Chapter 39
REALLY, TOTALLY, COMPLETELY
Six Months Later
After a rare night out with just us, Barry pulled the car into the garage and parked, and I wasted no time yanking him by his tie toward me until I could basically attack his mouth with mine.
No preamble, no grace. He gave a muffled yelp, but was quick on the uptake, sliding his fingers through my hair and kissing me back with as much single-minded focus as he did everything.
It was still like this, always like this.
When I felt like I was going to maybe explode from wanting him so bad, I pulled away and crawled into the back seat, squirming between the front seats instead of using the door. Jeremy had the car seat, otherwise this maneuver would have been impossible.
Barry snorted and lightly slapped my ass when it was right next to his face.
“Come on,” I whispered, and he sighed but followed me, bending his long limbs to get into the back seat the same way I’d just come, nothing coordinated about it.
“Why aren’t we going inside?” he asked as I crawled onto his lap.
“Because my brother is babysitting for another twenty-seven minutes, and if we go inside now, he’ll leave.”
I was confident Jeremy wouldn’t venture to the garage, even if he had heard the door or watched us come into the driveway.
He waltzed through the back door without knocking last month and found Barry and me using the kitchen counter in a way that he promised would do developmental damage to his psyche.
He’d leave us alone in the garage.
“Harvey, are you trying to get into my pants?” Barry asked as I was, indeed, actively trying to get into his pants. I undid his belt and unbuttoned his slacks with the kind of trained skill that came with many months of practicing getting him naked as quickly as humanly possible.
“How could you tell?” I asked.
“Bed might be more comfortable,” he noted, but he did so while reaching behind me to unzip my dress, so I didn’t put much credence to the comment.
“Yes, but I want you now is the problem.”
“Well, that is a problem, isn’t it?” he muttered before pressing long, sweeping kisses against my mouth.
Even without the car seat, this level of backseat coordination was difficult. I found a pacifier and teething toy under my knee, which I pushed to the floor.
“Do you have—”
“Already ahead of you.” I reached back to the front to rummage through my purse for a condom. Barry roamed his hands over my ass while I did. When I found it, I gave a triumphant sound and spun back, knocking my head on the roof of the car while I climbed back.
Barry’s chest shook with laughter, but he rubbed the top of my head as I settled back on his lap, out of breath.
“See, this is why car sex is ideal only for teenagers.”
“Where is your sense of adventure?” I reached over his shoulder and pulled the lever that reclined half of the backseat. It reclined way too quickly, maybe our combined weight on it, and both of us yelped.
“You’re right, I am such a bore.” He pulled my unzipped dress down my forearms until my chest was exposed to him. Nursing bras are not very glamorous, maybe as a rule—at least not the ones I had—but he looked hungrily at my tits anyway and immediately sucked a hickey onto one.
I took his dick in my hand, offering a few tight strokes that made his head fall back against the headrest with a groan.
“See how fun it is when you listen to me?” I said, but I was panting. I unwrapped the condom and slid it down his shaft before readjusting myself directly over him. I’d had the forethought to wear the thin, stretchy panties, and pulled them to the side so I could line myself up over his cock.
“Oh my God,” he moaned at the sight. “Sweetheart, what are you doing to me?”
“Celebrating my hot hockey player boyfriend,” I said.
The team didn’t win the cup last season, didn’t make it past the first round, but they seemed excited about what next season would bring.
And as of today’s pre-season dinner, Barry was one of the alternate captains for the Utah Raptors. “He’s a captain now.”
“Alternate captain,” he grunted out as I squeezed him again.
He held his breath with the tip notched at my entrance but I paused, waiting until he looked back up at me.
When his eyes were on mine, I smiled and slid down, reveling in the way his face went slack with pleasure and a moan rattled out of his chest.
The dirty windows on the back of the garage let in slices of moonlight, but the timer of the lights in the garage had clicked off and it was mostly dark, just me and Barry and the sensation of sliding up and down him while he gripped my hips like they were the only things keeping him Earth-side.
“I miss when we didn’t have to wear a condom,” I said, because I knew it riled him up to think about. Sure enough, he made a sound like an animal and started thrusting up into me. He banded an arm around my lower back, and I released some feral sounds of my own.
I wasn’t on birth control while breastfeeding, and I had in fact learned my lesson the first time that unprotected sex sometimes does equal baby.
“You miss taking me raw, Wright?”
“You miss being taken raw, Harvey? Dreaming of me putting another baby in you?” he quipped back, but his voice was tight, breaths hot and shallow against my shoulder. I pulled back to kiss him again, a sloppy tangle of tongues and breath.
“I love you,” I told him as we rutted toward our climaxes.
In the spare light, I saw his eyes soften on mine, and when he kissed me again, it was a slower thing altogether.
It made me melt for him, and between the kissing, the tight hands, and his cock pressing deep inside of me, I hiccupped and came, clamping down around him in a way that sent him tunneling right over.
He held me so tight, unleashing into the condom inside of me, and when we were both done, we were left panting, foreheads resting against the other’s.
“I love you, Barry Wright,” I said again.
He nuzzled his nose against mine.
“I love you way worse, Harvey.”
Some days I couldn’t believe we were pulling this off: taking care of a tiny human, loving each other, sneaking secret moments for ourselves when we could.
It was exhausting and wonderful. Everything everyone had ever told me about having a baby was true and also didn’t even touch how it felt.
I couldn’t describe it; I didn’t know how to try.
Sometimes it was the feeling of the morning sun shining onto my cheeks through a bus’s window, or a very cold drink after a long walk.
Other times, and maybe more often, it was the scariest thing I’d ever done, new anxieties I couldn’t have even dreamed up piled upon each other because there was this tiny girl with a huge life ahead of her and she was mine to look after. Ours.
I didn’t want her to conceive of a time where Barry and I didn’t love each other.
When I felt like my heart rate wasn’t nearing two hundred, I pried myself off his chest, but kept my hands on his shoulders. “Barry.”
Barry sunk his head back against the headrest.
“Yeah?”
I swallowed and sat back to get a good look at his face. It was too dark for my plans, so I reached overhead and clicked on the cabin light, both of us wincing at the bright light momentarily.
That was better, though. His nose was crooked from the times it had been broken, the scar from last season now a thin line on his left cheek. He’d buzzed his hair short for summer, and I loved running my hands over it. I liked his hair every way, liked him every way.
“Can we get married?” I whispered into the still quiet of the car.
It was only a single startled beat before a wide grin covered his face, his eyes lit up bright. I laughed, already relieved even though he hadn’t answered me yet.
“You mean it?” he asked. “You have to really mean it.”
I laughed again and reached back for my purse to retrieve the little box I had stowed there. Seeing it, Barry made a startlingly gleeful sound and shook me until we were both giggling.
I opened the box and plucked the gold band from its case. I held it between my fingers like an offering. It was, I suppose. An offering of myself, my trust, my commitment to try really, really hard to love him as best as I could forever.
“I really mean it,” I said.
Barry grabbed my face, one hand on either side, and pressed a long hard kiss to my mouth.
“Yes,” he said, and kissed me again. “Yes, tomorrow, even.”
“Not tomorrow!” I shrieked. “Our families may never forgive us if we elope.”
“Fine, next week,” he bartered, then gasped. “Let’s do it in the backyard.”
The yard was looking especially good these days, the grass thick and green, my grandpa’s rose bushes full of bright blooms.
“I’d marry you at the bowling alley. Could buy everyone onion rings,” he said.
“Maybe your brother should do some stand-up, too? Just so we’re hitting all our first date bases.”
“I like how you think.” Barry kissed my cheek, my jaw, my neck, my earlobe. “Say yes,” he whispered.
“This is my proposal,” I chirped, indignant. He only grinned and batted his dark lashes at me until I heaved a dramatic sigh. I grabbed his left hand and slid the gold band onto his ring finger—no takebacks as far as I was concerned.
“Yes,” I told him, inciting a whoop and a hug so tight that the ache in my boobs reminded me we needed to get inside and either feed Frankie or pump.
“Can I give you your ring now?”
“When did you get a ring?” I asked, startled that he may have almost beat me to a proposal.
Barry shook his head, looking almost embarrassed. He reached behind me and clicked off the light, which I clicked right back on, waiting for his answer. He busied himself by pulling my dress back up my shoulders and tugging up the zipper while I waited.
When I didn’t crawl off his lap even though my dress was righted, he exhaled and smiled sheepishly.
“Last December. I took you to work and found you singing a very off-key rendition of a song you did not know the words to.”
“Hey!”
“Okay, you knew about forty percent of the words,” he amended. “I’d spent a sum total of twenty-three days with you and decided that I should have a ring on hand for the moment I convinced you to let me love you.”
My heart squeezed tight. I couldn’t believe there was a time I believed I’d never see him again.
“I’m glad you got traded,” I whispered.
Barry pulled me against his chest and rubbed circles over my spine, laying light kiss after light kiss onto my head. “Me too, Harvey.”
When we’d spent well over our twenty-seven minutes in the garage and my boobs really could not take being full anymore, he led me inside. The future could never be sure, but we’d make it.
This I was really, totally, completely certain about.