I cherish moments like these, moments where I can forget about business and just be a family man. I will always have my responsibilities, of course, but to be able to sit here on a warm day with my daughter cradled close to me and my dog sitting at my feet, it’s like a slice of heaven transported to earth.
It’s perfect.
No … I have to correct myself, because when I see Anna walking across the quad to greet us, I know that she’s the very definition of perfection and nothing and nobody even comes close.
She’s still beautifully shapely from the pregnancy, her dress settling over her curves as though whoever designed that dress was trying to drive me as insane as they possibly can. Her new bob cut makes her look cute and so sexy I could roar. She shoulders her bag, filled with her textbooks for the new year, and even that gesture fills me with a crashing tsunami of need for my wife.
She’s here. She’s doing it. She’s following her dream.
And I couldn’t be prouder.
“Hello, sweetness,” she says when she reaches us, leaning down and kissing Aurora on the top of the head. “And hello you.”
She reaches down and ruffles Rocky.
“I see you’ve saved the worst till last,” I grin.
She pouts. “The best.”
She leans over Aurora’s head and our lips meet, a brief moment of love and closeness, but I can taste the ever-present lust on her lips, the same lust that moves around me every second of every day, every time I so much as think of my wife.
“Ready to go?” I ask.
“Hmm,” she says, nodding.
“How was it?” I mutter as we walk toward the exit, Anna taking Rocky’s leash and smiling brightly at me as I rearrange Aurora in my embrace.
“It was amazing,” she says, passion flaring under her words. “Honestly, Artem, it was everything I dreamed it’d be. I know it’s going to be hard. I know I’m going to have to work my ass off. But I’m ready. I really am. I think I … well, I think I might be able to do this.”
“Might?” I laugh. “Anna, you’re already the best chef in the world. You’re going to set the world on fire. Just you wait and see.”
Her cheeks blush crimson in the cutest way imaginable, and then she reaches down with her free hand and curls her arm around my waist, hugging close to me.
“I love you,” she whispers. “So much. And thank you. For supporting me.”
“Always,” I tell her, kissing her on the top of the head, smelling her shampoo and her just-Anna scent. “A husband’s job is to make his wife so happy that she’s willing to be absolutely submissive in the bedroom. And I think I’m doing a fine job there.”
“Ha ha,” she says, rolling her eyes. But then she bites her lip in that way I know well, the same way she did on our wedding night. “I still can’t believe you even want me, after Rory. After the pregnancy, I mean.”
I laugh, looking her up and down, drinking in the supple sight of her, her curves enhanced by her body’s passage through motherhood.
“I want you now more than I ever have. And that’s going to be true for every day for the rest of our lives. When are you going to realize that, Anna? You could be the size of a house and I’d still want you. Because I want you. Your curves. Your sassiness. Your ambition. I love you.”
“I love you,” she breathes, leaning forward and kissing me, and then both of us kiss the top of Aurora’s head, and we stay like that, just for a moment, basking in our joy.
Extended Epilogue
Ten Years Later
Anna
“I think you’re going to do amazing—no, fantastic—no absolutely, um, um …”
Aurora giggles when she can’t think of another word to praise me with, which is her current way of expressing her flowering creativity. She’s decided to dedicate herself to learning one word a day at the moment, and she’s doing so well, it fills me with pride each time I hear a new one.
“You are, you are,” Alek says from the back seat, my six year old bobbing up and down, his father’s brown eyes glinting with excitement.
I glance at my husband in the driver’s seat, dressed in a pale blue suit with his face covered in a sleek iron beard. He looks as strong and capable as the day we first flew together like magnets and metal, except now he has a looseness, an easiness about him that he never had before.
Love.
That’s what it is.
Pure, contended, shiny love.
“You are the best chef in the world,” Natalie says, glancing up from her Kindle, my eight year old almost as voracious a reader as her big sister. She has my dark, unlike the other three who have their father’s light colored hair.