Page 75 of Property of Thrasher
“Oh.” She made a sound that was a laugh and a cry at once. “Oh, baby. I am so happy for you.”
“And…” I looked up at Enzo. He nodded, a small, sure thing, and slid his hand up my back until the base of my skull was cupped in his palm. “And I’m pregnant.”
She cried then, the good way, the way that tells you the past didn’t win. She said a thousand things in one breath and none of them were judgment. When she calmed, she said, “Tell him I said thank you. For keeping you safe. For being good to you.”
Thrasher took the phone like he was accepting a medal. “Ma’am,” he said, strangely formal and utterly sincere. “I’ll take care of both of them with my life.”
“I know,” she muttered full of tears. “I can hear it in her voice.”
After we hung up, after the music wound down to a soft ache, after he carried me to bed and wrapped me in his arms with the care of a man who understood that softness is not weakness, we lay in the dark and talked wedding.
“I don’t want a church,” I said, and we both laughed because there were a thousand reasons in that sentence. “I want the cabin. The porch, maybe. Or the yard. Bare feet if the grass behaves. Simple. Food after. Music. Elaina standing there with me. The club around us. Not a lot of flowers. They remind me of funerals more than brides.”
“Whatever you want,” he stated with a smirk. Then, because he couldn’t help himself, “Except shoes. You’ll wear boots. I’m not letting you step on a nail and start this marriage with a tetanus shot.”
“Bossy,” I challenged.
“Correct,” he accepted.
We sketched the rest in whispers. A day soon but not frantic. A dress that didn’t belong to a religion. A patch ceremony after where they’d put a property rocker on a fresh cut made for me, not to mark or own, but to say protected family in a language of leather and thread.
“What if it scares me?” I asked at the end, because it was a fair and ugly thing that sometimes fear isn’t logical. “Being a mom. Not because I don’t want it. Because I want it and that makes it terrifying.”
“Then I’ll be scared with you,” he said into my hair. “And I’ll block when fear tries to bite. And I’ll put the crib together with the instructions upside down and you’ll laugh at me and I’ll pretend to pout and the kid will never know a world where we didn’t try. That’s the work. Not about not being scared. It’s being scared and trying anyway.”
I fell asleep with his heart under my ear and woke up once to the thick knock of rain on the roof. The cabin took the sound and made it small. The ring cut a cool circle against my cheekbone where my hand tucked under. I smiled in the dark.
Morning came smudged and easy. He was already up when I opened my eyes, coffee steaming, bacon scenting the house because he thought protein made all problems better. He came back to the bed and kissed me like a man who had decided that this day was the first day of every other day.
“Good morning, wife,” he said, cocky.
“We’re not married yet,” I said, even as my mouth curled.
“Technicality. My world, my rules.”
“Is that going on our vows?”
He ticked his head, pretending to consider. “Yours can be ‘my world, my rules’ too. In the house.”
“And outside?”
“I outrank you by seven inches and a motorcycle.”
“You’re impossible.”
“You’re pregnant.”
I laughed. “That’s not an argument.”
“It is now.”
We told Elaina after breakfast. She squealed loud enough that the phone tried to compress the sound and failed, then she cried, then she threatened to kill me if I didn’t let her come dress shopping, then she threatened to kill her father if he tried to make me wear white leather, then she demanded pictures of the ring and the test and my breakfast because she wanted to evaluate my prenatal diet to determine if she needed to move in with us to cook for me. When she hung up, Thrasher stared at the phone like he’d just been hit with weather.
“She’s a storm,” I said, grinning.
“She’s my storm,” he answered, pride and fear in equal measure, and I loved him more for both.
By noon he’d measured the bedroom wall twice and made a list for the hardware store that included things I didn’t know existed. By one, he’d snarled at the dying-cricket dishwasher and then apologized to it because he thought I wasn’t listening. By two, he’d taken me on a ride down the ridge road at half the speed he usually liked, one palm splayed over my thigh when we hit the straightaways, as if that alone could keep the world from trying anything. We stopped at the creek and he made me sit on a flat rock and eat a sandwich because apparently I was now an incubator he intended to treat like a priceless engine.
On the way back, the sky opened and rinsed us clean. He pulled into the carport and shook his head like a dog, water flying off his hair. He looked younger in the rain, or maybe just lighter. He reached for me and I went, stepping into his chest, into the future he’d shaped with both hands, into the ring that flashed like a secret in the gray light. He said nothing and everything with the way he held me.
That night, we stood at the stove and stirred a pot of soup together because warmth is a language that doesn’t require translation. He pressed his palm to my stomach once more and whispered something against my shoulder that I didn’t catch because it wasn’t for me. He’d talk to our baby like that forever, I knew, passing down a vocabulary of safety and stubbornness and how to look at a world that had tried to hurt you and say: not today.
When we finally went to bed, he curled around me and tucked his chin over my head. The cabin breathed with us, wood easing and settling, night soft at the eaves. I ran my thumb over the ring and felt its promise like a heartbeat.
I had been claimed in ways that once would have terrified me. Now it felt like standing on the edge of a cliff and finding wings. My world, yes. His world, yes. Our rules, written in a language neither of us had been given and both of us were learning, line by line.
The End
