28. Fran #2
He sits, and the old couch complains in a language of tired springs, and then we work it out into something better, because the couch is too short and my back is a diplomatic situation: him stretched along the length of it on his side, me tucked back against his chest, the belly finally allowed to rest sideways instead of leading every room I walk into.
“This couch has maybe one good decision left in it,” I say.
“Then we retire it with honors.” He fits himself against my back, one arm sliding under my neck, the other settling over the curve of me, sure now, none of the old daylight hesitation left in his hands.
“You already asked me the only question that mattered this morning,” I tell him, reaching back to find his jaw. “The rest you can just do.”
His mouth finds the back of my neck instead, the knob of my spine, the one spot that has never once helped my composure. “Fiancée again, technically,” he says into my hair. “And like this you don’t carry an ounce of me. Let the couch earn its keep for once in its miserable life.”
“Just keep my hand where I can see the ring.” I guide my own fingers, his wrapped around them, until the band sits cold just under my breasts. “I want to watch it the whole time you’re proving you meant it.”
“Yes-” He stops himself. Grins. “Fran.”
“Better.”
Kissing over my own shoulder is a contact sport neither of us is good at, and we don’t care.
His belt lands somewhere on the tarp with a soft clatter.
Then his jeans, then my leggings, the clumsy choreography of two people undressing each other half-blind.
I reach back between us and curl my fingers around him, and the noise it pulls out of him is low and undone against my nape, and it goes straight through me, because I did this to him, me, on purpose, in the open, for keeps.
“Still-”
“Yes,” I say before he can finish. “Yes to the box, yes to the ring, yes to all of it. I stopped needing reasons a long time ago - I just want you. So stop checking and choose it with me.”
“Eyes open,” he says against my shoulder, like a line he’s rehearsing for the ceremony.
“So stop narrating and touch me. I walked through frost for this.”
He huffs a laugh into my hair and, for once, does exactly what he’s told.
He notches against me from behind, one hand guiding himself, and the first slow push has us both going still. Paperwhites. Narcissus. The yes still new between us, and nobody watching but the sky through the glass.
“Tell me if I should stop,” he manages, wrecked already.
“I have made exactly one good decision in my life and it is currently behind me being noble about the angle.” I push back onto him instead of waiting, slow, and take him in one long unhurried slide, the give of it obscene in the hush of the greenhouse, dawn coming up pink through the glass, the paperwhites bearing silent witness.
My jaw drops. Every other time I have had his face to watch.
This time I have his breath on my neck and his arm locked around me, and the depth of him from this side is a whole new argument.
“Fran.” His voice comes apart against my ear. His hand splays wide and warm low on my belly, holding me back against him. “Hold still a second. Just - give me a second.”
“You proposed. You don’t get a second.”
“Noted,” he says, and rolls his hips forward, just barely, to make the point.
He works into me as far as this angle and physics and late pregnancy will allow, and we stay fitted together, shaking, me laughing helplessly into the couch cushion because he proposed over pastries and now he’s buried in me in the dawn light like we’ve both gone gladly out of our minds.
His breath punches out against the back of my neck. His arm is a band across my chest.
“There’s nothing I want that isn’t you,” he says into my shoulder, and his voice cracks down the middle of it.
“No fathers. No clauses. Nobody’s hand on this but ours.
” His palm spreads over the baby. “And for the record, you said yes and I can feel you smiling, so this may be the shortest engagement celebration in history.”
I grin into the cushion. The ring glints where his arm pins it against me. “Good thing I already agreed to marry you again.”
He laughs, helpless and bright against my nape, and presses forward, and we both hiss.
“Best yes I ever got.”
“Say the part about the vows again,” I tell him, greedy now, because I get to be.
“In two weeks I’m going to stand up in front of everyone who matters, and the goose, and promise you things I actually mean,” he says. “This is just the rehearsal. The private part.”
“I love you too,” I tell him, and it comes easy now, no daylight left to be afraid of, the glass throwing the whole pink sky down over both of us. “Now stop rehearsing and ruin me before the space heaters give out.”
He starts to move, and it’s slow and deep from behind, his hand spread on my belly to keep me anchored, the old couch springs keeping a rhythm we did not authorize.
The ring catches light every time his arm shifts.
I can feel the band warm against my skin where our hands lace together over the baby.
We built this on purpose. The slow rock of it, the slick noise too loud under glass, his mouth staying open against the back of my neck.
My ring hand grips his forearm where it holds me together, and the diamond throws tiny sparks off the string lights, and I think: this is what it means to choose the same person twice.
“God,” I gasp, and I can’t look down from here so I look at his hand instead, at the muscle in his forearm flexing to hold me. I turn my face into the cushion, and I do not smother the sound I make. Let the paperwhites deal with it.
“You have to quit laughing,” he says, strained, grinning, hanging on by a thread. “I mean it. I still have to carry you back across a frozen field, and I’d like to do it with some dignity left.”
“Then earn the honeymoon.” I find his hand on my belly and walk it lower, right where I need it. “You’ve got a free one down there, fiancé. Use it.”
He gets there without being told twice, fingers finding me slick and easy, working me in tight relentless circles that owe nothing to instructions and everything to two years of paying attention.
I can’t reach his shoulders from here so I fist a hand in the blanket and take it.
Narcissus and pastry and the tea going cold on the table we abandoned.
I’m about to come apart in my own greenhouse at first light with his ring on my hand and his baby between us and yes still warm in my mouth, and it is nearly too much to hold.
“That’s my wife,” he breathes, feeling me start to go. “Come on. Nobody’s rushing us out of anywhere ever again.”
“Then don’t you slow down,” I manage, breathless, gripping the blanket harder.
The words dissolve in my throat. I come loud and graceless under all that glass, mouth open, no hand to muffle it, the sound ricocheting off the panes and startling something up in the rafters.
I don’t hide a second of it. He loses the fight the instant I clench around him, a groan punched out against my spine, and then he’s gentling me through it, easing off the moment I twitch too sensitive under his fingers, the way he learned to a long time ago now.
“Okay,” I manage, wrung out, still shaking. “Your turn.”
“Stay right there,” he says, voice wrecked down to gravel. “Just like this-”
“I’m not going anywhere. That’s the whole point of the ring - now finish, Davis, the danish is getting lonely-”
He follows a few rough thrusts later, no rhythm left in him, and comes with his teeth set in my shoulder and a broken sound he doesn’t bother to swallow, flooding into me hot, in waves I can feel all the way through, his arm cinched around me and the baby both so I don’t slide off a couch that was built for naps and nothing this ambitious.
Nothing about the next few minutes belongs in a wedding announcement.
Getting two people off a nap couch when one is thirty-eight weeks pregnant and both have just been thoroughly undone is less an act of grace than a group project.
He eases out, steadies my hip, mutters an apology to my lower back that my lower back does not accept.
The nap blanket is now a retired nap blanket.
We both look at it. We both lose it, wheezing into the cushions, trying not to wake the whole frozen farm.
“I have a danish with my name on it,” I inform him, “and I refuse to eat it in this condition. Do something.”
He sacrifices a corner of the retired blanket to the cause. We manage something in the neighborhood of decent. I settle back onto my side and he curls around me again, one hand spread over the belly, the scarred arm against my ribs, just skin now.
We lie there looking up at the greenhouse roof. String lights. Dawn. Paperwhites that have seen too much.
“There’s potting soil everywhere,” Logan says, not moving to fix it.
“That’s what happens when you propose in a greenhouse and then follow through.” I stretch, feeling every muscle register a complaint. “No regrets.”
“None.” He’s staring at the glass ceiling, the morning light climbing. “My hands were shaking, you know. The whole speech. I thought you could tell.”
“I couldn’t tell.” I could, actually. I thought it was sweet. I’m not telling him that. “You hid it well.”
“I rehearsed in the truck. Three times. Gertrude was not impressed.”
“Gertrude has high standards.” I hold up my hand, watching the ring catch the light. “She approves of the result, though. Probably.”
“Probably is good enough.” He rolls onto his side, careful of the belly.
He gets up to fetch the jewelry box from the breakfast table, then settles beside me with it, the one with the dahlia inlay, the one I’ve already traced with my fingers a dozen times since he first showed me. “What are you going to keep in it?”
I take it from him, run my fingers over the inlay work again. Each petal cut separately, fitted into place. Weeks of work.
“Logan.”