Chapter 410

Dallas

By the second week of February, I’m so tuned to my wife that I can tell the difference between her regular end-of-day tired and the kind that’s carrying a secret under it.

This is the second kind. I walk into the house smelling like green soap and late hours, and the first thing I hear is Sawyer in the living room growling at a plastic dinosaur like the little man’s got a personal grudge against extinction. The second thing I catch is Cheyenne laughing from the kitchen.

That sound hits me low every time. I scoop Sawyer up on my way through. He shoves the dinosaur at my face and says, “Rawr.”

“Same to you, Bubba.”

Cheyenne’s at the stove in one of my old shirts with her hair piled up messy and this look on her face that tells me I’m right. She’s been carrying something, and whatever it is matters.

“Hey, Baby,” I say.

“Hey.”

I kiss her slow, and for one second she melts into me like she’s been waiting all day for my mouth. Then she eases back and points at the sink. “Wash up. Dinner’s almost done.”

During dinner, she steals half my baked potato and barely touches anything else. Sawyer feeds himself noodles one at a time like he’s proving a point to the room. I watch my wife laugh at our son, rub one hand low over her belly without thinking, and look at me with a softness she keeps trying to hide. I don’t push.

I’ve known for weeks that something changed. I just haven’t known when she’d be ready to hand it to me.

After dinner, I take Sawyer for a bath and then bed while Cheyenne disappears into our room under the excuse of folding laundry. Sawyer splashes half the tub onto the floor, fights the towel, then falls asleep against my chest while I rock him in the dark.

When I lay him down, the house has gone quiet in layers.

Cheyenne’s waiting for me on our bed. No staged reveal. No little box with booties in it. No sonogram on the dresser with a ribbon tied around it.

Just my wife, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the mattress in one of my shirts, looking like the most important thing I’ve ever seen.

The second I step in, she looks up. “Can you shut the door?”

I do, then I sit facing her and wait because every part of me’s on high alert now.

She reaches for my hand, and her palm’s damp.

“I’ve been trying to figure out how I wanted to do this,” she says quietly. “Not because I didn’t want you to know. I did. I do. I just wanted it to belong to us first. All the way. Before family dinner, and opinions, and life happens turns it into something I don’t want it to be.”

My throat closes. She reaches behind her, brings something forward, and sets it in my hand. A test. Two lines.

The room narrows down to that little white stick and the woman who trusted me enough to place it there.

“Dallas.”

I look up and find that she’s crying already. I climb the rest of the way onto the bed and take her face in both hands. “Baby.”

“I’m pregnant,” she whispers, laughing and crying at once. “I’m actually pregnant.”

A breath punches out of me so hard it hurts. I drop my forehead to hers and laugh right into the space between us because there’s no clean way through this. “I knew something. I didn’t know know, but I knew something.”

She cries harder at that. “I wanted to tell you sooner.”

“When did you find out?”

“In January.”

I lean back enough to look at her. “You kept this from me for weeks?”

She winces. “I know. I’m sorry. I just wanted one thing in my life that got to start quietly. One thing that belonged to us before it belonged to everybody else. I wanted to be sure, and then every time I tried to tell you it felt too crowded or too tired or like the wrong second.”

And that lands because she’s not wrong. Our lives don’t offer much stillness unless we make it with our own hands.

So I brush my thumb under her eye and say the only thing that matters. “You’ve been carrying this alone too long.”

“I know.”

“You don’t ever gotta do that with me.”

“I know that too.”

I nod once because that’s all I trust myself to do without falling apart. Then my hand drops low and hovers over her stomach. “Can I?”

Her whole face softens. She catches my wrist and lays my palm flat there.

There’s nothing I can feel yet, but it doesn’t matter.

I swear my whole damn life changes under my hand anyway.

I bow my head and laugh, and then I’m crying because some things hit too suddenly to dodge. She wipes one tear away with her thumb and smiles through her own.

“There’s my soft boy.”

“Watch it.”

“You’re crying on my shirt.”

“It’s my shirt.”

That gets her laughing, and thank God for it.

I kiss her cheeks, her mouth, the line of her jaw. I keep touching her stomach like I’m afraid the truth’ll vanish if I let go. “You happy?”

Her smile breaks wide and wet. “I’m so happy I don’t know what to do with it.”

“Me too, Baby. Me too.”

We talk then about when her approximate due date is. The blood draw she had done through a friend at work. How she wanted the news to be ours before it belonged to the whole family. I tell her Sawyer’s still my first baby, and this one changes nothing there. She says that she knows, but she’s glad that I said it out loud.

Eventually the talking thins out, and not because we run out. Because the room gets too full for words to carry all of it.

My mouth finds hers again, deeper this time, and she pulls me over her. “I need to touch you,” I tell her.

“Then touch me.”

I start slow, kissing down her throat, over her breasts, over the soft little rise of her belly, and stop there long enough to press my mouth over the place under my hand from before. She goes perfectly still one sharp breath leaving her, and I let the moment sit exactly where it wants.

Then I strip her out of my shirt and shorts and take my time with my mouth because tonight I need to worship something, and my wife’s the easiest answer I’ve ever had. Her hands sink into my hair. Her thighs open under my shoulders. By the time I drag my tongue through her, she’s already shaking.

“Dallas,” she whispers.

“Yeah, Baby.”

She arches when I suck her clit, and I keep her there, keep her open, hold her steady while I work her till her whole body’s twisting in the sheets, and she’s saying my name like she doesn’t care who hears it. When she starts to cover her mouth, I drag her hand away and lace our fingers together.

“Let me hear you.”

Her first orgasm hits hard enough to fold her. I don’t stop. I stay on her till she comes again, softer and deeper, thighs trembling around my shoulders.

By then I’m hard enough to ache. I strip fast, crawl back up her body, and kiss her till she’s panting against my mouth. “You good?”

She nods. “I’m on birth control for the next nine months anyway.”

That laugh almost takes me out. I push in easy, inch by inch, and her face falls open in a way that always looks like home to me. She wraps her legs around me and drags me deeper. I let her set the pace. Let it build slow and hot and full while I kiss her and tell her that she’s beautiful. That she’s mine. I tell her Thank you for this, thank you for all of it.

When she’s close again, her nails are in my back, and her mouth’s at my ear. “Come inside of me,” she whispers. “Please.”

I kiss her hard and give her what she asks for.

She comes around me in a long shudder, and I follow right behind her, buried deep, my whole body locking around the feeling of her and the knowledge of what we just said yes to together.

Afterward I roll us carefully and pull her against my chest. She’s boneless and warm and smiling into my skin. My hand finds her stomach again without thinking. She covers it with hers.

And there, in our bed with laundry still waiting in the basket and tomorrow sitting outside the walls, my wife and I finally hold the secret together. No outside noise or interference. Just us.

Exactly like she wanted, and exactly like it deserved.