I stroke my belly nervously.
I hold back another wave of nausea. Whatever. He can be upset about it if he wants, but I already promised the baby I would tell him. I would be honest, and that’s what I’m gonna do when this is all over with. I’m gonna tell him about the baby, and at that point he can choose to stay uninterested, or get involved.
Fanning myself with a crumpled up program for the conference, I decide to look at in Brandon’s direction again. This time I do so with strength. Courage. I came because Riley said he needed me. Said he needed help with some administrative duties today would help pay for my legal fees. I’m here for my baby too, but not for you, Brandon. Not to apologize or anything like that. Not to try to get you back. I harden my mouth at him. Still, it seems a little too perfect that Riley would get me to come in today of all days to help with administrative stuff.
A small kick — the first one I’ve ever legitimately felt from my baby — comes to my stomach. Well, okay. I did say I would come to the conference, but I still can’t help but feel manipulated here. Like I’m being forced into contact with Brandon by Riley. Like he’s trying to get us back together or something.
Another kick.
Well, whatever this is, I’m gonna see it through to the end. You deserve that much, baby. At least then I can’t say I didn’t try, and you can’t come back and ask me later why you don’t have a daddy.
Chapter 32
Juliet
From the moment Brandon starts speaking, till now I haven’t been able to take my eyes off him. The whole time, my ears and heart have been attuned to every word. Every image. Every emotion he’s taken us through.
He’s just taken us through a harrowing recount of his daring rescue mission. The one where civilians and members of his own unit were vulnerable. At risk and being fired on by enemy forces. He talks about how they shot at the helicopter. Shot out the engine, and damage the propellers.
“When I went hurtling toward the ground, I had only one thought,” he says, folding his hands in front of himself, “it wasn’t about my life. It wasn’t about what I may or may not leave behind, what I had to lose or gain by being a hero. It wasn’t about being heroic.” He pauses, clearing his throat. “As you all know, you don’t do this job because you want to be a hero. Because you want accolades or praise. You do this job because you care about people. Life. Liberty. You do this job because you want to protect those things, even if it means at great cost to yourself.” He gestures with his hand, mimicking the trajectory of his shot down helicopter. “So, when I saw that I was about to go down in flames along with my fellow rescuers, my thoughts were on how I could make sure that whatever I did in the next few minutes, and led to freedom. Liberty. People’s lives getting to continue beyond this point, even if it wasn’t my own.” Here, I can hear genuine tears in his voice.
Brandon walks forward, locking eyes with me. “Those few minutes of fire were terrible. The most terrifying thing I’ve ever live through in my life. Something I had night terrors about for years after I came home, but even as I feared the fire around me, I grabbed around for people I could free. Team members I could get away from the blast, should it happen. I focused on shielding myself and civilians alike from gunfire, but an explosion did come.”
My breathing catches here, as I notice him gripping at his arm. The arm I remember that has extensive scarring and damage. “That explosion damaged my arm. My muscles and tendons. But the real damage to that part of my body came when, even in the midst of that explosion, I tried to lift burning metal and other debris off my compatriots. The civilians I had intended to save. I didn’t want them to be burned alive by a rescue mission gone bad, so I pushed my limits and that arm to try to save them. I didn’t realize until later that I had tried to do all this with muscles and tendons already shredded.” He pauses. “You see, I didn’t feel any pain until later. I didn’t feel the extent of my injuries until I woke up in the hospital wing of our base. And even then I didn’t know that have a price I ultimately paid until I return home, after being formally discharged.”
A long pause stretches here, and in it I’m left to reflect miserably on my behavior. How I just ran away from him. Treated him like he couldn’t or wouldn’t know what I needed, or that he was being unfair to me.
“People think coming home is the end of it. They think it’s where they want to be after being on the battlefield. Being deployed for so many months or years on end, but as you know, and as I’m sure many of you have experienced, coming home is the beginning of the real battle. Of the real fight with your demons, and of paying the price for your bravery and sacrifice. Often in disabilities in the mind and body that you didn’t start out with, and you don’t know how to handle. I won’t tell you it’s going to be easy.” He looks around the audience, but then comes back to me, as if I’m the period on his very being. The end of everything he wants to be or will ever be in life. “I’m not going to tell you it’s going to happen within this timeframe or that, or that healing is going to be complete and total for each one of you, but I will say that there is a way to cope. There is a way to create a new you. A new life worth living after combat, and that’s what we at the New Hope Veteran’s Association strive to do. Help each and every one of you create a new lust for life, a new way of being, not taking you back to the way you were. We all know you will not be the way you were before you saw the other end of a gun. There is no coming back from that, but there is a chance to rebuild. There is a chance for things to be better for your service, not worse.”
As applause begins to echo around the room, I feel really horrible. The worst woman in the history of womankind, to be honest with you. How could I ever think about leaving him? Walking out on him like that? How could I treat him that way? More applause greets the end of his speech, and that’s when I know I really fucked up. I really made a mess of things. Made an enemy of him, and when he showed me nothing but kindness. Nothing but love, and I just kicked them to the curb. I just ran away. I know I was dealing with the loss of my dad and everything, but that doesn’t excuse it. That doesn’t make it right. I fidget, seeing him step off the stage having finished his speech. He’s headed right this way. I know I was afraid of him rejecting me. So I rejected him first. But now I don’t know if there’s any way I can make it right with him. Why would he accept someone like me back?
After he showed me nothing but compassion love and kindness and I left him. Kicked him out of my life completely, why would he take me back?
I wouldn’t, if I were him. But I’m not him.
And, as he makes his way to my seat, and I stand up to face the music, I see no anger. Just concern.
The same concern I saw in his eyes when he pulled me from that mountain cliff over three months ago.
Chapter 34
Juliet
In the last five seconds, I’ve debated how to react to him. How to receive him. To be cold and professional, or to be warm and apologetic. For all my thinking, it’s my heart that makes the decision in the end. The moment he gets within range of my arms, I bring him and for a hug and a kiss.
Before he can say anything about the baby I’m carrying, or where I went or why, I ask for his forgiveness. Practically beg for it, feeling tears spilling out of me. “I’m sorry for leaving like that. I’m sorry for not telling you where I was going. I’m sorry for not telling you about the pregnancy.” I hug him tightly, feeling him pull off his fancy jacket and throw it over my shoulders. Just like he did the night we met, except it’s not his windbreaker, it’s his uniform-approved jacket. With all his awards and pins on it. “I was afraid,” I admit, sobbing pitifully. “You didn’t seem to want kids, so I thought if you found out about the baby, you’d ask me to leave anyway. You’d be upset with me, so I decided to make it easy on you.” I hiccup on my sadness, letting about three months’ worth of tears and snot flow out onto his shoulder. “I didn’t want to leave you, but then when I saw you downtown with your friends, after you said that you would be l
ate getting home from work, I thought you must really hate me or something. That you must really not like having me around, so I decided to leave for that reason, too.”
Brandon just hugged me. Kisses me all over. Lets me feel the few tears he is shedding. But I only feel them as wet spots on my neck and part of my shoulder. “Oh, Juliet. Oh, my baby,” he says, “I’m sorry you thought I didn’t want a baby. I’m sorry you thought I would be angry because of it.” He squeezes me tightly to him, kissing me more and more. “That’s not true at all. I wouldn’t have been angry with that kind of news. I had a hand in what happened, anyway. Not being careful and everything.” Here he looks into my face. Sweeps back the hair I’ve decided to cut and color since he saw me last. He kisses me on the lips. “I know I didn’t sound excited about kids when we talked about it earlier, but that’s not the same as not wanting them. I’m happy for a baby. I want one.”
I give a sad smile, bringing his hand down to my belly.
For a moment, he marvels silently at the new life in me.
Then he says, “To be honest with you, the moment I saw you today, and the moment I saw you had a belly on you, I started thinking about getting that little one a sibling.” He smiles sheepishly, but, believe it or not, I’m feeling similarly.
“I wouldn’t mind.”
“Good,” he says, kissing me. Wrapping the jacket more tightly around me. “Because I want us to start over. I want us to get to know each other again.”
“I’m relieved to hear you say that,” I say, feeling legitimately relieved. If not for that, I would be stuck in Albuquerque with nowhere to go, and no special person to spend the rest of my life with. No way to make good memories, which I’m determined to do, to balance out all the bad. All the loss.
“And if you want to know what I was doing downtown with my friends,” he says, awkwardly getting down on his knees and fishing for something in his pocket. He does so, not caring that he is knocked over a few chairs, and then more than a few people are staring at him and us. Some even have their cell phones out, prepared to capture some scandalous moment or other. Some news bit of the century, I guess. “I was getting their opinions on this” — he reveals what he’s been holding in his hand, what he fished out of a pocket — “how this would look on you.”
“This” is an engagement ring. A big shiny thing. It’s even got small diamonds in the band, along with one giant one in the middle.
“Oh my God, Brandon!” All the other women in the room have started to see the sparkly ring and react similarly to me. Tears. Gasps. Eager pointing. Grabbing of their husbands and boyfriends. So it wasn’t about deceiving me at all! It wasn’t because he hated me or wanted me to get the “hint” and move out of his house! It wasn’t any of that! It’s because he wanted to make sure his engagement ring was up to snuff! Big, wet tears roll out of my eyes at this. Had I not run away without thinking the way I did, I would’ve been engaged. I would’ve known how he really felt about me. But instead I made up a story about him. About how he didn’t want me or my baby, no matter the circumstances. No matter his equal responsibility.
And now I know none of that is true. It never was, and never will be.
Brandon’s just started to say, “Juliet, will you…”
I don’t even let him finish. “Yes.” I cry hard here, wipe my face and nose. “Yes, I will.” I let him put the ring on my finger, as a few cell phones moving to take pictures. As a few surrounding women squeal and moan with emotion. “Whenever, wherever, I will marry you, Brandon.”
This time, I’m the one who leans forward to kiss him. To wrap him up in all the love and trust I can muster.
When we finally come up for air, I say, “And I wouldn’t mind getting started on baby number two.” I whisper this. Nibble on his ear. “You’ll just have to wait a few months for me to make room.”
Chapter 34
Juliet
A few months later. June/July. Albuquerque.
Standing as I am in my wedding dress in the middle of a national park (the wilderness has been transformed into a white laced and wild Chapel). I’m there with my mom Janel, Whitney, my maid of honor. And Riley and Brynn Smith, their perspective wives and Whitney’s sister-in-law, Monica.
We have all spent all morning getting ready for this wedding. I actually got ready in my old bathroom at Dad’s house. It was the last kindness I was done by the new owners of his house before going to the park to get married today. Sounds weird, but I just wanted to feel like Dad was present while I was getting ready. Having my hair and makeup done, since he won’t be here to walk me down the aisle today.
Of course, I’m sad thinking about this, but I quickly. I’m standing in front of Brandon now, our vows being shared. Brandon goes first. “Juliet, when I first met you, I wasn’t sure you were real. I thought you were a ghost. I still don’t think you belong on this planet, but now instead of a ghost, I think you’re an angel.” Birds twitter and tweet in between these words, seeming to agree about my heaven-sent origins. “Little did I know when I grabbed you off that cliff side almost 6 months ago, that you would become not only my best friend, but my wife. The mother of my first child, who I can’t wait to meet in a few months.”
My mother sniffles on the side. She’s one of my bridesmaids, after all. She also happens to be the ring bearer, since nobody else wanted to volunteer.
Brandon clears his throat, taking my hand. “I am blessed and honored to have you in my life, juju-bear. I hope you’ll do me the honor of sharing my life with me as well. I will live for nothing else in my life but you and my children. I look forward to years together with you, both in the woods and down off the mountain. I can’t wait to see all the style and pizazz you bring into my life, and the lives of our children. You are truly a work of art.”
With these words, my mother comes up with the decorative pillow with the rings on it.
The pastor, a middle-aged woman who also happens to be a self-proclaimed Wiccan, asks, “Juliet, do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
“I do,” I say, and Brandon slips the ring on my finger. While I’ve been wearing an engagement ring for the last few months, it doesn’t compare to the feeling of a wedding ring slipping over my finger. I feel sealed. Loved. Adored. And now it’s time for me to say my vows. Things I have actually been practicing in the mirror while getting ready as well. “Brandon, when I met you, I honestly didn’t want to live. I didn’t know what I had to live for. I didn’t know if I would ever be back to my normal self. I didn’t know if I would ever be the person I was before my dad died.” My voice breaks over these words, as much as I had been practicing otherwise. “But, because of you, I cannot only say that I’m the person I’ve always been. Vivacious. Creative. In love with life, but I can say I’m better than I was before. I’m warmer. More open. A mother.” I smile, unable to believe how much joy that one word gives me. And when I wasn’t the kind of girl who played with dolls growing up. “Because of you, I have more to do with my life. I have more to live for than ever. And to think I came up to the mountain to escape. To get out of my life as I knew it.” I blink away tears. “Because of you, my life has changed in ways I could’ve never imagined. I’m a better person, a better wife and mother because of you.” I clear my throat. “It will be my honor to be your wife until death do us part, Brandon.” As I say this, I catch a glimpse at Harlow, who just has so happens to be Brandon’s best man. He gives me a thumbs-up. “Thank you for never giving up on me. And thank you for letting me not run away.”
With that, I fall silent, and the officiate steps forward to do her job. “Brandon Whitley, do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?”
“I do,” he says, and I slipped the ring on his finger.
“Then I now pronounce you Mr. and Mrs. Whitley, man and wife in the eyes of God, and all gathered here today.” Even before the pastor has stopped talking, Brandon and I are already leaning close to kiss each other. We’re already giggling at the prospect. �
��You may now kiss the bride,” she adds, veritably rolling her eyes. To her, we must look like high school sweethearts.
That’s all we need. The minute were given permission, we lock lips. We swap spit too. Don’t care that this is an intimate family event, I give him tons of tongue. And he returns it tenfold.
Epilogue
Juliet
About a year or two later.
Life is great. But not just for me. For Brandon. Since getting married last spring going on summer, we’ve set up a nice little life for ourselves and Brandon’s cabin in the woods. For from a horror story waiting to happen, like I thought when I first got here days then out of my head, it’s been a dream come true. It’s been a fairytale come to life for me.
We’ve made it through our first winter. At the end of which, my baby boy was born. He’s about 8 to 9 months old now, and getting into tons of trouble. I’ve named him William, after my dad. His middle name is Timothy, after his father.
Along with the baby, and being a full-time mother, the biggest change has been in myself and my husband. He and I are doing full-time work with the charity now. I’m doing work as a writer and office clerk, and he’s doing outreach. Sometimes that’s going and giving speeches; other times that’s talking with people on the phone about what services we offer and to whom; other times that he’s fielding crisis calls, from veterans who are at their wits end. You don’t know what to do, and can’t get down from an episode.
Hold Onto Me_A Secret Baby Romance Page 13
