Autumn Adventure (Summer Unplugged #6)

by Amy Sparling

  “Aww, that’s cute!” It dawns on me now that I have done very little shopping or planning for the baby. I had wanted to a few times but Jace always told me it’d be easier to plan for the wedding first, and then plan for the baby, so we wouldn’t be overwhelmed. Well, now the wedding is over.

  “Shit, we should be planning for the baby,” I say. “We only have like, three and a half months left until he’s here.”

  “That’s plenty of time to set up a nursery,” Jace says.

  “You sound pretty confident,” I say, giving him a look that I didn’t know I was capable of until I became a wife. “Exactly how many children have you set up nurseries for?”

  “Zero, but, I mean how hard could it be?”

  I shrug. “Guess we’ll find out.”

  Jace lifts his arm and wraps it around my shoulders while I snuggle closer, lying on his chest. There’s a small flat screen TV facing the bed and he has it on a motocross race on ESPN with the volume down. It’s weird to think that if it wasn’t for me, Jace would have continued to work hard with his racing and he would have gotten his sponsorships back and continued to be a professional racer. He would have probably been in this race on TV if he had never met me. Motocross is his passion and he had the skills to be one of the best racers in the world. But instead, he chose to settle down in the middle-of-nowhere Texas and just teach motocross to others.

  “Do you miss professional racing?” I ask, staring straight ahead at the television. There’s no way I could look him in the eye after asking a question like that. “Do you wish you were out there right now in that race?”

  “Nope. I’ll never quit riding, but I’m not sorry I quit racing.”

  “Why? You could have been super famous and rich.”

  “I’m famous and rich enough.”

  “Yeah, but you could have been more—”

  “Bayleigh, there’s two things more important in life than being more rich and more famous than I am now.”

  I look up at him. “What two things?”

  “You,” he says, leaning down to kiss me. “And our baby.”

  Even though we’re married now, I still feel myself blush. I think he notices it, too, because he kisses my cheek and pulls me into a horizontal bear hug, making me roll on top of him against my will. I have to stay kind of sideways though because my stomach is getting so big. But lying on top of him and his rock-hard chest, with his strong arms wrapped around me completely even though I’m a fat cow right now, is the greatest feeling ever. I feel protected and loved and safe and happy.

  My mind wanders back into baby territory. “Now that the wedding is over, I’m kind of super excited to start baby shopping.”

  “Me too,” Jace says. “I didn’t realize there was so much dirt bike themed baby stuff until Mom told me about it. Don’t hate me for this, but I’m glad we’re having a boy.”

  “Me too,” I say with a sigh of relief. “You can raise him to be an awesome man like you are. I would have no idea what to do with a girl. Except, you know, lock her in her room until she’s thirty.”

  Jace laughs. “I think you’ll be a great mom no matter what. But if we were having a girl, I’d probably never let her on a dirt bike. Now I can get our son a bike the day he turns three.”

  “Three? Um, hell no! Maybe when he’s ten he can get a dirt bike.”

  “Ten? Are you kidding? I was winning national championships at that age.”

  “We’ll talk about this later,” I say with a smile. I always knew we’d raise our son to be a dirt bike kid, but three years old is a little too young to give a kid a motorized bike in my opinion. But this is our honeymoon so I’m not going to get in an argument. “So where is this plane headed?”

  “You were sleeping pretty hard, so I had to make the choice for us,” he says. “You probably don’t remember this, but there’s this place in Louisiana that—”

  “Big Al’s Seafood,” I say with a laugh. It’s a restaurant in Louisiana that Jace’s parents always went to when he was a kid and had a race in New Orleans. Jace has talked about their shrimp po’boy sandwiches so many times that he’s insane if he thinks I don’t remember.

  “Is that okay?” he asks. “If not, there’s tons of places to eat in New Orleans…”

  I nod. “Baby, I love being treated like a princess all of the time,” I say. “Trust me, I do. But you’re an equal member in this marriage and you can totally pick the places we go to. So stop looking so worried about your decision. I love it. Let’s go.”

  “You’re the best wife ever,” he says.

  I smile. “You’re the best husband ever.”

  From somewhere in the ceiling, the voice of our pilot crackles through a speaker, “Oh my god, would you two stop being so sappy? I’m getting diabetes by listening to all the sweetness.”

  Heat rushes up my face as mortification fills every cell of my body. “Wait, you can hear us?” I say aloud, to wherever the microphone is in this room.

  “Just for the last minute or two, whenever one of y’all hit the intercom button.”

  Jace starts laughing and apologizes to Christopher. I jump up out of bed and sure enough, just above our heads is a red button with a label that says intercom. We must have hit it when Jace pulled me on top of him. “Oh my god, I’m so embarrassed,” I say, covering my face with my hands.

  “I can still hear you,” Christopher says. “Hit the button again.”

  I practically dive through the air to punch the button again, while Jace erupts into laugher. My face is beet red and yet his eyes fill with tears because he’s laughing so hard. I grab the pillow and throw it at him.

  “You remember that best husband thing I just said? Well, I take it back!”

  Jace gives me a seductive look which sends a tingle down my body even though I’m still mad at him. “Imagine if we had hit that button a few hours ago.”

  I throw the other pillow at him for good measure.

  Chapter 12

  A few days later, there is one thing I know to be an absolute fact: New Orleans sucks you in and makes you never want to leave. Jace and I found a hotel in the French Quarter and we paid for five nights up front. We were both tired of flying places and Big Al’s Seafood really is as delicious as Jace made it out to be, so we wanted to squeeze in as many meals as possible before we go home.

  There’s something magical about New Orleans, especially at night. The air is thick with history and the people are always nice. And most of them are drunk, but still. They’re nice.

  I do more shopping in downtown New Orleans than I did in all of Hollywood. We get souvenirs for our parents and for Becca and I buy a dozen more things that I swear are gifts even though I want to keep them for myself.

  Between hitting up the zoo and touring several museums, I start to lose myself in thoughts that don’t involve our honeymoon. I hadn’t thought it would be possible to forget I’m supposed to be on the most romantic adventure of a lifetime, but here I am, touring a Mardi Gras museum with Jace and fretting about motherhood.

  We don’t have baby stuff yet. We don’t have a car seat or bottles or diapers. We have a spare bedroom that’s full of junk and a weight bench and a few pairs of Jace’s old motocross boots stacked by the window. That’s not a nursery.

  What’s worse than our complete lack of preparedness to bring a child into the world? The fact that we haven’t chosen a name for him yet.

  It’s weird, right? We’re having a baby, and we’ve known that for almost six months and we still haven’t talked about what we should name him. I thought for sure after the wedding, Jace would bring it up. He was so adamant about only allowing ourselves a small amount of stress for the wedding, and leaving the baby stuff for after. Well, now it’s after. It’s been two weeks. I am ready to stress about this now.

  Why haven’t we talked about it? And why is this such a weird topic? I mean, we’re having a kid together. I should be able to just bring it up. Just say hey Jace, what should we name our kid?
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  I guess that deep down I’m scared. Worried he’ll want a name I don’t like, or vice versa. I haven’t really put a lot of thought into the idea myself, which I know is crazy because most girls have their future kid’s names pick out before they’re even conceived. But it’s never really been a big deal with me. I’m not even sure I wanted kids before I met Jace. And now that we accidently got pregnant, I’m so excited I can’t stand it. Now, I can’t picture a life where it isn’t Jace, me, and our son.

  But that son needs a name and I need to talk to my husband about this. Come on, Bayleigh. You can do this.

  Big Al’s Seafood has the world’s greatest hushpuppies. It doesn’t say that on their menu or anything, but I have given myself the authority to declare them the greatest hushpuppies in the entire world. I’ve never liked them before in any other restaurant, but here, they’re to die for. Golden little balls of cornbread and seasoning and whatever the hell else they use to make them. They’re amazing.

  “I can’t believe you ordered a basket of hushpuppies for lunch,” Jace says as he takes a massive bite of his po’boy sandwich.

  “I also ordered a Coke,” I say, lifting up the glass to give it credit. “I can’t help myself. They are too good to be the side to an entrée. They should be an entrée all by themselves.”

  “I’m pretty sure there’s no protein in those things, so they make an awful meal.”

  “You make an awful meal!” I stick out my tongue playfully and he rolls his eyes. “Besides,” I say, finding a way to bring up the topic that’s been bugging me. “I’m a pregnant lady with weirdo pregnancy cravings so you just have to put up with me and do what I say. And if I want to order twenty hushpuppies and eat them all in one sitting, I will.”

  Jace raises his Dr. Pepper in a salute to my declaration of food love. “Damn straight,” he says. “Eat up. I want my son to be big and strong and kickass like me.”

  Okay, now’s the time. “Yeah, so about that,” I say in an incredible display of being not the least bit smooth about it. “What should we name our son? We’re running out of time to decide on something.”

  His expression turns thoughtful and I’m glad, because this is something he should be thinking about. “What did you have in mind?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. What about you?”

  “Seriously?” His head cocks to the side as he studies me. I shrug. “Yeah?”

  “I don’t know, I just assumed you had like fifty names picked out already.”

  I frown, feeling like a terrible mom-to-be. “Not really,” I admit. “I mean, I think about how we need a name but I never think of what we should name him. Honestly, I’ve been wondering what you think.”

  Jace finishes his sandwich in one massive bite and I have to give him credit because the boy can eat a ton of food in record time. Maybe we should enter him into eating contests—that can be his new claim to fame besides the motocross world. “Am I total asshole if I say I haven’t really thought about it? I just kind of assumed you’d pick the name and tell me when you knew it.”

  “Why does it have to be all on me?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Because you’re my woman and I trust you to make these kinds of decisions.”

  I realize I’ve been tearing my napkin into tiny pieces. “I don’t know, Jace.” I have more to say, but an overwhelming feeling of sadness falls over me like a thick blanket. Suddenly all I can do is stare at the table and try swallowing the lump in my throat.

  “Baby, what’s wrong?” I feel his warm hand touch mine, his fingers closing over mine so I can’t keep tearing the napkin. “Please talk to me.”

  “I don’t know, I guess…” Words come out of my mouth but they’re just placeholders for what I really want to say. “I don’t know. It’s nothing. Just…forget it.”

  I stab into a hushpuppy with my fork and eat it. If my mouth is full then I can’t talk.

  “Honey, what happened? Why are you suddenly upset? Talk to me.”

  I don’t look up at him because I know if I do, then I’ll see his face and his sincere eyes and that little wrinkle he gets in the middle of his forehead when he’s worried about me. I can’t see any of that because then I might cry and I can’t cry in the middle of freaking Big Al’s Seafood. So I just shake my head and make this little smile and blame it on the pregnancy hormones.

  Jace accepts my excuse even though we both know it’s a lie.

  Chapter 13

  We’re back on the plane. Headed to Florida. There’s less than a week left of our honeymoon and I said it would be fun to visit the beaches of the east coast since we’ve seen the west coast and we live near the beaches in Texas. Jace agreed and he seems really excited about this destination. He wanted to visit Disney World but as the days go on and my belly gets bigger, so do my ankles. Walking around in the hot sun all day doesn’t seem fun, so I promised him we’d take another trip to Disney World when our kid is older. For now, I just wanted to lounge on a beach.

  I’m pretty sure every beach is better than the beaches in Texas. Our sand is covered in seaweed and the water is muddy brown with the constant warnings of jellyfish posted everywhere. Miami should be fun. A relaxing way to end the summer and our honeymoon.

  I haven’t spoken about the baby naming thing. Although it plagued me on the inside, I shoved the thoughts away, buried them deep in my subconscious and just tried to have fun with Jace. As much fun as it was seeing new hotels and shopping in new stores and eating food at all kinds of places, my body was tired and my mind was driving itself crazy thinking about baby names.

  The name we chose for our son would have to live with him forever. It would need to sound good paired with the last name Adams. It would need to be something that a girl could scribble on her notebook in fifteen years. I smile at the thought of our son having a girlfriend in the future. I bet Jace would teach him how to treat a girl. He wouldn’t be like Ian or any of the other assholes in my past. He’d be a mini version of the greatest man on earth—my husband.

  “What ya smiling about?” Jace nudges me from his seat in the airplane. We’re preparing to land so Christopher had us buckle up. My smile quickly fades as we begin the descent. Even after making several stops in our rented private jet, the feeling of landing always makes my stomach seize up uncomfortably, like when you make the drop on a roller coaster. I grab the armrest and take a deep breath.

  Jace laughs. “Okay, the smile is gone.” The plane makes a deep descent as the landing strip gets nearer and nearer and then Jace’s head bobs as we touch the ground. “Man, I hate that,” he says, reaching over and grabbing my hand. “I don’t know how pilots do it all the time.”

  “Me neither,” I say, feeling a wave of relief wash over me as the plane comes to a stop. We unbuckle our seatbelts and I rush to get to the side door before Jace does, since it’s fun to be the first one out of the plane. It’s become our little contest with each landing we do, and lately I’ve been winning.

  “Don’t think you’re getting out of answering my question,” Jace says into my ear as we step off the plane.

  “What question?”

  “The reason you were smiling back there. It looked like whatever was going on in your head was pretty good.”

  I reach up and kiss him, threading my fingers through his hair. “I’ll tell you later.”

  The beaches of Florida are where it’s at. Seriously. Best beaches ever. Jace and I rented a car and stopped at the first place we found after leaving the Fort Lauderdale airport. It was an apartment complex, a nice one, with a crazy beautiful view of the shore.

  “Why are we stopping here again?” Jace asks as I yank of my seat belt and bolt out of the rental car.

  I bend down and take off my shoes, tossing them into the floorboard. “I need the sand in my toes,” I say as an explanation. The wind blows through my hair and it’s warm and it’s sunny and this is the most gorgeous place we’ve been.

  Maybe not as gorgeous as the Grand Canyon, but it’s perfect i
n its own way. I take off running through the parking lot of an apartment complex we don’t belong to, past some picnic tables and straight to the sand. Jace is behind me, his feet splashing into the water just a second after mine.

  “Wow,” I say, mesmerized. Unlike in California, this water isn’t cold. And unlike at home, the water isn’t brown. It’s warm and crystal clear and I can see my pink toenail polish sparkling up at me through the water.

  It’s just after noon and there’s a ton of people outside enjoying the beach like we are. But all I care about is Jace and me, here and now, in our own little world. We stand in the water about calf-deep and I lift my arms up and around Jace’s neck. He grabs my waist, his fingers lacing together around my blue sundress.

  “This place is amazing,” I say, wiggling my toes as I look up at him. The sand here isn’t like the sand back home. It’s thick, chunky and super soft. The only thing around is sand and water, no dirt or debris or old tires. This is the perfect beach.

  “We should have come here first,” he says, looking out over the horizon. “The weather is perfect.”

  I nod, thinking it’s a little bit humid but I’m not going to say that and ruin the mood. “Let’s find a hotel right on the water like this.”

  Jace looks around and lets go of my waist, grabbing my hand instead. “What about that place?” he says, pointing to a Hilton just down the beach.

  “Well, that was easy,” I say. “What should we do now?”

  Jace grabs the beach bag from his arm, and I can’t believe I hadn’t noticed that he grabbed it until now. He takes out a beach towel and spreads it out on the sand. I sit in front of him, facing the shore. He wraps his arms around me and I lean back into his chest, taking deep breaths so that I can forever remember the smell of the beach and the feeling of these perfect little moments with him.