Epilogue 2
GAGE
Ten years later…
I shoot a quick glance at my wrist as I stop my gray Rover Autobiography SUV just at the mouth of the pathway that takes to my estate and see that it’s almost ten p.m.
I never come home this late anymore. Since meeting and marrying Piper, I’ve tried to leave my workaholic ways behind as much as possible and keep a sane working schedule, so it’s rare for me to miss our children’s bedtime routine.
Tonight, there was no way I could make it in time, though.
We had an international emergency meeting with the board of directors of a logistics company we were in the market to acquire, at least until our security was tipped off to some of their well-hidden, shady dealings. We, of course, called the whole thing off, but it wasn’t enough. Our legal department had to get involved, and we had to turn our evidence to the law, which took damn near forever.
I’ve been in the office since seven in the morning to deal with this crap, and by the time I was done, it was already eight p.m., and then, of course, to make matters worse, I got stuck in a traffic jam that moved an inch forward every ten centuries.
I use my smartwatch to open the gates, and I drive through them and up to the main house.
Everything is dark and quiet.
I pick up my briefcase and retrieve the tie that I discarded on the passenger seat as soon as I got behind the wheel and stuff it in one of the front pockets of my slacks, then I head toward the wraparound patio, jogging through our perfectly manicured lawn to get there faster.
My wife and I still use my penthouse in the city weekly, especially in the winter, but we prefer to stay here on weekends and during the summer. This estate is close enough that any family member who might need us can be reached in around twenty minutes if they aren’t staying here with us –which they often do. It’s just more convenient in general with four little kids.
We love living in Seattle and all that it can offer, but we decided from the start that our kids should get to have normal, happy childhoods away from the limelight and in a place where they could actually get fresh air, have space to run around, play and swim, rather than spend their days stuck indoors in front of some type of screen.
The women in our lives went gaga over the idea.
Grammy just loves to stay here, and usually, she's the first one to come down for her summer holiday, preferring to move into her private quarters in the family wing we all share in the middle of May while we usually can't come down here for our extended stay until the third week of June when our kids are all done with their scholastic and sportive activities until September.
So, Grandma is the one who opens up the place for us, and makes sure that the pantry is full and that everything is in tip-top condition.
This activity keeps her out of trouble and is not too strenuous, so we're good with it. In fact, we really appreciate the help.
As for the moms, if they could, they’d never leave.
Celeste, Piper’s mom, loves spending time outdoors to explore the hundreds of acres of woods we have in the back. It still cracks me up that my lovely couch potato of a wife could come from two people who enjoy trekking, camping, and hiking so much.
Ryan, my father-in-law, loves tending to the gardens and fishing in the stream that runs through the woods, and when he’s not lost somewhere green and leafy, he likes spending time in the garage with me and my brother as we tinker on our bikes. If it were up to him, he would also never leave.
Now, my mom is a city girl down to the tips of her toes, and I was sure she would hate spending time in the country, but as it turns out, she loves playing the traditional grandma role to perfection and, besides, she would gladly live in a cave if it meant being around her beloved grandbabies as much as possible.
While Celeste takes the kids into the forest for adventures and birdwatching sessions, my mom bakes cookies and cakes with them. She has discovered she has quite the green thumb as well and can spend hours on end in the greenhouse helping Piper and her dad with their orchids or in the herb garden that they started a couple of years ago almost as an afterthought and was meant to be just a few pots of mint, rosemary, basil and lavender scattered about our patio at first but then ended up being so much more.
Parker also loves to call this place home and comes down as much as possible. My brother loves everything tech-related and is a true geek when it comes to smart homes and stuff. According to my wife, he's the one who helped us take the country out of the country house since our place might look like your typical estate from the outside, but is actually hip to the latest modern technology inside.
And then there’s my wife of ten years, who loves this place to bits.
The estate is totally our baby, so I understand. In fact, I feel the same.
We bought the land when our twins turned two and did everything from scratch, starting from a project we created together.
We were pretty hands-on in each phase of the construction, and we did it all together, from the sustainable energy system that renders us entirely self-reliant and completely green down to the decor of each room.
As it is, we spend lots of time in this place thanks to the flexibility of both our jobs regarding location since I can very easily manage my affairs remotely, and my wife can write virtually from anywhere in the world.
We have a ginormous playground with swings and all sorts of kid-friendly contraptions that my wife could get her hands on for our children, running tracks, an Olympic-sized salt-water swimming pool — which is the only sport-related thing in the house that my wife actually enjoys using—, a fully-equipped gym, a beautiful sunroom that the entire family loves to hang out in and then, of course, we have my office and Piper’s adjoining writing-cave, her reading nook, a humongous library and her stargazing observatory with the clear-glass ceiling that I had built as a surprise for her for our last anniversary.
We have everything we need here.
It’s like our little perfect little bubble, and if we could, we would never leave.
This year, we actually fell behind with the program and were almost a month late in moving in for the summer, but no one complained about it since it happened because of the best possible reasons. My wife and I got sidetracked by an unprogrammed special delivery as we became parents again just over two months ago to a wonderful little boy who couldn’t wait to meet us and so got here a whole month earlier than predicted.
Even being a preemie he’s still a bit of a bruiser —definitely takes after Daddy— and he put his poor tiny Mommy through a very long, very difficult labor. They had to stay in the clinic a little longer than normal both because he was born early and because the labor was so hard on Piper. Our baby was pronounced healthy and ready to go home a little over a week later, but there was no way I was going to move us to the countryside at that point because I wanted to stay in Seattle and as close to the nearest hospital as possible until my baby doll was completely recovered and our little son was ready to travel such long distance, which we were told would be perfectly safe for him in a month or so.
Afterwards it was rounding up three kids and a baby to move while I was working on the closing of an important deal with a shipping company that Bannon Overseas was in the process of acquiring, and my wife was in the midst of launching the first book in a new romantic suspense series, that proved difficult, since while we planned the trip we kept getting distracted by other important things that were clamoring for our attention.
The move was a total mayhem with these many children ten years and younger to corral during the trip and our stress level went through the damn roof all through the ordeal, yet my beloved wife, that insane woman, even now and after the horror show our newest son put us through, she's already babbling about having another next year.
I'm thinking our little family is more than complete with our latest addition, though, and I hope I can convince her of the same thing soon.
I'm also thinking of following Sylvianne's very good advice and possibly keeping Piper’s mind from scheduling more babies into our future by attempting to bribe her with a puppy and a kitten, a thing I'm already looking into doing as soon as our youngest starts to sleep through the night.
I think we are the perfect family unite right now as, counting the four kids, we’re three boys and three girls in total.
Who could ask for more?
In keeping with our tradition, we called our new baby son Victor.
All our kids are named after the frontman of Aerosmith and the song that brought my wife and me together in some way or the other. We wanted to recall every detail of how we met and fell in love with each other every time we looked at our babies and we thought using their names as mementos of the beginning of our story would be just the thing to do.
Our firstborns were fraternal twins, so we got one of each from the get.
We called them Tyler and Steven, and they are now ten years old. We got our second little princess, Rosa, who is now almost seven, three years after their birth. We could not straight-up name her Pink , after all, but we went pretty close, using the Italian translation for the word, which happens to be an actual name for girls, common to several languages.
After she was born, we took a long break from baby-making even if we both wanted another child because Rosa's pregnancy was particularly difficult on Piper. She had to spend seven months on bedrest to keep our baby girl safe up until delivery.
We started low-key trying again two years ago, and since the previous two times getting pregnant had been so easy for us, we were kinda surprised and more than a bit disappointed when, month after month, there was no baby.
We did all kinds of testing to make sure there were no issues, but everything kept coming up negative, so we just figured it wasn’t meant to be, at least for the time being, and that we should just stop stressing about it and don’t try for a baby any longer, at least for a little while.
We already had three kids to love, after all, and, of course, we had each other.
Exactly two months after we had thrown in the towel, Piper got pregnant, and now, like I said, we have become parents again, and our family is complete –pets aside.
I guess that’s life for you.
Wonderful. Unpredictable.
It gives you what you need when you didn’t even know you wanted it, and, sometimes, it chooses to do so when you least expect it or when you have entirely given up on ever getting it.
That’s what makes happiness taste all the sweeter, I guess.
The fact that you have no control over it, I mean. If you’re smart enough to recognize it, you just grab onto it when you have it and hold on fast, hoping it lasts forever, and if you’re lucky enough, your hope becomes your reality.
That’s what happened to me.
I'm a very happy man. A grateful man.
I've got everything that matters, and I owe it all to one little lady who stole my heart after blasting my ears till they bled with Pink by Aerosmith that long-ago Friday night.
I love my wife and our life together. In fact, I fall more and more in love with her every day.
Before I met her, I wouldn’t have believed something like what happened to us could be possible if someone had tried to convince me of it.
I could have never imagined that so many little, apparently unimportant or even silly things had to happen in a certain way, in a certain order to bring my wife and me together, but that’s what happened.
Piper has often said that the stars just aligned for us at the perfect moment.
All it took was for someone to screw up my booking, and for her headphones to break at the worst possible time while she thought she was the only person staying on the entire seventeenth floor.
All it took was for me to feel so sick I could not stand from my bed for hours and for her to play that song over and over.
All it took was for me to see her while I stood on that sidewalk, catch a glimpse of her and fall instantly in love with her, and for her to spot me through her telescope even before that happened.
All it took was for me to have my people search the whole city for her not knowing she was my next door neighbor all along and for her to think it would be okay to play Pink on speaker again one last time before her new headphones were delivered later that very day.
Easy, right?!
All those little things that sound so trivial if taken alone but came to mean so much more when strung all together in a sequence of events that changed our lives forever.
Small, insignificant things that had to happen in just that way and then boom there we were, me knocking on Piper’s door and she opening it.
That’s why I like to think of all those things as little miracles.
That’s why my wife thinks it was all written in the stars.
That’s how two people from two entirely different worlds, two people who were both from Seattle but never frequented the same places and would have likely never met even though they were, still are and forever will be soulmates, ended up living one door away from each other in Phoenix for a few months at the start of an incredibly hot summer and fell in love.
I smile to myself, shaking my head as I punch in my security code to disable the alarm.
I’m feeling like a total mush-ball tonight. My wife would tease the fuck out of me if she could read my thoughts —which I’m pretty sure is one of her special powers as we are so in sync that sometimes she’ll take a single look at me and just guess what I’m thinking.
I would be at a definite disadvantage if it was just her, but our connection runs deep and goes both ways, so I’m pretty good at reading her as well, thankfully.
I let myself in and close the door behind me.
I rearm the alarm, and after a couple of seconds, the house electronic voice tells me that everything is secure and locked up tight.
I make my way through the main hall and I frown when I start to hear rock music blaring loudly.
I could recognize the strings of this song anywhere. It’s our song. Pink .
The song is being played at full blast on our state-of-the-art high-tech sound system, and the volume is so high it feels like the band is actually playing on a stage somewhere in my private quarters.
What’s my baby doll up to?
Playing a prank on me or something?
We were texting not ten minutes ago while I was still on my way, and she said our babies were all tucked in already, and she herself was feeling tired and would be waiting for me directly in our bed since I had dinner at the office and she had eaten something at six p.m. with the kids.
So if they’re down for the night already, why is she playing Aerosmith so loud that the walls are freaking shaking?
I stop in my tracks in the middle of the hall and call for Piper, but of course, Steven Tyler’s croon is so loud she doesn’t hear him.
The song's final notes fill the house just as I'm about to reach our bedroom, only for the track to start back from the top.
I laugh. I just can’t help myself. She is looping it, no less?
I start to walk a little bit faster. I’m curious to see what my very lovely but also very looney wife is up to.
Our bedroom door is open and there’s a soft light coming out of there and casting shadows onto the hall.
I strain to hear some other sound other than the drums and harmonica from the intro but I can’t make out anything else.
The closer I get to the room, the more deafening the music gets.
I finally step into our bedroom, and it doesn’t take me long to spot my wife, and as soon as I do it, I nearly swallow my tongue.
She’s lying in the middle of our bed, on pink sheets, wearing a beautiful smile and a pink nightie that’s straining to hug her bountiful curves and it’s so sheer and short it would almost be less indecent if she were completely naked instead.
Her long white-blonde hair is dyed rose gold from her chin down, and it's styled in bouncy fat curls cascading over her pale, creamy shoulders.
I just stare for a long moment, unblinking, as everything south of my belly button hardens and starts to rise so fast that the rush of blood almost makes me dizzy.
I’m trying –and failing– to get my neurons to cooperate, but I finally manage to unglue my tongue from the roof of my mouth. “Weren’t you fully blonde this morning?” I ask her numbly, screaming to be able to hear my own voice over the music.
Her smile gets bigger as she shrugs one shoulder, her soft, thick thighs rustling against the silk that covers our ginormous bed as she reaches for her phone and slightly lowers the volume. “Today , it just went with the fashion ,” she quips quoting the song, her lips twitching
I just roll my eyes at her, chuckling. “Very funny, baby. You look… you look,” I flounder.
Brain, are you planning to help me out anytime soon?
“Very hot, gorgeous even, my beloved wife,” Piper supplies, one hand twirling in a circle.
I nod, gulping down air loudly. “Yes and yes…”
She laughs, her large breasts shaking under the tight transparent material of the nightie.
I feel more blood pool at my groin and wince as my erection starts to throb and painfully punch against the front of my slacks.
Okay, I need to get myself under control.
Just find a way to escape and dunk my head in the sink under a stream of ice cold water.
Why would she decide to torture me like this?
We haven’t had sex since the day she went into labor while we were fucking and scared the fuck out of me.
I’ve been going to bed hard and waking up every morning harder with my little doll in my arms for over eight weeks now, and seeing her like this is… fuck!
Just as I gear up to ask her what she’s up to and why she is so keen on giving me a heart attack, she pats the bed, and I go over and automatically sit beside her.
“Guess what?” she asks, her grin getting bigger.
I shake my head, words escaping me entirely.
She goes on, blessedly oblivious to how much seeing her in this get-up is killing me. “I went to see Dr. Morales…”
That would be her long-time OB/GYN.
I nod, trying hard to keep my eyes from straying to her breasts. “And?”
“And she gave me the all-clear, Gage.”
I straighten up at that. “You mean…?”
My wife nods. “Yes! I’m all healed and good as new.”
Oh fuck, yes! Thank God!
I’m so elated, I can’t put it into words. My heart starts to slam against my ribcage, my hands immediately reaching for her.
“Piper…”
She sighs. “I know, love… but I’m here… no more waiting…”
I slide a bit closer to her on the bed until I can clasp her to me and kiss her hard. My wife kisses me back just as hard; our lips, tongues, and teeth clashing together as she moans into my mouth, and I groan, plastering her to my chest as her fingers sink into my arms.
I’ve tried to keep all our interactions almost PG-13 since after Victor was born. It was a matter of sanity.
At first, because she was recuperating and could not be messed with in any way, then just because we are like a truck full of gas colliding with a barn full of hay whenever we touch, and I just couldn’t risk even fooling around a little bit.