“Don’t poke your tongue out at me,” she demanded.
I froze. Straightened. Looked around to see if Lucy was hiding in her car.
She was not.
“Are you psychic?” I asked seriously.
“Dude, if I was psychic, I would be using my powers for evil, not to spy on you,” she replied. “I just know you’re Polly.”
And she was right.
I was Polly.
Not exactly the same. I was scarred now. But every day, I was getting more like me. I watched the sunrise, every morning. Sometimes alone while Heath slept. Most of the time with Heath beside me. Or inside me.
I taught my classes, five times a week, multiple times a day. And I derived so much joy from it.
I still volunteered. I was helping Jay with expansion.
I still helped my friends out with whatever crazy plan one of them had.
But I also had Heath.
Really had him.
Every single day.
And he was planning for the days ahead.
Since he’d purposefully left the iPad screen onto a house listing.
I’d obviously picked it up because I was nosy.
And also because the house was beautiful.
It was by the ocean.
Old.
Beautifully restored.
It had character.
“Do you like it?” Heath murmured from behind me, arms circling me.
“No, I hate the beautiful yet quaint cottage by the sea,” I deadpanned.
He chuckled, and the sound vibrated all the way to my bones.
“Why are you teasing me with it?” I asked. I definitely couldn’t afford it, since I had little of Craig’s money left and I was planning on something else with the small amount I did have. The small amount that wouldn’t even make a dent in the deposit needed for such a house. It might’ve been quaint, but it was seaside. In L.A.
“Not teasing if you like it,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, we can set up an appointment. View it. If you hate it as much as you say, we’ll keep looking. If you don’t, we’ll buy it.”
I froze.
Heath noted this, as he noted all changes, big and small so he let me go and I turned to face him.
“Buy it?” I repeated.
He nodded.
“To live in...together?” I clarified.
He grinned. “We live here together.” He gestured around the apartment. “What’s the difference if I buy you a house to build a home with you?”
“It’s different,” I snapped. “It’s grown up and real.”
“Newsflash, we are grown up and real,” he said.
“You would do that?” I whispered. “Buy a house for me?”
“For us,” he corrected. “And yeah, I’d do anything for us. For you.”
I chewed my lip. “This is a lot.”
“Babe, it’s our future we’re plannin’ not a military coo,” he said, voice amused.
I chewed my lip. “I know that,” I snapped.
He pulled me into his arms and all the stiffness that had emerged with his words melted with his touch and I relaxed into him immediately. Well, my body did. My mind was still running.
“Baby,” he murmured, cupping my face. “Talk to me.”
That was it. Talk to me. He was so direct. He saw something was bothering me, he noticed it. And that in itself was something. Because in my experience with men—and I had a lot—they didn’t notice much or distinguish the subtleties in a woman’s demeanor. Or even the fricking obvious mood changes.
And even when they did, it was rarer still for them to address it.
Men didn’t like conflict, as a rule. Of course most would like to portray different, about their lack of fear directly correlating to their abundance of ‘manhood.’ But they were terrified of fights with women. Or even heated discussions. Anything that would make them uncomfortable, they avoided like the plague.
A huge generalization, but I’d done the legwork, so to speak.
It rang true.
For every man I’d dated except Heath.
He noticed the subtleties.
And then he cared about getting to the bottom of them.
He wasn’t afraid of conflict.
Of any kind.
Shit, I loved him.
“Well, I’ve lived my life spontaneous,” I said. “I’ve never planned. And it’s been quite common for me to decide to do a cross-country road trip when I’ve got a full tank of gas and nothing on that day. Or especially if I’ve got something on that day. I’m used to that. The unknown doesn’t scare me like it does other people. But this? Plans? Future? It’s terrifying.”
He kissed me. “That’s a good thing, baby. Bein’ scared means you’re livin’, really living.”
We looked at the house the next day.
And I loved it.
“We’ll take it,” Heath said immediately the second my eyes lit up with the view of the ocean.
Heath hadn’t even blinked at the fact he had to provide the capital. “You’ve given me a home, least I can do is buy you one.”
“You’re not concerned I’m only with you for your money?” I teased.
And he had money. Not that you could tell. But considering we were buying a beachside cottage in Malibu, albeit rustic and not at all like the flashier ones around it—it was the shabbiest on the street, which was why I’d instantly fallen in love with it—it was still Malibu. And he was buying it all with cash.
“Well, I’m only with you for your looks, so it works,” he teased.
I was yet to tell everyone about the house, but I reasoned that I could tell Lucy now.
“Lucy—”
“Oh, fuck!” she hissed.
I froze, because of the utter pain in her voice.
“Lucy, are you okay, is it the baby?” I demanded, fear choking me.
“Yes it is,” she hissed. “And I was right, this baby is an asshole.”
“Lucy, I need more information.”
“That’s why I was calling,” she bit out. “To give you the information that I’m in labor. But then you had to start talking about physics and my child had to contract my womb with the power of its father’s stubbornness,” she ground out.
“Lucy, I told you, five fuckin’ minutes on the phone,” Keltan’s tight voice entered from the background.
“And I told you, when you push a baby out of your vagina, you get to make the rules. Until that point, you shut up and drive me to the place where they give me the drugs.”
“And where they’ll deliver our child,” Keltan added.
“Whatever,” she muttered.
She sounded calm.
Much too calm.
I was, however, freaking the fuck out.
“Lucy, you’re having your baby,” I chanted.
“I’m aware,” she replied. “We’ll meet you at the hospital. And I expect you to have a martini ready for me the second this baby comes out.”
Then she hung up.
I was pacing.
Pacing in a hospital, waiting for news on Lucy.
Heath was watching me.
It was like before.
Except instead of waiting for news that would shatter our world, we were waiting for news that would brighten it.