Asher
"What do you think?" Kennedy asks, biting her lip.
I stare at my name on her, a welter of emotion running through me in a tangle too tight to unravel. It's love and joy and all those things I never thought I'd find. Home. My family. Peace. I don't know if this is what my mother hoped for me when she left me in that bathroom with her note. I like to think it is. That, wherever she is, she wanted this life for me.
It's a pretty fucking great one. My wife and kids are my world. I would kill for them without remorse, die for them without complaint. They're the reason I get up in the morning, and the last thought on my mind when I sleep at night.
I already love the baby growing in Kennedy's belly as fiercely as I do our daughters. I pray she's a girl like her sisters, another little replica of the woman standing in front of me, tiny and delicate and forged from a type of steel no man could ever break.
Spirit. Soul. Love. I don't know which she is, exactly. But she's mine.
"Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still," I whisper the line from Jane Eyre that reminded me of her the first time I read it, running a finger around the outside of my name inked in her skin. The line is even more accurate now than it was five years ago. Her incredible mind is my treasure. Her soul is my home.
I'm fucking crazy about her. Always have been. Always will be.
"Asher," she says, melting like a Popsicle for me. She flings her arms around my neck, rising on her toes to kiss me.
It's there that our girls find us a few minutes later.
"Daddy! Daddy!" Coraline yells, bursting into my booth like the little comet she is. She runs straight to me, wrapping her little arms around my leg. Her face is covered in sticky chocolate, her eyes bright with happiness.
Kennedy laughs quietly at the sight.
"Knock, knock," Caroline says, peeking her head in a second later. She's got Catherine in her arms.
My girl sees me and immediately reaches out her little arms, demanding that I take her from her aunt. I do, of course. She commands me just as easily as her mama does. Both of my girls do. They're pieces of me, part of my soul.
"Oh, wow," Caroline says, looking at Kennedy's new tattoo. "It's so pretty."
"No, Kennedy whispers. "It's perfect."
Happy New Year!