Grant complies, helping me sit up and shift my body so that I’m now facing him. We curl into each other like we’ve done this our entire lives.
“How do you feel?” he asks, one hand reaching down to caress my belly.
“I feel amazing,” I say with a chuckle.
“Me too.” He smiles, pressing his lips to my forehead in a precious kiss.
“I wasn’t sure if sex while pregnant would work,” I say. “It seemed unlikely with another . . . being in the room.”
“True.” Grant laughs, smoothing my hair from my cheek and neck. “Third parties aside . . . I think you wear it well.”
“The belly?” I ask, incredulous.
“You’re sexy as hell.” He sighs, touching his lips to mine. “It’s been tough.”
“Has it?” I laugh, my eyebrows raised.
“You have no idea.”
“I’m sure I have some idea,” I whisper against his lips.
We kiss then, long and slow and perfectly in sync. It’s the kind of kiss that I doubt I’ll ever forget.
“I have a gift for you too,” I say once we part.
“You do?” His voice is surprised.
“I’d get it for you, but I don’t think I’ll be moving from this spot for a minute.”
“Where is it?”
“On the dresser.”
Grant plants a firm kiss against my forehead before he vaults out of bed, younger now than I’ve ever seen him act. I watch him (well, his muscular butt) as he saunters over to the dresser, finding the box and lifting it.
“This?”
“That’s the one.”
He looks at it for a minute, reading the sans serif type on the front, and then on the back, and then on the front again.
After what feels like a year has passed, I speak up. “What do you think?”
“It’s a DNA test?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” he asks, sounding confused but not irritated.
“Well, don’t you want to know if she’s yours?” I ask, tapping my fingers across my swollen belly.
He stares for a prolonged moment before setting the box down on the dresser and climbing back into bed with me. “I hate to say this after you’ve already spent money . . . but I don’t need that thing,” he says softly, his fingertips resting lightly on my arm, drawing inscrutable patterns.
“Why not?”
“I just . . .” He sighs, thinking for a moment before he shrugs. “I don’t care. She’s yours. And that’s good enough for me.”
“You don’t . . . care?” I brace myself for the impossible hurt I know is about to hit me.
“I don’t. I’m going to love and care for this child, regardless of whether she’s mine or someone else’s. It doesn’t matter to me. She’s your baby, Ana, and I plan to protect and care for both you and your child for as long as you’ll have me.”
For the umpteenth time today, tears well up in my eyes, a fountain of gratitude pouring from me. What am I supposed to say to that?
“Okay,” I whisper through the tears.
“Okay.” Grant chuckles, reaching over to the bedside table to grab a tissue. He wipes my wet cheeks and my nose with a tenderness I almost can’t believe for such a large man.
“In that case . . . can you do one more thing for me?” I ask, batting my eyelashes.
“Anything.”
“Can you help me get up so I can go pee?”
His broad shoulders vibrate with a deep, echoing laugh. “You bet.”
25
* * *
Change of Heart
Grant
“Don’t say a word,” I grumble, lacing up my skates.
Jordie raises both hands in surrender. “Not saying a thing.” He grins wickedly. “Other than . . . you look so pretty.”
I flip him the middle finger. I got a black eye during our last game. Fucking Vancouver Rebels. Hooligans, the whole team. And since the director of the charity organization thought I would, and I quote, scare the children, I’m now wearing fucking makeup to cover it.
Apparently, between my unkempt beard and the black eye, I’m a scary motherfucker these days. And so when I arrived for the Little Rookies camp today, the director marched me straight back into the dressing room and grabbed something from her purse, all but shoving me into a metal folding chair. I didn’t realize it was makeup until she was halfway through. I opened my mouth to protest, but she went right on dabbing and blending until the bruise under my eye had mostly vanished.
“Dude, get over here.” Morgan, our backup goalie, cackles like a hyena. “Cap’s wearing makeup.”
I grimace at them. “Apparently, my appearance was going to frighten the kids.”
Jordie chuckles. “Yeah, but now you’re a six-foot-four dude with a grizzly-ass beard who also wears makeup, so what’s worse?”
“Fuck off, Jordie.”
He shrugs. “Fair enough.”
We take our places on the ice, which quiets down my teammates, although I’m sure I haven’t heard the last of this. I’m assigned to work with the younger group of kids, so I head over to the far end to get my station set up.
The ice has been configured in stations with foam pads sectioning it off into quadrants, and there are nets positioned in each corner to create more scoring opportunities. It makes me wish a program like this existed when I first started.
Watching a dozen five- and six-year-olds waddle and scoot their way out across the ice in full hockey gear puts a smile on my face. The feeling is so foreign, because I haven’t smiled since Ana moved out two weeks ago.
“Hey, mister!” one of the little boys with two missing teeth calls, gazing up at me.
“Yeah?” I bend down so I can meet his eyes through the cage on his helmet.
“What happened to your face?”
I chuckle. “Nothing, kid, I’m fine. You want to practice shooting the puck or what?”
“Yeah!” he shouts and toddles off toward the net, barely avoiding tripping over his own stick along the way.
I skate behind him, trying not to get hit in the nuts with any stray sticks or pucks.
There’s not much actual instruction with this age level, just some occasional praise and a lot of picking kids up off the ice when they fall. I spend the next forty-five minutes working with the group while my mind wanders to Ana and my unborn baby. Somewhere along the way, I started thinking of the baby as mine.
No matter what some DNA test or piece of paper might say, I know how I feel about Ana and the child growing inside her.
The parents who raised me didn’t do so out of biological obligation, and that didn’t make them any less my mom and dad. As a result, I never felt the need to go looking for my birth parents. I understood the reasoning of why some people feel compelled to, but I’ve never had that urge.
All I want is for Ana to give me a shot at a future, because I’m pretty damn certain we could be the real deal if she’d only try.
Holding her in my arms the other night, and the feel of her belly between us. Watching her fall apart when I brought over the rocking chair her mother used when she was a baby. And then, God, making love to her after—it was an incredible night.