Page 145 of What if It's Us

Layken pops the cap off a root beer and perches on the arm of the couch. She takes in the tableau. “So, is it like a contest, or is Ellis always the drama queen?”

“She trains them during the day, then unleashes hell at night,” I tell her much to Marlee’s amusement. “She’s clearly the alpha.”

Marlee smirks over Ellis’s pink-squished head. “She’ll be running the team by next season. Mark my words.”

“You know, if you have three more, you could field your own rookie line,” August points out, poking a burp cloth with his toe.

“First of all, fuck you,” Marlee says pointedly to August but with just enough of a smirk to let him know she’s kidding.

“And secondly,” Bodhi says, raising his hand. “Nobody tell Coach. He’ll get ideas.” He winks at Corrigan who rolls her eyes with laughter but agrees with him.

“Ugh, Bodhi’s not wrong. Dad is so ready for grandkids.”

For a wild second I wonder what Ellis, Rowan, and Juniper’s stats might look like in eighteen years. Tough, fast, tactically devastating. I’d say ‘no way’ but judging by the squawk Ellis gives in her sleep, I’m not betting against her.

Griffin buries his nose in Juniper’s hair. “They smell like powder and hope,” he says. “It’s crazy. I didn’t think I’d get it.”

I look at him, at everyone, and the air feels charged—like game seven just before the puck drops.

There’s a hush, a waiting.

The kitchen pendulum clock ticks, underscoring the silence only infants can conjure, precarious, blessed, brief. I bounce Rowan with mechanical precision and let my head tip back, eyes tracing the lazy swirl of the ceiling fan. An empty bottle rolls across the floor, and I try to think of my old tidy single-dude life. The life pre-Marlee but it’s hard to remember even one memory from life without her in it. The kids are ten weeks old now, which means they’re about the age and size they should’ve been when they were born. After five long weeks in the NICU—six for Rowan since he was so tiny—they were all granted their escape papers and we’ve been enjoying our time at home as a family ever since. Friends and family come and go relatively regularly. Sometimes to help Marlee when I’m traveling with the team. Sometimes just to hang out because they’re as obsessed with our kids as we are. And sometimes to quickly drop off coffee or foodbecause God knows we don’t have time for that these days. The mess here is a monument to survival and I am proud of it.

This is our life now.

Babies and hockey and us.

And I couldn’t love it more.

Actually…I could love it more.

“Marry me.”

The words slip out, raw and unruly, confusing everyone. Marlee’s arms cocoon tighter around Ellis, and her eyes, those impossible, fierce, tired eyes, widen to let in the moment.

Barrett scoffs silently as he turns another page in the parenting magazine as if I’m just over here telling jokes. Oliver’s jaw unhinges and his eyes bug like he’s missed a face-off. And August chokes on a laugh. “Dude, are you serious? Right now? You’re still wearing…” He cocks his head, staring at me. “I think that’s baby vomit on your sweatpants.”

Layken whoops and Griffin, one arm balancing Juniper, starts pounding the coffee table like it’s the boards after a goal. Burp cloths tumble to the floor. Bodhi’s half-eaten protein bar actually lands on the pacifier, and neither he nor anyone else cares.

I kneel by the couch. My knees don’t love it, but I’m still moving. “Marlee.” I take her hand and she lets me, even though it’s sticky with breast milk and the mysterious substance all new babies seem to secrete. “I mean it. I want to marry you, right now, before one of these little monsters wakes up and we both forget how to speak in full sentences again.”

She’s laughing and crying at the same time, the way only Marlee can. Her mouth pulls sideways, and she blinks like she’s furious at the tears blurring her vision. Ellis blows a milk bubble in her sleep, a perfect white marble, and Marlee looks down at the baby, then at me, then at our friends, all eager and expectant.

“We…we don’t even have rings,” she says, her voice a squeaky whisper.

“I’ll get you as many rings as you want,” I promise her, my hands shaking just a little. “All I have for right now is what’s left of me, which is mostly caffeine and a shocking tolerance for baby poop.”

She snickers and shakes her head, smiling through her tears. “That’s all I need.” She sniffles. “Say it again.”

I gaze into her eyes and know that I’m seeing all the way down to the bottom of her soul. Her contentedly happy, beautiful, God-given, I-will-be-in-love-with-her-forever soul. “I want to marry you, Marlee Rose.”

She leans forward, and our foreheads touch, and suddenly the mess and the faces and the whole crazy living room are sealed away. It’s only the two of us, breathing the same air, connected by these three perfect disasters we made.

“I’m in,” she says.

There’s a moment of quiet, like everyone can sense something just shifted, like the world stopped and started again, rearranged in our favor. And then the silence fractures as Layken “yessssss!”-es so loudly that Juniper snorts awake and gives a little newborn scream. Without missing a beat, Uncle Griffin lifts her over his shoulder and starts the slow side-to-side football sway.

Marlee wipes her nose on a burp cloth and asks, “Can our honeymoon be a solid night’s sleep?” She shrugs. “Or I’d settle for a cool one-hour nap.”

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