by Stacy Gail
“Essie.” He squeezed his eyes shut in a kind of wince, and his indrawn breath echoed with pain. “Damn my fucking carelessness for planting that seed of ugly in you, when all I’ve ever wanted was to give you beauty.” His eyes opened to lock onto hers, their depths so dark with turmoil it made her pulse stutter. “Hear me, baby, please. The person you are is the person I want to be with, more than anyone else in this world, and I gotta hope you feel the same way about me. You say you’re not perfect, and I know that, but I also know you’re perfect for me. I’ve told you I’m not perfect either, but give me a chance to try to be perfect for you. I swear I’ll never give you a reason to regret it.”
She wanted to. With everything inside her, she wanted to. Could that be enough to build a relationship on? He wasn’t the type of man who did forever, especially when he couldn’t feel love. While he’d backtracked on almost everything else he’d said earlier, he hadn’t amended the statement that he could never love her. That was something that couldn’t be forced from him, or anyone. If she had his love, she’d take that chance, absolutely. If she had his love, freely given and without her having to drag it out of him, she wouldn’t need anything else. She’d have her rainbow, her golden ticket, her lightning strike.
But he hadn’t amended the statement that he couldn’t love her.
With that in mind, she smiled a smile that hurt so much it made her eyes sting, and pulled gently pulled away. “I’ve always seen you as perfect. I don’t need to be convinced.”
His hands tightened, fighting the distance. “Essie—”
“It’s been more than five minutes, Steele. The test suggested three to five minutes, so if you don’t mind I’d like to get this over with so I can move on with my life.”
He held her a second longer, as if he had issues with her moving on anywhere, before he dropped his arms. “You gonna be okay?”
He wanted a guarantee she wasn’t going to have some kind of emotional breakdown. She didn’t blame him. She wanted one, too. “I know I’ve lived through worse, so… yeah. I’ll be okay.”
The hell of it was, she was right.
This time around she didn’t drag her feet. The test was a done deal, so she didn’t see any point in prolonging it further. Together they moved to the powder room, and since there was only room for her, Steele braced himself in the open doorway while she grabbed up the test, already knowing what it would say. Because lightning never struck. Not for her.
Only…
“Essie?”
She stared at it.
It didn’t make sense.
“Essie.”
Impossible things didn’t make sense.
She grabbed up the discarded box, rotating it to the illustrations on the back, before holding up the stick for comparison. Okay, she told herself while her hands began to shake. She just had to be calm and read through it again. Slowly.
Okay.
One line meant no pregnancy.
Two lines meant a pregnancy.
Two lines.
“Essie, damn it, say something.”
“Two lines,” she whispered wonderingly, a warm, giddy flush overtaking her from the bottoms of her feet to the top of her head. In a daze she turned to show him both the box and the strip. “Two lines. Lightning struck.”
A wildfire lit in his eyes before he took the items from her, held them up to the light and went still. A dizzying happiness whirled through her, filling her up so completely she had to sit down for fear of falling, so she pushed past him to collapse on the couch they’d just vacated. She hated being a cliché, and being a delicate, fainting pregnant lady was about as cliché as they came.
Oh, wow.
A pregnant lady.
She was a pregnant lady.
Yes.
A bubble of laughter burst from her, and she hugged her arms around herself while the sound of sheer joy rang around the cavernous room. Somehow, in a matter of days—hell, a matter of moments—her world had gone from bleak to black to unbelievably brilliant, to the point she couldn’t wrap her mind around it. That road that had been her desolate life was now wide open and vibrant, filled with an insane amount of possibilities. A boy or a girl, it didn’t matter. If she was lucky and all went as it should, her horizons were filled with cribs and baby clothes, diapers and regular check-ups, preschool and play-dates and bedtime stories, packed lunches and after-school recitals and dentist appointments and screwed-up science-fair projects, and all the craziness and worries in between. Things she never thought she would have in her world were now within reach. She had to be dreaming.
If it was a dream, she never wanted to wake up.
“Through condoms and scarring… Jesus.” Sounding breathless, Steele dumped the strip and its box in the sink before coming to her, dropping to his knees to settle between hers and pulling her against him. “Hot damn. My boys can seriously fucking swim.”
“This is the best day of my life.” She couldn’t seem to stop laughing, even as a warm flood of wetness spilled down her cheeks. “I don’t even know what to do, I’m so stunned. I never dared to dream of this day, so I don’t even know what the next step is.”
“A doctor’s visit to get things started off on the right foot. Do you have a doctor here in Chicago?”
“No.”
“You’re going to have one by the end of the day.” He leaned back just enough to grab his phone and start thumbing through his phonebook.
“Angel’s got a doctor’s appointment as well, so I guess that’s the thing to do. Oh, and a house,” she said suddenly, putting a hand to her brow as the giddy euphoria faded to a level where practicality could at last bob to the surface. “I can’t keep living where I’m living and have a baby there as well. I need a place to live that’s big enough for the two of us.” A baby. Oh God, a freaking baby.
Steele went still. “The two of you?”
“The signing bonus I won along with the House Of Payne contract is really going to come in handy,” she went on, barely hearing him “I was going to look for a place with enough room to work somewhere in the city later this week, but now I don’t know. My brother’s moved out into the boonies, not exactly my thing, but when you have a kid like I’m going to—”
“Like we’re going to have.”
She blinked and focused back on him. “Sorry?”
“We are having this kid, Estella. Not you. You didn’t make him by yourself, so you’re sure as hell not going to have him and raise him by yourself. You hear me?”
She blinked again. “I hear you.”
He scowled as he studied her face before he jerked to his feet. “I don’t think you do. In fact, I don’t think you’ve been hearing me the entire time we’ve been here. So let me say how things are going to go right now so there’s no fucking confusion. I’m going to be a full-time father to this kid, so don’t even think about cutting me out of this.”
“I… wasn’t.” But that wasn’t precisely true, and she had the grace to feel a flash of guilt over how she’d just sort of assumed this baby was going to be all hers. She should have known better; Steele wasn’t the kind of man to walk away from responsibility. Far from it. He knew what it was to be abandoned, so the last thing he’d want to do was deal that same blow to his own child. “I just know you’ve always insisted on condoms, even when I told you my getting pregnant was a near-impossibility…” Another wave of joyous laughter almost overtook her, and she had to deep-breathe for a few seconds before getting a handle on it. “I know you didn’t plan this.”
“So the hell what? You didn’t plan it either, but you’re happy about it and ready to step up to the plate. Why the hell would I be any different?”
“I don’t know. I just thought—”
“I know what you thought,” came the blistering reply. “You thought that once you had everything you ever wanted, you were going to cut me out of the picture, am I right? You don’t need me anymore.”
“You cut yourself out,” she shot back with br
utal honesty. “You let me know in no uncertain terms that you weren’t with me for white picket fences and happily ever after—your words, not mine. I’m just letting you know that since I’m headed exactly in the direction of picket fences and happily ever after, the door is wide open for you to leave.”
“I don’t want to leave,” he roared, before he dragged his hands through his hair and began to pace in front of her. “Damn it, why does fate hate me so fucking much? Why does it hand me a woman I was stupid enough to think was perfect, only to have that bitch hit me so hard it blinded me to a woman who actually is perfect for me?”
“I’m not perfect,” Essie muttered, but he kept going as if she hadn’t spoken.
“But that’s bullshit, blaming fate like that. This is all my fault for being so… fucking… stupid. Maybe this is my penance for being the Devil’s spawn my old man said I was. Maybe this is my punishment—being given a glimpse of what my personal heaven would be like before it’s snatched away from me.”
“Steele—”
“But even that’s weak. I’m not going to blame fate and I’m not going to blame what my old man said I was. Truth is, I fucked things up with you, and that’s no one’s fault but my own. I made you doubt me. I made you feel unloved. Careless bastard that I am, I even made you feel like you weren’t worth the effort to love. You gave me every dream come true when you gave yourself to me, and how do I repay you? I gave you pain. God, oh God, no wonder you’re trying so hard to shove me out that fucking door. If I were you, I wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of me, either.”
“Don’t.” She came to sit on the edge of her seat, stopping herself at the last minute from going to him, his pain was so obvious. “I love the sight of you, just as I love everything about you. That’s why that door is open. I love you enough to let you out of a life you don’t want.”
“You love me enough to do that, but not enough to forgive me, is that it?”
“It’s not about forgiving you. It’s about being smart enough to not settle for something that can never work. No relationship can ever go the distance when there isn’t love on both sides. I’d be ground into nothing, don’t you see that?”
“Essie.” His agitated pacing stopped as abruptly as it started before he again dropped to his knees in front of her to clamp his hands over hers. “Love comes so easily to you. From you. I’ve met your family and I see where all that comes from. You’ve been loved your whole life. You’re comfortable with it. My background…shit. I’ve told you what it was. So it’s not like that with me.”
“I know.”
“But you don’t know, because…” He took a deep breath, his expression tight with a tension so profound it bordered on pain. “I do love you. So much it freaks me the fuck out, because love has never worked out for me. Not once. Not ever.”
Her heart stopped. Any minute she was going to die, but at least she’d have this moment. “What?”
“It’s not easy for me to say it. I haven’t had that phrase a lot in my life, so it honestly doesn’t have a lot of meaning for me. And whenever it does enter my world, shit always seems to blow it right back in my face. This kind of thing… it just doesn’t work out for me.”
In that moment, as she began to understand what was going on inside him, she hated how the world had treated him from the moment he was brought into the world. “It’s important to me to hear the words, Steele, I’ll admit it. But it’s even more important to me that you feel it.”
“Oh, I feel it. That’s why I said you brought my heart back to life. Nothing but loving you could’ve done that,” he grated roughly, and the self-directed anger and regret in his tone was so bitter it stung her just to hear it. “Believe me, Essie, please. Believe in me. You’ll never have cause to regret it, I swear.”
“I just don’t ever want you to regret being with me.”
“Never. That you could even have that thought in your head tears me up inside.” He brought one of her hands to his chest and pressed it flat against the powerful beat of his heart. “You feel that?”
She looked into his stormy eyes. “Yes.”
“My heart beating like this is because of you. If you shut me out, like I know I deserve, it’ll die again, and this time it won’t be coming back. You and our kid—Jesus, our kid—are my life, my world, my everything. I’ll die if you shut me out of my everything, so don’t do that, please. Don’t shut me out.”
Tears finally spilled out as the miraculous, impassioned words filled her with so much sweet promise it was almost an anguish to bear. “If you can love me even a little, we can make this work.”
“A little? Fuck, woman, haven’t you been listening to me?” With gentle savagery he pulled her to him, his arms like iron bands around her while he buried his face in her neck. “You’re such a fighter baby, but I’ve already told you that you’ve won. Stop fighting to let me go, okay? I’ll do anything, be anything you want, if you’ll just fight to hold onto me now. Please, Sweetness, please… don’t let me go.”
At last she wound her arms around his neck and let herself melt into his embrace. Maybe Joey was right. Maybe life could be awesome if she just let go of the expectation of perfect. “Okay, Steele. I promise.”
Epilogue
(Eight months later)
“This isn’t how it was supposed to go.” Gritting her teeth, Carla laid on the horn as yet another car nudged in front of her. “Goddamn it… move it, asshole!”
Beside her, Essie tried to concentrate on her breathing. “Game… must’ve… ended.”
“Stupid opening day,” Carla muttered, knuckles showing white as she gripped the steering wheel. Stupid Chicago Cubs. Stupid everything. Wait. I see an opening. Hold on.”
“Carla… shit, that’s not an opening, that’s the breakdown lane!”
Too late.
The minivan punched forward just as another contraction hit. Essie groaned and tried to breathe through it, not even bothering to look at her watch this time around. The contractions were almost on top of each other now, so there was no point.
Clearly, the babies had decided today would be the perfect date to have their birthday.
Carla was right; it wasn’t supposed to be like this. The twins’ due date was next week, and everyone in the family had been preparing for it. Her mother had begun to make and freeze meals so Essie wouldn’t have to cook right out of the hospital. Her father had been bouncing back and forth between Twist’s place and hers, helping assemble cribs and figuring out how to install car seats, as Angel gave birth via C-section less than a month earlier.
The birth of Angel’s and Twist’s baby hadn’t gone according to plan, either. It had been a harrowing ordeal with the baby refusing to get its head down where it belonged. When the fetal heart monitor warned of a slowing heart rate, the medical team decided to take the baby then and there. Tiny, delicate Angel gave birth to a nine-pound baby boy that had the Santiago golden skin and thick black hair, but such vivid blue eyes just a shade off from Angel’s that Essie was convinced they wouldn’t change with time. Cade Edward Santiago was the herald of what her mother was happily calling the “baby season.”
She and Steele had also made plans. He had asked for a month off from work starting tomorrow, so that he could be there whenever she went into labor. For the past month, PSI had also assigned him to local jobs, ensuring that he wouldn’t be out of town should anything unexpected happen. At the moment, he was heading a security team at Field Museum across town to prepare for an international exhibit of Cartier’s greatest pieces, including a priceless emerald the size of a saltine cracker and three times as thick.
When Essie had called him from across town to tell him that her water broke while she and Carla were picking out leather for a new half-glove project for the House, he’d simply said, “Oh my God.” Then there was a lot of yelling and craziness, and since things were starting to seriously hurt at that point, she hadn’t paid a lot of attention. The only thing on her mind at that point had
been to get to Prentice Women’s Hospital, where she’d reserved a private room and where her OB-GYN had privileges.
But traffic had been horrendous, and with her labor coming on like a freight train, Carla made an executive decision and headed for the nearest hospital, which was Mercy.
Perfect.
Another contraction hit just as Carla veered through two lanes to shoot onto an off-ramp, the big, blocky hospital looming within sight. “We’re almost there,” she announced the obvious amidst a chorus of honking horns, profanity and a flock of middle-fingered birds. “I don’t suppose I can convince you to cross your legs at this point? Oh, wait. I’m about nine months too late for that, aren’t I?”
“Very funny—ugh.”
“Don’t you dare push, girlie. Patrick just got the momster-mobile detailed.”
“Then stop being funny!”
“Right. From this point on, I’ll be like that politician. You know, what’s his name? Fuck it, never mind. They’re all not funny.”
“Carla!”
“Sorry, sorry, I can’t help that I’m awesome when I’m stressed. That’s the cross I must bear in life.” She bounced into the emergency room parking lot, popped a curb that made Essie suspect her friend was trying to jolt a kid right out of her, and screeched to a stop beside an ambulance with its crew hanging out around the back.
“Help!” Carla zapped the momster-mobile’s window down to yell at the surprised EMTs. “Super-preggo lady delivering twins like, now!”
It was heartening to see how quickly that got everyone moving.
It was a funny thing, labor pains. They had a magic that wiped out every other problem. She was wheeled into a private room, where fetal heart monitors were wrapped around her belly. Someone assured her that while her doctor didn’t have privileges at Mercy, they had a great baby doc on call, and she was currently the only mother-to-be in active labor. She didn’t care. Just as long as someone was there to help her babies get the hell out of her body and safely into the world, she didn’t care who it was.
