Page 7 of Always Us

I lean over her shoulder and kiss her cheek. “Good. I love seeing you happy.”

And that’s why I can’t tell her what’s going on. All her happiness would disappear if she knew the truth. Jade hasn’t had much happiness in her life and now that she finally does, I’m not going to take it away from her.

“Did you mean it when you said we would have lots of guest rooms in our house?” she asks.

“Of course I did. We’ll need lots of rooms for when people come visit us.”

She flips to face me, her face beaming. “That’s what I want. I want both our families to come to our house for the holidays and summer barbecues and birthdays.”

It’s sweet how Jade gets so excited about family. This family thing is all new to her and she loves having them around.

I kiss her. “We’ll make sure there’s plenty of room for everyone. Maybe we’ll build a guest house. We have all that land. Might as well use it.”

“That’s a great idea! Let’s do that. Then people can have more privacy if they want it. They can stay with us or in the guest house.”

“And that’ll keep the main house from getting too big. If we get too many rooms we’ll end up with a house the size of my dad’s and we don’t want that.”

“We won’t have that many rooms. Your dad’s house is huge.”

“I don’t know, Jade. Like Ryan said, with the guest rooms and the rooms for our six kids, it’s gonna add up to a lot of rooms.”

She rolls her eyes. “I was joking about the six kids. I had to get Ryan to shut up.”

“That’s a relief. I mean, if you want six, that’s fine, but it seems like kind of a lot. And you’d have to be pregnant for almost six years of your life.”

“Not if I had two sets of triplets.” She laughs. “Can you imagine us trying to take care of triplets?”

Jade has been bringing up the kid topic a lot more now. She doesn’t say she wants kids, but she’ll at least talk about it or joke about it like she did just now. I think she’s been talking about it with Jennifer, her counselor. Jade usually doesn’t tell me what she talks about at her counseling sessions, but I can guess by the topics she brings up at dinner or when we’re just sitting and talking. And this kid topic has come up several times the past few weeks.

“Garret? Are you awake?”

I realize I haven’t responded to the triplets comment. “Yes. The triplet thing threw me. I was trying to figure out how that might work. I think we could handle it, but I don’t think it’s something we should try for. One at a time seems like a better option.”

Now that she’s more comfortable with the kid topic, I sometimes just pretend we’re planning to have kids and see how she reacts.

“I don’t think we have any control over it, Garret. We may try for one but end up with three.”

“Well, we’ll just have to wait and see what we get.”

“Yeah.” She looks directly at me and smiles. Like really smiles.

Wait. Did she just agree to have kids? What was the ‘yeah’ referring to? That we’ll wait and see if we have kids? Or that we’ll wait and see if we have one or triplets? And what’s with the huge smile?

“Jade, did you just—”

She interrupts my words with a kiss. “Just give me a little more time, okay? And then we’ll talk.” She smiles again. “But yeah, I want that.”

Holy shit, is she serious? I think she just told me she wants to have kids. But she said she needs more time. More time for what? To be 100% sure? From the look on her face, I think she’s already there. Damn. I did not expect that. At all. It’s not like she’s telling me she wants them right away. Neither one of us wants that. But to have her admit to wanting them at all is a huge deal.

Ever since we got married, I’ve been telling myself I might just have to accept the fact that kids aren’t in our future. Before today, Jade didn’t really act like she wanted them. She’d joke about having them, but she was never serious. But just now, she was serious. She even seemed a little excited about the possibility. Maybe it’s because she’s around family and it makes her think of us having our own family someday. Who knows? But whatever the reason, it made my heart jump a little. Who knew a simple ‘yeah’ could have so much meaning?

“I love you.” They’re the only words I can come up with after hearing her say that. I’m too shocked to come up with anything else. I hope this isn’t just temporary and that this really is what she wants. Because it’s definitely what I want. I love Jade so damn much and I want to have kids with her. One. Two. Six. Triplets. Doesn’t fucking matter to me. I’ll take whatever she’ll give me.

“I love you, too.” She flips around and pulls my arm down around her middle. “You need to sleep. Let’s just take a short nap.”

A few minutes later, she’s asleep. But am I? Hell, no. My body is freaking exhausted but my mind is wide awake, even more so now that Jade’s agreed to have kids. Well, almost agreed. We’ve got this whole future ahead of us. We’re making plans. A new house. Kids. Holidays with the family. And instead of being happy about it, like I should be, I’m scared shitless that it’s nothing more than a dream. A dream that will never come true because of my psychotic, controlling grandfather. I don’t know why he won’t just leave me alone. I don’t know why he’s doing this. What the fuck happened in his life to make him this way?

A half hour later Jade’s still asleep and I’m still lying here, wide awake. My phone vibrates on the nightstand. I carefully take my arm off Jade and reach over to get it. There’s a text from my dad asking if we made it to Iowa. I text him back that we did. Then I slowly move off the bed.

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