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She awakens with a gasp, and I set my hand over her heart so that I might feel as its tempo rises.
It doesn’t take long.
“Em,” she breathes. “Did the oven go off?”
“It did,” I confirm, ghosting my lips over her skin until they almost, but not quite, share her cinnamon chapstick. “It needs to sit for a few minutes,” I remind her.
She blinks sleepily and tilts her head up.
I pull away just enough so that she can’t reach me, and press back in when she falls, letting our breaths mingle but not join.
“You want to play,” she nearly whines. Her lower lip almost hits mine when it juts in a pout.
“You love this book,” I remind her.
She has no rebuttal.
I move down and put pressure on her neck with my nose, moving until I catch the spray of cinnamon at the dip between her collarbones. “No pumpkin?”
“If I do pumpkin, will you kiss me?”
Probably, actually, so it’s a good thing she’s not wearing it. I like our current game.
“Maybe,” I allow. “Are you going to wear it tomorrow if I say yes?”
She hesitates, and I know.
My girl is not going to wear pumpkin tomorrow.
My girl wants to play.
I grin, and my heart and soul tangle to celebrate. We’re here, finally, with Almond, finally, and she’s everything we ever wanted.
She’s this, the woman who believes in me so much, she’d risk death by fire to prove it.
She’s that, the woman who plays with me, even when the play is a bit of delicious torture for us both.
She’s more, the woman who’s owned my heart since the minute I saw her, and has treated it with care every moment it’s been in her palms.
Almond Wright—my this, my that, my more.
My everything.
The Epilogue That’s Not An Epilogue
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They’re going to be so cute.
Muse
Loud, screeching beeps scream at me through the plume of dark smoke rising from my oven, and I curse. I curse this situation. I curse this moment. I curse the very day I was born.
Of course I caught the oven on fire making Halloween cookies. What did I think would happen? That I’d drink a glass of wine, pop a store-bought cookie with a jack-o’-lantern face in the oven, and enjoy a relaxing evening of spooky season fun?
Yeah, right.
My life doesn’t go like that—not when I was conceived, not when I was born, not through my childhood, and certainly not now, in my adulthood, when I thought I’d left my troubles and trauma hours away when I left the people who made my life a living hell.
