Epilogue I
EPILOGUE I
ISAAK
Two Months Later
“So what do you think?” I ask. “Wanna come train with me?”
I take a sip of my coffee as I look across the table at Art. The years both have and haven’t been kind to my old friend. He was a shrimp when I last knew him and now he’s built as fuck. But where he used to be the jokester light of the party, now he’s got shadows in his eyes and I only saw him smile once, when we first saw each other in the parking lot and exchanged a quick hug.
But the whole time we’ve been catching up—pretty fucking depressing tales on both our parts except for my recent lucky as fuck fortune of finding Kira and having her in my life—he’s been grim.
“It’s good you found your Angelique,” he says, the ghost of a smile almost hitting his lips, but then he shakes his head. “I just don’t know if bodyguarding is for me. I don’t think I could—” he shudders, “have the weight of knowing anyone’s life was in my hands again.”
“Bro,” I shake my head and reach out a quick hand to slap him on the shoulder. “The stakes aren’t usually so high. We can get hired to be extra security for concerts, events, stuff like that.”
“There’s active shooters at that kinda shit all the time.”
I tilt my head at him. “And who better than us in a situation like that, man? Seriously? But that’s not the day to day. Just come train with me. What the fuck you doin’ down in Austin right now?”
“Working at Buck’s shop.”
“Fuck, Art.” I pull back from the table, frowning seriously. Art went into the military in the first place to avoid getting pulled into his cousin Alex’s motorcycle gang. “Are you in?”
“No. No ,” he says again when he can see how freaked out I am. The Rattlesnake Kings are no one to fuck with. A few years ago when a war broke out with them and one of the south Texas gangs, bodies dropped up and down I-35 with rattlesnakes on their chests as a calling card.
“I just work in the shop. Alex knows I don’t fuck with that. After Gracie took Paloma and left me he knew I had to be on the up and up to be able to get any visitation with my daughter.”
“They moved to Ft. Worth, didn’t they?” I ask, arching an eyebrow. “And I’m offering good work, out of Alex’s world. Surely a judge would look more favorably on that.”
He lowers his eyebrows. “It’d still be a job where I’m carrying a gun.”
“Are you sure you can afford to go around and not carry a gun, Art? Fuck, hanging out with the Kings again?”
He shoves back from the chair and stands up.
Dammit. I pushed too hard too fast.
I immediately stand up, too. “I’m sorry. Fuck, man. You know I’d go to the mat for you if you’re ever in trouble. I just know how hard you worked to get out the first time. We both did. I’m trying to build something here that could be good for guys like us. I’m trying to give us second chances. I already got a couple other guys who are up here, training with me and working on their certs. But you’re my brother.” I clap him on the shoulder again, but this time don’t let go. “And I’m trying to build a real family here for once. One better than blood, cause sometimes blood families bite ass and don’t do nothing but keep us stuck.”
He frowns, deep lines in his forehead, and nods. “Yeah, I’ll think about it.”
“You do that.”
We both nod at each other in the way that means more than words sometimes with brothers, then he gets up and heads out. He stops right before the door, though, turning back to me.
“This thing you got with your woman. Don’t fuck it up. And congratulations, man.”
Then he’s gone through the door. I watch through the window of the diner as he hops on his Harley Road King and pulls out of the parking lot.
I hope I see him again.
In the meantime, I grin. I’ve got a little woman to get home to.
* * *
“Can you find me a… an um…” Kira frantically flips pages in the cooking book while the kitchen mixer loudly whirs and a YouTube video in the background blares. “An omelette pan!” she finally announces.
I laugh and look around the boxes towering all around us in the little house we’re renting. Well, I say little —it’s bigger than anything I’ve lived in since some of the foster houses when I was a kid. But those were always stuffed to the gills with people.
This place has three bedrooms for two people. Three bedrooms. Two people. Make it make sense.
But Kira declared it perfect, because she said she and I could both have our own offices. I try not to choke on my own tongue at how blasé she is about money. Even though I guess this place is technically “reasonable” with two of us making income. Well, Kira will be making income, soon. We’re not spending any of the inheritance money on housing—one of my requests. Instead, she’s using it to set up her first clinic, even though, yes, she hasn’t technically graduated yet. Doesn’t mean she isn’t already trying to poach her favorite professor, Dr. Ezra, to come work for her and only teach part-time at the university.
“What box might that be in?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says, flipping rapidly through the cookbook pages some more, flustered. “The one that says kitchen!”
I glance at the tower of boxes filling the little dining area off the kitchen, all of which are labeled kitchen .
After we signed the lease, a moving truck full of her stuff showed up. All of her stuff. Apparently she’d still been “storing” a bunch of shit with her parents, and it’s now in boxes up to the ceiling in our living room, bedroom, and her office. I told her straight up my office was off-limits. Everything I owned fit in three boxes that I’ve already unpacked and put away. Last night, I built a sturdy little desk out of wood I got from the hardware store, and I’ve got a nice little office going. It’s the only room that’s got ten square feet of free space and that’s saying something in a fourteen hundred square foot house.
I heft down the top box and tear it open. Pantry items. I chuckle. Who moves their graham crackers and cereal from one house to another? Is any of this shit even still in date? I pluck a box of saltine crackers out and check. Best by 3/6/2021.
I shake my head and toss the crackers towards our most current trash bag. There’s a pile of them towards the door I need to take out to the bins before it gets dark out, and another pile of flattened boxes we’ve already worked our way through to take to the recycling center. There’s no way we’d be able to fit it all in the blue bin outside.
Frankly, I never lived in a place without dumpsters and a parking lot. This whole living-in-a-house thing is gonna take some getting used to.
I drag down another box. Then another. No pans to be found.
But there is a lot of plastic click-top Tupperware-type shit. Granted, I’ve never seen Kira cook before today, so I don’t know why she’s got all this shit for leftovers. Maybe it’s why it all looks so pristine.
“Oh wait,” Kira calls from over the U of the kitchen counter. “What’s that you just pulled out?”
I lift up one of the plastic rectangles and click off the lid.
“Perfect!” she declares.
I heft an eyebrow as I set it on the counter and slide it across to her. “Pretty sure the plastic will melt upon entry on the stove, babe.”
She rolls her eyes at me, blowing at some curls that have fallen in her face out of her hair tie. “I’m not going to put it on the stove. Who do you think I am? I haven’t lost my entire brain yet. There’s a video here that shows how you can make omelettes in the microwave.”
“Um.”
But she’s already bustling and pouring the whipped up eggs into the plastic rectangle. Then I watch on in amusement as she tears up some pepperonis—one of the few other food stuffs we have in the house in addition to frozen pizzas. Hence the extra pepperoni. Kira apparently thinks frozen pizzas never have enough, so she always buys extras to cover her pizzas so that not an ounce of cheese is left visible.
I’ve never in my life met anyone so averse to cooking a simple meal. But I guess frozen food and takeout are how she’s survived her short, adult life. They had a cook growing up, naturally.
But she got sensitive the one time I pointed this out and is now determined to learn how to cook. She uses a chopstick from last night’s takeout to stir the pepperoni into the eggs, then heads confidently over to the microwave.
“Any reason we’re having omelettes for dinner?” I’m glad she told me what she was making because I’m not sure I would’ve been able to figure it out otherwise.
I’m trying really, really hard to stifle my grin.
Her head whips my way with a glare. “Breakfast for dinner is like, a thing .”
I hold up my hands in surrender. “Totally.”
“Plus, eggs and pepperoni were the only things in the fridge besides mayo and ketchup. We’re out of frozen pizzas.”
I nod. “Whatever sounds tasty to you.”
She’s reaching her hand up to the microwave but again she glares at me. Hard. “Are you mocking me?”
Again my hands go up. “I would never, Red.”
“Good.” She turns her head back to the microwave and starts punching in numbers. The machine whirs to life. We made sure the microwave was the one thing we kept track of so we could unpack it first thing. Did I mention the woman also lives on instant coffee? And instead of using an electric kettle, she microwaves her water?
I always thought all these little habits of living with someone else—especially a woman—would drive me nuts. Instead, I find them so fucking adorable.
And all the shit she unloaded in the bathroom. I love her making the place smell like her.
“Because I’m working really hard here to try to make this place feel like home even though I will never be a home-maker. God fucking forbid. But I thought it might be nice for my man to have a nice dinner to come home to and—” She stomps her foot and breaks out in tears.
“Hey, hey—” I hurry over to her, wrapping my arms around her from behind and cradling her to me. “You know I don’t ever need that shit. You’re amazing just the way you are. I’ve been cooking for myself for my whole life and I don’t mind making extra for you. You shouldn’t even be on your feet at this hour.”
I rub her belly, still in such absolute fucking awe at the news she told me two months ago.
We thought it was just a bad flu. I took care of her for a week, working from a chair in her living room while she wasted away on the couch and tried to stubbornly keep working on her dissertation.
By the second week when it didn’t clear up and we’d given up on work and given in to watching The Office reruns all day, I finally insisted on taking her to the doctor.
She expected a bad case of the flu or maybe another bout of Covid.
Instead the doctor sent me out of the room. When I heard her screech, I all but busted down the door to get back to her; the nurses were ready to call the cops on me. But she invited me back in, and shell-shocked, shared the news with me.
“We’re pregnant,” she’d said, with a wide-eyed look of wonder in her eyes. Apparently in the chaos of everything that had gone down in the duration and aftermath of the Red Wedding—her joke, not mine—she’d neglected to take her birth control.
Then she’d bent over and thrown up all over the doctor’s shoes.
Now that we’re near the end of the second trimester, the nausea has finally calmed down for the most part.
I rub the soft skin of her barely distended belly and it hits like it does occasionally.
Holy shit. I’m going to be a father.
I’m still talking about the found family I’m trying to build, but the truth is, I’m building a real one, too. Me and Kira and— I suck in a sharp breath as the weight of it whacks me in the chest like a shotgun blast.
Me and Kira and our kid.
“Come on,” I murmur. “Why don’t you go sit down on the couch. I’ll bring out the food when it’s finished.”
But right then the microwave beeps. Kira immediately opens the microwave and reaches in for the dish.
“Careful, if it’s hot.” I try to block her hand but she’s determined, yanking out the plastic. Then she starts crying even harder when she sees the strange, rubbery egg block that’s half-solidified and burnt on one end and half-gooey in the middle. It smells god-awful.
“That was the last of the eggs,” she cries, turning and collapsing against my chest.
I wrap my arms around her, trying not to let her feel me chuckling. “Babe. Babe. It’s okay.”
She pulls back from me, wiping her nose on the forearm of her cardigan. “Okay? Okay? It’s not okay! I’m going to have a baby and I can’t even cook eggs! I’m going to accidentally poison it! All the other moms are going to be making all sorts of organic homecooked baby food and I don’t even know how to?—”
I cut off her words with a quick kiss, but she just keeps right on the second I pull back.
“—and how am I going to open up the clinic at the same time as I have a newborn? It’s too much too fast! And what about us? What if having a kid so quick makes everything tense between us because we never get a honeymoon period and?—”
I cut her off with a kiss again, laughing out loud this time.
She yanks back and glares at me through her tears. “Are you laughing at me?!”
“Pretty sure we gotta have a wedding to have a honeymoon.”
She shudders. “Ugh, god, don’t talk to me about weddings!”
“Fair,” I nod. “But how bout this?”
I drop to one knee and pull a box out of my back pocket, holding it up to her. “I know it’s not much. Later on, I’ll be able to give you a bigger one. But Miss Kira Roberts, will you come to the courthouse with me to become my wife? No wedding dress or fancy hairdo necessary.”
When she starts crying even harder again, I gotta say, I’m not sure what that means. Dammit. She was just talking about everything being too much, too fast. It’s the wrong time. Fuck. I’ve been waiting, walking around with this damn box burning a hole in my pocket for a couple weeks now. Why’d I think the kitchen after burnt eggs that have left a weird sulphury smell in the air was the right time?
I start to get up off my knee. “Listen, it’s fine if?—”
“I thought you’d never ask, you big oaf!” She drops to her knees and throws her arms around me. “You’ve been driving me nuts carrying around that ring and not asking!”
A wave of relief crashes me. “So is that a yes?”
“Yes.” But she pounds my back with her little fist. “Only if you don’t make me wait so long ever again.”
I chuckle in her ear. “I don’t know about that. Good things come to good girls who wait.”
“Fuck waiting,” she says back. “Can we go out to eat? And then, god , can we go play? I’m hungry and horny, in that order.”