29. Gracie
— ? —
Gracie
The truck rattles up the drive, and the porch light catches my ring.
I’ve been staring at it the whole ride home.
Turning my hand this way and that while Mal drives with one palm on the wheel and the other wrapped around my thigh like he’s afraid I might evaporate.
The diamond’s the same. The platinum band’s the same.
But it feels different now, heavier in a good way, weighted with everything we almost lost.
“You’re going to blind yourself,” Mal says.
“I’m admiring.”
“You’re obsessing.”
“I’m appreciating.” I turn my hand again, watching the stone catch the dashboard glow. “This ring has been through some shit. It deserves appreciation.”
He laughs, low and warm, and pulls the truck to a stop beside the fence. Waffles stands at the gate like a furry gray sentinel, ears pricked forward with obvious judgment.
“Your donkey’s giving me a look,” Mal says.
“He’s wondering why we’re sitting in the driveway like teenagers.”
“Fair point.” But he doesn’t move. Just sits there, engine ticking into silence, staring at the farmhouse like he’s seeing it for the first time. Or maybe the last time before everything changes. “Gracie.”
“Mal.”
“We’re going inside.”
“We are.”
“And then-” He stops. Swallows. The silver at his temples catches the moonlight, and I watch his throat work. “There’s nothing stopping us anymore.”
The words land somewhere in my chest. Nothing stopping us.
For five months, there’s been a wall. An invisible, careful barrier made of all the ways he was trying to prove himself and all the ways I was trying to protect myself.
Even when we slept in the same bed, there was a gap. A held breath. A maybe.
No more maybe.
“Are you nervous?” I ask.
“Terrified,” he admits, and the honesty cracks me open.
“Good.” I unbuckle my seatbelt. “Me too.”
We walk to the porch hand in hand, and I feel every point where his skin meets mine. The calluses on his palm from rebuilding fences, the way his thumb traces circles on my knuckles, the heat of him even through the cooling night air.
Inside, the house smells like coffee and sawdust and home. Mal’s sketches still paper the fridge. The cradles he built gleam in the corner of the nursery, visible through the open door. Everything looks exactly the same as it did this morning, and absolutely nothing is the same.
“Water?” Mal asks.
“Are you stalling?”
“Yes.”
I laugh, and the sound breaks whatever tension was building. “Malcolm Koch, nervous to take his own wife to bed.”
“My wife who’s been through hell because of me.” He turns to face me fully, and his pale eyes are so serious it hurts. “My wife who I’m terrified of rushing. My wife who-”
“Mal.”
“-I’ve been wanting to touch properly for months-”
“Mal.”
“-and I don’t want to fuck this up.” His jaw works.
I step into him. Close the gap. Press my belly, our babies, his babies, our babies, against his stomach and feel his sharp intake of breath.
“You won’t,” I tell him.
“How do you know?”
“Because you already did, and you spent five months un-fucking it.” I reach up and trace the line of his jaw, the stubble rough under my fingertips.
“Because you learned how I take my tea and made peace talks with my donkey and built cradles and left sketches, and never once pushed for more than I was ready to give.”
His eyes close. “Gracie.”
“Because you wore my ring against your heart like a secret, and tonight you gave it back.” I pull his face down to mine, lips almost touching. “You won’t fuck this up, Mal. I promise.”
He kisses me.
Not like the careful kisses of the last few months, the good morning pecks, the goodnight brushes, the restraint always there like a third person in the room.
This kiss is every held-back week cracking open.
His hands slide into my hair and he tilts my head back and claims my mouth like he’s starving for it, and god, god, I’d forgotten what it felt like to be wanted like this.
I grab his shirt and pull him closer, closer, as close as my belly will allow. He laughs against my lips.
“Slight obstacle,” he murmurs.
“Your fault.”
“My pleasure.” His hands slide down to cup the swell between us, and his voice goes rough. “Christ, Gracie. You’re so-”
“If you say ‘big,’ I’ll murder you.”
“Beautiful.” He kisses my forehead, my cheeks, the corner of my mouth. “Fucking beautiful. I painted you tonight, and I still didn’t capture it.”
“You captured it fine.”
“A piece of it.” His hands are still on my belly, and he drops to his knees right there in the middle of the living room. Presses a kiss to the curve through my dress. “Hey, you two. Daddy’s going to borrow Mommy for a while. Try not to kick too much.”
“Oh my god.” I’m laughing and crying at the same time. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m romantic.”
“You’re stalling again.”
He looks up at me, pale eyes glinting. “Am I?”
Before I can answer, he stands and sweeps me into his arms, carefully, mindful of the belly, and carries me toward the bedroom. I yelp and grab his neck.
“Mal! I’m heavy-”
“You’re perfect.”
“I’m literally carrying two humans-”
“And I’m carrying all three of you.” He kicks the bedroom door open. “I’ve got you.”
He sets me down on the bed with a care that undoes me, and for a moment we just look at each other. The moonlight through the window turns everything silver and shadow. His hair falls across his forehead. My ring glints on my finger.
“Hi,” I whisper.
“There you are.” He kneels on the bed beside me, and his hand shakes slightly as he reaches for the zipper at my back. “Can I-?”
“Yes.”
The zipper slides down. He peels the fabric away slowly, reverently, and I feel the cool air hit my shoulders, my back, my belly. I’m not wearing the body I had when we last did this. There are new curves, new stretches, new territory he hasn’t mapped yet.
I wait for self-consciousness to hit. It doesn’t.
“Gracie.” His voice has gone rough at the edges. “Look at you.”
“I’m looking at you looking at me.”
“Then you know.” He traces a line down my arm, over my hip, across the tight drum of my stomach. “You know what you do to me.”
My fingers go to his shirt buttons. “Show me anyway.”
He does.
The shirt comes off, and I relearn the planes of his chest, the dark hair that trails down, the scar on his shoulder from a childhood fence accident. He’s leaner than he was in New York. More work-worn. More real.
“You’ve been building things,” I say, tracing a new callus.
“Cribs. Fences. A life I should have built years ago.”
“You’re building it now.”
His belt buckle clinks. His jeans hit the floor. And then he’s there, all of him, kneeling over me in the moonlight like a figure from one of his own paintings.
“Like what you see?” he says.
“I’m admiring.”
“You’re obsessing.”
“I’ve got a lot to look at.” I pull him down to me. “Now stop talking and kiss me.”
He kisses me back like he’s been starving for it, and every wall we’ve both been guarding just gives way. No wall. No maybe. Just his mouth on mine and his hands everywhere, learning me again, discovering what’s changed and worshipping it.
“Here,” he murmurs against my neck, “this is new.” A kiss to a stretch mark.
“And here.” A kiss to the underside of my breast, fuller now, sensitive.
“And this.” A kiss to my belly, where one of the twins kicks against his lips, and he laughs.
“They’re going to be trouble,” I manage.
“They’re already trouble. They’re ours.” He looks up at me. “Can you turn on your side? I want - I don’t want to put pressure on-”
“Yes. God, yes. However you want.”
We rearrange ourselves in the soft chaos of sheets and limbs. I end up on my side, and he curls behind me, one hand splayed across my belly, the other doing unspeakable things to the rest of me.
“Okay?” he asks.
“Better than okay.”
“Tell me if-”
“Mal.” I reach back and grab his hip, pull him closer. “Please.”
He slides into me and we both stop breathing.
It’s been months of wanting and waiting and walls, and now there’s nothing between us but sweat and skin and the small sounds we’re both making. He moves slowly, carefully, mindful of my body’s changes, and it’s almost unbearable.
“More,” I whisper.
“I don’t want to hurt-”
“You won’t. Please, Mal, more.”
He gives me more. His hand finds mine and laces our fingers, the ring pressed between our palms, and then he stops being careful.
“Like that?” he breathes against my nape, driving deeper, and I can only nod, wordless, my whole body strung tight.
“Tell me. I want to hear it.” “Yes,” I get out.
“God, yes, just like that, don’t you dare stop.
” He doesn’t. He takes me apart in long, greedy strokes, one hand splayed possessive over the swell of his babies, the other working me until I’m babbling nonsense into the pillow.
“I love you,” he breathes into my hair. “I love you, I love you, I-”
“Show me.”
He does. He reaches around and presses two fingers exactly where I need them and it’s over, I come undone around him so hard he curses into my hair, a raw “fuck, Gracie” that I feel in my spine.
He follows a beat later, hips stuttering, spilling into me on a groan that breaks in the middle, and then we’re both wrecked and breathing hard, tangled up, sweat cooling on our skin.
“Holy shit,” I whisper.
“Yeah.”
“That was-”
“Yeah.”
I laugh, and he laughs, and somehow that’s better than any eloquent declaration. We shift until we’re facing each other, foreheads touching, his hand still on my belly.
“Hey,” he says.
I turn my head against his chest to look at him.
“You’re crying.”
I am. I hadn’t noticed. “Happy tears.”
“Still.” He kisses the wetness from my cheeks. “I spent all this time trying to make you stop crying. Old habits.”
“These are the good kind.” I trace the line of his brow. “We made it.”
“We made it.”
The moonlight shifts as clouds move across the sky. Somewhere outside, Waffles brays at nothing in particular, and Biscuit whinnies in response. The ordinary sounds of our ordinary life.
“Gracie.”
“Mal.”
“I need to ask you a question.”
I wait. His hand trembles slightly against my skin.
“Marry me,” he says.
I blink. “We’re already married.”
“I know.” He sits up, and his face is so serious, so painfully earnest. “But I said the words wrong the first time. Not the wedding - the wedding was perfect. Your dad walking you down the aisle in that barn, me shaking so hard I could barely get the vow out. I meant every word. I just spent the years after proving I didn’t deserve the gift you gave me that day. ”
“Mal-”
“Let me do it right.” He takes my hand, the one with the ring. “Let me marry you again, Gracie. Here. On your ground. In front of everyone who watched me grovel my way back to you. Let me make vows I’ll actually keep this time, because I know what happens when I don’t.”
My throat closes. “You want a vow renewal.”
“I want a wedding. A real one. The one you should have had.” His thumb traces circles on my ring. “I want to stand in front of your donkey and your horse and your loud-ass best friend and my crying mother and say the words again. Better words. True ones.”
“Mal.”
“Will you?” His voice cracks. “Gracie Tate, will you marry me? Again? Here, where you built a life without me, so I can prove I’m worth being part of it?”
I look at him. This man who broke my heart and spent five months putting it back together, piece by careful piece, who wore my ring against his heart like a talisman, who painted me as I am, myself and nobody’s muse, and asked me to name the work.
“Yes,” I say.
His breath catches. “Yeah?”
I pull him back down to me, kiss him soft and sure.
“Yes,” I whisper against his mouth. “Again, and every time after.”