“Shit. Is that the time?”
Glenn flicked me his patented side eye. “Have you been drinking that eggnog in the lounge?”
“Yeah. Fucking buzzed over here. What gave me away?”
“Dick.”
“Yup. When are you flying out to see Jed?”
“In the morning.”
“You’re flying on Christmas Day?”
Glenn shrugged. “It’s just a day on the calendar, man. Your people still love you the day after.”
“Preach.”
But I pondered Glenn’s words a lot as I walked home a little while later. The morning air was damp, rather than crisp and cool, but it suited my mood less and less the closer I got to home. Maggie wasn’t there, but Ash was, and Cosmo and the baby, Danni and Joe. I loved them all so much.
The early morning winter sun was behind Danni when I found her waiting for me on the steps of our building. “The fuck are you doing out here?”
“Grouch.”
“Tell me something new.”
“We’ve named the baby…sort of.”
“Seriously?” I finally returned her smile and took her outstretched hand. “It’s not something whacky, is it? Your poor fucking kids.”
“Can it.” She punched my arm. “It’s not whacky, but I want to talk to you about it before we make it official.”
“Okaaay. Can we talk inside? I’m beat, and, girl, so should you be. You just had a baby.”
Danni let me tug her inside, but made no move toward the stairs. “It’s the strangest thing, actually,” she said. “I keep forgetting I gave birth a couple of days ago. I feel so empowered, you know? Because it went so well?”
“You were owed a good one after Cosmo.”
“True that. I just wish you could’ve been there. It meant the world to us when you delivered Cosmo.”
“I’m not an obstetric nurse, Dan. I was winging it.”
“Liar. You’ve delivered a dozen babies as a paramedic. Glenn told me.”
“Glenn wouldn’t know. I was a nurse by the time he got here. Anyway…”
“Anyway what?”
I sighed, craving my bed and a double helping of Ash before I had to have ridiculous conversations like this. “Just tell me, okay? I’m too tired for this bullshit.”
“I want to name him after your father.”
Of all the things I’d imagined her saying, that wasn’t among them. “What? Why?”
“Because he deserves it. Your mom used to sit up at night with me when Cosmo was tiny and tell me all about him. I know we all would’ve loved him. I know you loved him.”
My father had been dead so long I could barely remember him. But Danni was right—I had loved him.
I loved him still.
I sat on the third step of the staircase. The tiles were cold enough that I pulled Danni into my lap rather than let her sit down too. “You’re seriously gonna call your kid Bill?”
“Billy, actually, if you’re okay with it.”
I nodded slowly. “I’m okay with it. In fact, I was okay with it when I thought Heidi had named Liam after him, but she never gave me a straight answer on that. She liked fucking with me.”
“I’m not that kind of sister, Pete.”
I kissed her cheek. “I know.”
Pete
Call me insane, but I was starting to enjoy Ash being pretty much confined to the couch and the bed. Road trips aside, it had been a while since we’d spent so much time simply lying around with each other. The only downside was that with Danni busy with the baby—with Billy—and Ash resting, cooking Christmas Dinner was down to me and Joe.
Joe held up the pot roast. “The hell do we do with this?”
“Fuck if I know.”
Danni’s giggle carried through from the living room. I chose to ignore it and turned the stove on, guessing at the temperature while Joe googled Martha Stewart. Damn it, I could intubate a pediatric burn victim on a sinking tourist ferry. How hard could this shit be?
Very, apparently, if your cooking repertoire was limited to toast, bacon, and Joe’s grandmother’s weird ass potatoes, but after around eleventy hours in the kitchen we managed to turn out a passable meal.
Well, it got eaten and no one died, so I was taking the win.
Later that night when Joe and Danni had taken the kids home, and I was done making sure Liam’s room was ready for when he came back from Seattle—‘cos what else did you do on Christmas night when the love of your life was napping on the couch?—I came back to the living room to find Ash awake and standing by the window, disheveled and wonderful. If it had been snowing outside, it would’ve been my kind of fairy tale, but the gray drizzle was far from picture perfect.
Not that it mattered when Ash had discarded his shirt, something he only did when it was just the two of us. I crossed the room and tried not to zero in on the scars scattered across his gorgeous skin. Some days I was real good at pretending they weren’t there, others my heart ached for him so hard I felt sick. Today was somewhere in between. My fingers itched to trace them, to love them as much of the rest of him, but he wasn’t always down with that, and it was Christmas, goddamnit. Fuck the asshole who’d put them there.
Clearing my throat in warning, I came up behind him and wrapped my arms around his waist, pressing a cautious kiss between his shoulder blades. “Want me to turn the heat down?”
“Hmm?” Ash leaned languidly into my embrace, vindicating my instinct not to draw focus to bullshit that made him tense up and fear my touch. “Nah, I’m good. Just woke up hot.”
“What kind of hot?”
He chuckled. “The good kind.”
That was a new one. Ash’s dreams tended to scare the life out of both of us, when he told me about them, at least. In more than half a decade, I couldn’t remember him ever confessing to having a dirty dream.
I stepped around him and put myself between him and the window. “Care to share?”
An infinitesimal flush stained Ash’s fashion model cheekbones. “It’s not that exciting, it was more a flashback than a dream.”
“A flashback of what?”
“Of you fucking me in that cabin in North Dakota.”
Heat flooded through me like someone had turned a faucet on. So much had happened since that glittery frosted morning, but I recalled every second we’d spent in that cabin with perfect clarity. Our trip had been life changing, but a single moment, laced together by a million others I couldn’t remember so well, had changed us.
I took his hands, wrapping my fingers around his tight enough crack knuckles. “How come it was on your mind?”
“Dunno.” Ash shrugged. “I like it being on my mind, though. It makes me happy.”
It made me happy too, so fucking happy. I kissed him, trying for sweet even though my heart was thumping and my blood had already rushed south.
He responded in kind, but there was something about the way his tongue dragged over my bottom lip and gently demanded entrance to my mouth, something about the way he sighed and tugged me closer.
He wants me. Even after all this time, I couldn’t quite believe it. Ash was fucking magical, and I was the luckiest dude in the world.