clam chowder. I know some people say it’s a tourist trap, but as a proud Oregonian I still think it’s the best chowder in the state. I’m not sure Dex agrees though, because he put about eight packets of oyster crackers in the bowl, followed by a dangerous amount of hot sauce.
After that we stopped at a pub or three, walking all the way up to Ecola Creek, hand in hand, feeling tipsy. The drizzle came and went but we stayed relatively dry, going back to the cottage for another round of the hot tub and then to a Mexican restaurant for tacos and margaritas.
It doesn’t escape me that we actively avoided the beach all day. As fun as it was to just be with Dex, without a care in the world, I kept running the morning through my head. I hated that it happened, hated that it put a damper on the day, on our trip. But try as I might, it was really hard to let it go.
But I had to, for both our sakes. It would drive me mad otherwise.
After dinner, we stopped by a liquor store where Dex got not only a cigar but a big bottle of Jack Daniels. I expected us to just drink it in our hotel room, maybe the hot tub, so I was surprised when he went into a tiny hardware store to purchase some kindling and a charcoal lighter.
“What’s the point of being on a beach in Oregon if you’re not going to light a bonfire?” he tells me, sticking the cigar in his mouth and putting a lighter up to it. He doesn’t smoke a cigar very often so I can tell he’s in a celebrating mood.
We walk down a short street to the beach. In the early darkness, a few bonfires are already lit up and down the sand.
We don’t have far to walk before we find a couple of logs facing a burned-out pile of charred wood. I light up the area for Dex with my phone as he scrounges around nearby for some smaller pieces of driftwood.
“Are you sure you can light a fire with that?” I ask him, nodding to the wood.
“Driftwood is the driest wood you can find,” he says. “Also, I used to be in the Boy Scouts. I know what I’m doing.”
I laugh. “Oh, you were not.”
He arranges the wood, sticking the kindling in at various intervals, then squirts the charcoal lighter in the middle. The lighter engulfs the wood in an instant with a big hot whoosh.
“Okay, you’re right, I wasn’t in the Boy Scouts,” he says. “But only because they would have never taught you how to do that.”
He stands there and stares at the fire for a minute, and I watch him closely, loving the way he looks in the glow of the flames, his face a mixture of light and shadow. His eyes seem to sit deeper, almost black underneath his dark arched brows, the shadows under his cheekbones more pronounced, his beard looking thicker.
I start wondering what traits of his the baby will get. No doubt they’ll have thick black hair. Will they have his olive, easily tanned skin tone? Or my pale one (the only thing I inherited from my mother)? Considering I’m short and Dex isn’t especially tall, I don’t see any basketball players in our future, but I do hope they get his athletic ability. Will their eyes be blue or brown? Will they get my small nose or Dex’s strong jaw?
Eventually he catches my eye, the flames dancing in his, and gives me a crooked smile as he takes a drag on the cigar, the embers at the end burning red. He sits down on the log beside me, blowing the smoke from the cigar in the other direction, and hands me the bottle of Jack Daniels.
“Just like old times,” he says.
“We’re really going back,” I tell him, unscrewing the cap with a satisfying snap. I raise the bottle to my lips, having the first swig. “Ahh, burns so good.”
I hand it to him, our fingers brushing against each other, and fuck isn’t it so strange that even the slightest touch still has the power to unleash butterflies in my stomach. Though perhaps it’s all the alcohol I’ve already consumed today.
“Speaking of going back,” he says, turning the bottle over in his hands. “Remember when we were up at Seaside, just before the haunted demon school? And we were talking about the future, and where we wanted to end up? Have you given that any more thought?”
“What do you mean?”
He takes a sip and hands me back the bottle. “I mean, we have the money. We’ll do what we can to honor what we promised Harry, but we have the money and we aren’t giving it back. I know we want to put the apartment up for sale, I know we want to move. But where? What do you really see for us? Where do you see us? Does any of that change if we’re going to have a family?”