And now he wanted to tell me I was beautiful again. Amazingly, I felt beautiful. Maybe pregnancy could do that. Or maybe it was more than just being pregnant. Maybe it was everything. I had to laugh because everything today had been perfect so far, exceeding my expectations by a mile. “Only a dozen times or so,” I replied.
“Not nearly often enough, then.” He pulled me closer, oblivious to the throng of people surrounding us. “Dana Zellinger, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known.”
Hearing him say that—Dana Zellinger, not Dana Campbell—sent a series of shivers skittering up my spine. That only reminded me that this—today—was real. All of it. Even the baby.
“It might take a while to get used to hearing that as my last name,” I murmured, not even attempting to stop myself from grinning.
“That’s okay. There’s plenty of time for that.”
“Not as much time as you think,” I said under my breath. Not only was I a Zellinger now, but our child was going to be a Zellinger, too. I needed to get used to it as soon as possible.
The look on his face was one of utter confusion. “Are you already planning to leave me?” He said it with a light tone, but I could feel his concern in the way his arms tightened around me, as though he had no intention of letting me go anytime soon.
“No! Definitely not.” My denial did nothing to ease the concern causing that all-too-familiar tic to start up in his jaw, so I stretched on my toes so I could kiss his cheek, the spot right beside his ear. That way no one else would be able to hear when I whispered, “I’m pregnant. We’re going to have a baby.” I lowered back down and waited for it to sink in, amazed at how easy it had been to say those words when I’d been stressing myself out over it since last night.
“Oh,” he said. “Okay.” A moment later, his eyes widened. “Oh!”
That was when I knew he understood.
“So I want to be used to being Mrs. Zellinger before the baby comes,” I murmured.
“Which will be when?”
“Maybe around Valentine’s Day? I don’t know for sure yet.”
“I can’t think of a better Valentine’s Day gift we could give each other. Or a wedding present. Can we go to the doctor as soon as we get back from our honeymoon?”
I laughed so hard that half the people around us leaned in, trying to get in on the joke. But there was no joke. There was only life.
The photographer cleared his throat behind me. “Mr. and Mrs. Zellinger? We’re ready.” He and videographer had finally sorted out all of their issues and gotten everyone else into place, so I turned around in Eric’s arms again to face the cake.
He dutifully put his hand over mine on the cake server, but he kept the other arm snug around my waist, his palm flat over my belly, in a very protective—and slightly possessive—manner.
They gave us a few directions on how they wanted us to do things and counted us down. Just before we cut into the cake, I looked up and caught Brenden’s eye…and I promptly burst into tears as the four of us made our first slices. I’d made it through the whole day without crying until he’d gone and made that speech, but now I could hardly look at him without tears welling up in my eyes. Damn him. I’d just repaired my eye makeup a few minutes ago, too. I decided to take a page from Sara’s book and blame my emotional state on my hormones.
Eric bent his head down by my ear and kissed my cheek just like I’d done to him a moment ago. “We should tell Soupy and Rachel,” he murmured. “And our parents. Maybe not everyone here for wedding, but at least our family.”
I sniffled and nodded, and I tried to focus on putting the slice we’d just cut on the plate Sara was holding out for me. I barely got myself back under control in time to feed him a bite. The four of us had agreed long ago that we were just going to put a piece of cake in each other’s mouths. There would be no smearing of the stuff on the faces.
Apparently my brother forgot that part, because everyone around us burst out laughing, and I looked over to find that Rachel had a big dollop of icing hanging off her nose. No one was laughing louder or harder than Tuck, though. For a second, I thought he might pass out from lack of oxygen, he was giggling so hard. I had to wonder if he’d put Brenden up to it.
“You’d better be glad you didn’t do that to me, too,” I muttered to Eric.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Sara and Noelle took over cake-cutting duty and shooed us out of the way. Katie and Babs got Rachel’s kids situated with a slice of cake and a cup of punch each, Tuck still laughing like a hyena. Hopefully he wasn’t going to get any ideas about trying to do the same thing to his sister, but I figured Babs could keep him in check better than just about anyone else.
“Be right back,” I said to Eric, kissing him on the cheek again. “Be sure he’s not going to do anything else like that, okay?”
“You think I have any sway over Soupy?”
He held more sway over my brother than he realized, apparently. He should have understood just how much my brother valued him and his opinion after that speech, if not sooner. Maybe someday he’d realize it. For as long as those two had been best friends, they sure did have a lot left to learn about each other.
I didn’t bother to answer Eric’s question. Instead, I grabbed Rachel’s hand, shooting my brother the evil eye as I did, and hauled her off to the bathroom with me.
“Sorry he did that.” I grabbed a paper towel from the dispenser and dampened it in the faucet. “My brother can be an ass. You already knew that, though.”
She was smiling, not upset. “I was pretty sure he was lying when he’d agreed not to do it in the first place. I think he had a bet going with Tuck.”
“So they’re ganging up on you, huh?” I started to dab at the icing on her nose, but she took the paper towel from me and did it herself, nodding toward my face in the mirror.
“It’s not the first time, and it definitely won’t be the last. You should deal with your makeup, and let me do this.”
I’d worn waterproof mascara, but apparently waterproof didn’t equate to tear-proof. I didn’t quite have raccoon eyes, but I wasn’t too far from it. Taking another paper towel from the dispenser, I set to work cleaning myself up.
A few minutes later, we made our way back into the banquet hall, looking as put together as we could manage after my sobbing and her having cake smeared all over her face. At least none of it had gotten on our dresses. We headed back to the table at the front of the hall and took our seats, where our cake was waiting for us. Mine had a glass of punch beside it instead of champagne.
I met Eric’s eyes after noticing that little touch, and he grinned, taking my hand and tugging me down into my seat.
“You know you’re the best thing that ever happened to me, right?” he asked.
“I know,” I said, letting another grin take over my face. And he was the best thing in my life, too. Now and forever.
I WAS GOING to be a father.
Dana had told me a little while ago, slipping it into conversation as though it was anything but a big deal, despite the fact that it might be the most important thing she ever said to me, but it still hadn’t fully sunken in yet. I mean, we’d definitely talked about having kids. We both wanted a family of our own someday—two kids, maybe three. Her mom, in particular, had been pushing us in that direction for a while, even before we’d officially gotten engaged. Mrs. Campbell’s efforts to convince us to give her grandchildren had only increased once she’d gotten a taste of having Maddie and Tuck around. This was a woman who would thrive on being a grandma.
Our initial thought had been to keep it just us for at least a year or two so we could figure out the married-couple thing, and then we could start making our plans and sorting out when would be the right time to start growing our family. In the end, the timing of it wasn’t all that important. Not really. The only things that mattered were that Dana was my wife, and we were having a baby. A family. Hell, our kid might just be the size of a peanut, but t
hat baby already had cousins as of today.
My family just kept expanding, and it only made me want more. Maybe Mrs. Campbell was on to something.
Our first dance as husband and wife was to “All of Me” by John Legend. Rachel had suggested that song a few weeks ago when we’d started talking about the finer details of the reception, and one listen while really paying attention to the lyrics had been more than enough to get the other three of us on board with her recommendation.
Everything today kept moving too quickly. More than once, I’d had to remind myself to take it all in, to really allow myself to absorb every aspect of the day. That had been hard enough right from the start, but then Soupy had thrown me for a loop by apologizing again, and Dana had turned my world on its head by telling me I was going to be a father, and it was all I could do to remember to breathe.
As we swayed to the music, all eyes and a bunch of cameras on our every move, Dana stared up at me with her big, brown eyes full of still more happy tears. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d danced with her. In fact… “We’ve never danced together before, have we?” I asked.
She shook her head. “We were always too busy playing hockey to bother with dancing. And then there was no chance I was going to dance with anyone…”
Because of her panic attacks. There was no need for her to finish that thought; I already knew what she would have said. “We should have bothered with it,” I replied.
I should have made my move to be with her, to convince her to be my girlfriend, the summer before she left for her freshman year of college. Instead, I had decided to let her settle in and wait for a break to come around. Mainly because I was too chicken to face Soupy. But then again, maybe we both needed that time, all the years between then and now, to figure out who we were and what we wanted. Maybe our love was stronger because of the time in between.
I tugged her closer, wrapping her up in my arms as though it could convey all my love for her. “I suppose now we’ll have to make up for lost time.”
“I plan to, today.”
I raised a brow, but she kissed my questions away before I could ask them. By the time the song finished, I doubted we had done much actual dancing because we’d spent so much time kissing. Not that I minded. It would just give me more of an excuse to ask her to dance again later, since we hadn’t done it properly the first time. I intended to take any chance I could get to pull her into my arms.
The father-daughter dance was up next, but we’d made a few modifications to that ritual since Rachel didn’t have a father here to take part in it. Mr. Campbell came over to collect Dana from me, and Mrs. Campbell ushered Tuck and Maddie out to join Soupy and Rachel, to the chorus of a few hundred people saying, “Aww,” in unison. Tuck leaped up into his mother’s arms, but it was Soupy and Maddie that my eyes fell on. He held out both arms, and she put her small hands in his, and my tongue got thick and dry. If I wasn’t careful, I might start crying anytime now. My emotions were already floating just under the surface today, but this might send me over the edge, especially now that I knew I would be a father soon, too. The DJ started playing “I Hope You Dance,” and I tried to pull myself together while they started moving to the music.
That wasn’t easy to do when Maddie moved in closer and wrapped her arms around my new brother-in-law’s waist, hugging him while they swayed. Hell, I didn’t know how Soupy wasn’t an absolute wreck right now. The only thing that saved me from breaking down was Tuck’s tone-deaf, top-of-his-lungs warbling as it cut through the music, making me wish I could plug my ears while, at the same time, I was laughing. That kid was unreal. He was going to make a good cousin for my baby. Both of them would.
Even though I’d had time for it to settle in by now, I was still baffled by Soupy’s latest apology. I mean, he’d already told us—numerous times—that he was sorry for acting like an ass about my relationship with his sister. Not only that, but every single time he had apologized, I’d told him to knock it off, that he didn’t need to make amends because if he hadn’t been so protective of Dana, I would have been furious with him.
Yet, he’d done it again just a short while ago, in front of pretty much everyone we knew.
He needed to let that shit go. Soupy wasn’t just my best friend now. He was family. He needed to start acting as if he understood that meant there wasn’t a damn thing he could do that would ever make me stop loving him like a brother. He might piss me off sometimes—brothers do that—and I was sure there were going to be plenty of times when I did the same to him. But then we would get over it, and we would move on.
Babs came over and took the seat next to me, the one Dana had been sitting in before we’d gone to dance. “Can you keep a secret? Jim drafted my brother,” he said without waiting for me to answer, with the goofy, blushing grin he always seemed to be wearing. “He traded up to get him, even though he’d told me not to get my hopes up.”
“That’s great news.” I had great news of my own, but it wasn’t for his ears, at least not right now. “We’ll have to come up with a nickname for him since we’ve already got a Babs.”
“Yeah.” He dropped his head down to stare at his lap.
That wasn’t like Babs. Something else was up, but I didn’t have the first clue what. “Spill it,” I said. “Whatever it is. Something’s bothering you.”
“He traded Razor to draft Levi.”
“Ah.” Now that made a lot more sense. Babs and Razor had been close. Probably not as close as me and Soupy—but they’d only known each other for a couple of years. Still, that was a hell of a conflict for the kid. “You know how it is in this business,” I said. “People get traded all the time. They leave as free agents. They retire. Every year, you’re going to say good-bye to some friends and hello to new friends.”
“I know. I just…”
It wasn’t just about Razor leaving. That much was pretty easy to tell, especially once Babs looked up from his lap and his gaze landed on Katie Weber. She was at a table with her parents and a few of the boys from the team.
“Is she leaving?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that question, whether Babs knew it or not. Katie was at that age where she had to figure out what she wanted to make of her life. And that might mean going away to college or off to pursue her entertaining career. Her family was sticking around, of course. Webs was going to be an assistant coach this year, and Katie’s younger siblings were in a school that Webs and Laura really liked. But that didn’t mean Katie would stay. It didn’t necessarily mean she should stay. Webs had told me in confidence that he thought she was leaning toward going to LA to meet with some agent or another.
All Babs could do was shrug. “I don’t know. Haven’t been able to get her alone to talk since we all got to Providence.”
I cuffed his shoulder. “Once we’re done with these official dances, go over and ask her for a dance. Get her to talk.”
He didn’t respond. I got the sense that he wasn’t anywhere close to ready to drag her away from her father so she could tell him whatever she’d decided to do—possibly because he’d already convinced himself of the worst.
“Babs,” I said.
He looked over at me.
“You love her?”
He shrugged, but his eyes said a hell of a lot more than his mouth did. This kid was just as in love with Katie Weber as I’d been with Dana when I was his age. Admittedly, my love for Dana was bigger now. Stronger. But what I’d felt for her back in the day was no less real, and it had hurt like hell when she’d been attacked and I’d realized I’d never be able to have the sort of relationship with her that I’d wanted. Things were different now, but it had been a long, slow process, and I’d spent years with a huge hole in my heart that no one but Dana could fill, and the belief that I would never be whole again.
But I had to wonder if I would be able to love her as deeply as I did now if we hadn’t gone through all that we had. Those years where she couldn’t even let her father hu
g her, where there was no chance in hell I could do anything but watch her from afar—they helped draw us closer together than we would have been otherwise. They showed us life’s low points so we could make the most of the high points.
“I’m gonna give you some unsolicited advice,” I said, my eyes straying over to watch Soupy and Maddie. She had her feet on top of his, so the pair of them were perfectly in step, and it took me back to watching Dana like that with her father years and years ago. The smile on Soupy’s face made me even happier for him.
I looked at Babs again, waited until he met my eyes. “If you love her, you’ve got to let her go.”
“I know.” He nodded, but it seemed more as if he was trying to convince himself than me. A few moments passed in silence. “But what if she doesn’t come back?”
“Her family will still be in Portland. She’ll come back.” I knew that wasn’t what he meant, though. Some people might feed him some bullshit line like, There are always other fish in the sea, but I knew that when you’d found “the one,” no one else would do. I wouldn’t try to tell him anything like that.
“Let her figure out where she wants to land, Babs. Let her sort out who she wants to be. If she stays now, she’ll be your girlfriend and that’ll be great…but who will she be? She’s always been defined by who her father is, and then she’d go straight into being defined by who her boyfriend is. Let her find herself, and then trust that she’ll come back once she’s sorted that out.”
Even though I wasn’t sure I’d made a lot of sense, I was fairly certain he got the gist of it. Babs was a smart kid. More than that, he’d always been perceptive. He understood people sometimes better than they understood themselves. He knew what I meant.
Granted, he might not like what I’d had to say, but I didn’t like having to tell him it, either.
Double Major (Portland Storm) Page 7
