Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 86126 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 431(@200wpm)___ 345(@250wpm)___ 287(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86126 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 431(@200wpm)___ 345(@250wpm)___ 287(@300wpm)
“Do you like them?” I asked. They were looser than they should’ve been, and a few tendrils had escaped in the front but I thought they looked good. They made my face look softer somehow. Less uptight.
“You look beautiful,” my sister replied, rolling her eyes as Flora flew past us toward the house without a word of hello. “You look your age.”
“So, like, you really like them?” I joked, flipping one over my shoulder.
Esther laughed. “You’re not that young,” she teased. “What made you want to change them?”
The easy answer could’ve been the fact that I’d kissed Titus. Or he’d kissed me. I wasn’t really sure which one of us had moved first. But I knew it was far more complex than that.
“Myla, Lou, and Frankie came over for dinner last night,” I told her, shrugging.
My sister nodded knowingly. She understood better than anyone how the change from belonging to a super conservative church that controlled everything about you, to the huge wide world that barely had any rules in comparison, felt. At first, nothing fit. Everything seemed odd and wild and uncontrolled. But after a little bit, things started to calm, and you noticed pieces of the big wide world that you’d like for yourself.
I was done scraping my hair into a tight knot every morning before I went downstairs.
“It suits you,” she said, coming over to give me a hug. “Now I need to go before I’m late.”
“Okay, love you!”
“Love you too, be back in a few hours.”
I went back into the house as she drove away and found the girls setting up a new little wooden train set that Cian had brought home a few days before.
I hadn’t seen him again after he’d walked out the night before and I hoped that he hadn’t been too uncomfortable with the conversation we’d been having. I hadn’t meant to cause a big debate about the whole thing, I’d just answered honestly. I was nervous about having the baby in the birth center since I’d never done it before. I knew everything would be fine, but that didn’t mean that I was looking forward to it. I dreaded having to stay there overnight. I hated the thought of leaving the girls for that long, especially Diana, because she wouldn’t understand. I wished that I could just have the baby in my own house, familiar scents and sights around me, with the girls just a room away if they needed me.
No one needed to remind me that I didn’t have my own house. I was living in Titus’s house and I would never in a million years ask him if I could have the baby there. We’d already taken up enough of his time and energy and money. It would be really… shitty if I asked to give birth there, too.
“I want the red one,” Ariel announced as they scrambled for the little trains. “You can have yellow.”
“Want purple,” Diana argued.
“There is no purple,” Ariel reminded her.
“Purple,” Diana said stubbornly.
I sat down on the couch and watched them as they worked it out, Flora ending up with the yellow train and Diana with the blue. The girls convinced her it was the closest color to purple.
My mind wandered back to that kiss in the kitchen and what it could possibly mean going forward.
I loved him. I must’ve known it on some level before. It was why I still trusted him after being apart for so long. Why I’d known that moving in with him was the right thing to do. Why I couldn’t help but watch him as he went about his day, somehow fascinated with the way he held the remote, or kicked his boots off after work, or carried the girls from one room to another. But it was the night before when the surety of it hit me.
When Bas had said that thing about women dying in childbirth at the hospital and Titus had gone bone white, barely breathing as he’d stared at Bas in horror—that was the moment I realized I loved him. It wasn’t his reaction that made me come to the realization. It was the fact that I couldn’t bear his reaction, that would’ve done anything in that moment to erase the fear in his eyes.
The kiss helped, though.
Any lingering thought that my sexuality had disappeared when I was seventeen was gone. I wasn’t dried up. I couldn’t take or leave sex. Because I wanted it. I wanted it with Titus. I wanted to see him naked and climb into his bed and I wanted to touch him everywhere and I wanted him to do the same thing to me. As I’d lay there in bed the night before, replaying the kiss in my head, I’d realized with shock, that I didn’t care what that meant about me. I didn’t care if that meant I was a horrible person. I didn’t care if that made me a whore. I just didn’t care.