Swoon.
“But you have stop making yourself sick over me. What good will it do if I live to be a cranky old man, and you worry yourself into an early grave over me?”
He does make a good point.
His hands slide beneath me to grasp my ass as he picks up the pace. For several minutes, there’re no words, only sharp gasps and deep sighs of pleasure as we reach the peak together in a loud crescendo that makes me thankful we don’t have neighbors close by.
Wyatt comes down on top of me and wraps his arms around me.
I hold on tight to my one true love.
“Do you feel any better?” he asks after a long silence.
“I feel sublime, as I always do when I get to be with you like this.”
Bending his neck, he plants a kiss on my chest. “What about on the inside, where your freak-o-meter has been running on overtime?”
“I’m trying to find ways to cope with the worries.”
“And how’s that going?”
“Good days. Bad days. The day before your annual checkup? Not so great.”
“I think we need therapy about this.”
“You do? Really?”
“Yes, I do. I’m used to living with the uncertainty of it all, but you’re not, and you need some coping skills beyond my ability to sex you into relaxation.”
“Don’t underestimate your potent capabilities.” I smile at him. “I feel better than I have all day.”
“Which is great, but since I can’t keep you in bed for days at a time—although we really ought to do that sometime—we need extra help with this. Would you be willing to go?”
“If you think it would help, of course I would.”
“I do think it would help. I had a ton of therapy when I was younger and first dealing with my precarious health situation. It made a big difference for me. I want that for you, too.”
“I’m sorry if I’ve done a poor job of hiding my worries from you.”
“I don’t want you to hide anything from me, Dee, especially worries about me. I’ll ask around about a good therapist and get us in there in January, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And in the meantime, you’re going to help with the Nochebuena preparations tomorrow while I do my thing at the hospital.”
“No, I want to go with you.”
He kisses the words right off my lips. “You’re going to be with your family like you are on Christmas Eve every year. There’s nothing you can do for me but lose an entire day sitting in waiting rooms. You won’t even get to see me.”
“But I’ll be near you.”
“There’s nothing you can do, sweetheart, but shiver in overly chilled waiting rooms. You’re already cold all the time. That’ll make for a miserable day for you when you could be having fun with your girls. I promise I’ll come straight to Abuela’s the second I get out of there.”
I think about that for a second. “You’re sure there’s nothing I can do if I go with you?”
“One thousand percent positive.”
“All right, then,” I say on a long sigh. “I’ll do it your way, but I’d better be the first to know if there’s anything wrong.”
“There won’t be anything wrong, and you’ll always be the first to know everything.”
“I guess I can live with that if it means I get to live with you.”
“That’s my girl,” he says with another sweet kiss as he gathers me in close to him. “Now get some sleep. You’ve got a pig to roast tomorrow.”
Carmen
The smell of the roasting pig is making me want to vomit, but that’s not surprising since every smell makes me sick lately, or so it seems. I’m constantly swallowing bile as my stomach churns relentlessly. No one told me pregnancy was going to be this difficult. Sure, I’ve heard stories about morning sickness, but it’s the all-day sickness that’s killing me. And after a miscarriage earlier in the year that no one knows I had, I’ve held off on telling people about this pregnancy for fear of having to take it all back if this one doesn’t take either.
“What’s wrong with you?” my mom, Vivian, asks me when we’re in Abuela’s hot, crowded kitchen with the other women in our family, less my cousin Maria, who’s stuck in LA.
“What? Nothing.”
She raises a dark brow that lets me know she sees right through my bullshit. As the only child of a woman who suffered nine miscarriages before she had me, trust me when I tell you that not only does she see through my bullshit, sometimes I feel like she can also read my mind. “Are you fighting with your sexy neurosurgeon?”
“No, I’m not fighting with Jason.”
“Well, then, what is it? This is your favorite day of the year, and you look like you’d rather be anywhere else.”
Before I can come up with a reply she’ll accept, she takes me by the arm and all but perp-walks me outside, thankfully to the front of the house and not the back where the pig is roasting in the above-ground Caja China that Abuela bought years ago for Nochebuena. It replaced the hole in the ground where the pig used to be roasted.
My cousins Nico, Milo and Dom, all of whom are actually from the Italian side of the family, were recruited yesterday to go with Abuela to choose the pig. They were also in charge of cleaning and preparing it for roasting. I can’t think about that process, or I’ll lose the meager contents of my stomach. “Tell me what’s wrong so whatever it is won’t ruin both our days.”
“Nothing is wrong, Mami. It’s actually something good.”
Again with the eyebrow.
“We were waiting to tell you—”
She lets out a shriek that the entire neighborhood probably hears and wraps me in a hug so tight she nearly squeezes the puke right out of me.
“Mami! Stop your screaming before someone calls the cops!”
“A woman is allowed to scream when she finds out she’s going to be a grandmother, and why in the world didn’t you tell me before now?” With her hands on my shoulders, she holds me back so she can give me a full inspection. “What’s the problem?”
“No problem other than feeling like I’m going to die every minute of every day.”
She winces. “I was like that with you, too, but not with any of the others. That’s how I knew you were going to stick.”
That information renders me nearly speechless. “Really?” I ask in a higher-than-usual tone.
“Yep. I swear I subsisted for months on wafer crackers and ginger ale.”
“That’s what I’ve been eating, too.”
“And the smells!” She makes a revolted face.
“Oh my God! The worst. The pig is taking me over the edge.”
“Then let’s get you out of here for now.”
“I can’t leave.” Just that quickly, I’m battling tears, which is another thing that’s been ridiculous lately. Jason laughs at how I cry over everything. “I’ll miss all the fun.”
“No, you won’t. You can come back later when everything is cooked, and the scents won’t be so pungent.”
“We don’t want people to know yet, Mami. I’m not even three months. I want to wait awhile longer.”