It was the dream that woke me.
That dream that had me waking up with a gasp.
It wasn’t real, I told myself as I blinked up at the darkened ceiling. It had been at least two or three months since the last time I’d dreamt about my dad and that house and the stupid-ass and the idiot that had my subconscious jerking awake to get out of it. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.
I was fine, I was safe, and I was loved.
I wasn’t seventeen years old, and I was fine.
But I didn’t have to roll over to know that it was after midnight now, so technically I was thirty-one now. Thirty-freaking-one. And it was that knowledge that had me smiling in my bedroom, that had my heart rate slowing back down, and that had the goose bumps I’d woken up with, retreating.
Of course I’d had a dream about my dad after one of the best nights of my life. That was how this stuff worked. Those dumb memories were spread out more and more as time went on, but they were still there in the those dark, little corners I didn’t go visit that often.
Reaching over to the other side of the bed, I found it empty but still warm, the covers thrown over partially on top of me. I glanced toward the bathroom to find the door closed and the light off, and I knew exactly where Rip was. I knew exactly what he was doing.
And that, even more than the reminder of my night before, calmed me down that last little bit.
Swinging my legs over the side of the bed, I rolled up to sit on the edge, grabbing my half-full glass of water and chugging the rest of it down before standing up. The house was quiet, which honestly surprised me because according to my cell phone screen it was three in the morning. Rip and I had made it to midnight before we’d gone to our
room to shower—together—and then gone to bed, leaving everyone else up and farting around the house.
Everyone else. That had me smiling even more and getting to my feet, still holding my empty glass.
Opening the door as quietly as I could, I listened down the hall but still couldn’t hear a peep.
And I already knew well enough not to screw up a bad thing, so I headed toward the living room as quietly as possible. It was then that I heard the noises. The freaking snores coming from it. Before we’d gone to bed, I’d told everyone that hadn’t gone home where the air mattresses were in case they wanted to stay over. Apparently, someone had.
I came up to the living room to find the seventy-five-inch television that Rip had insisted on buying two years ago on but muted, I had to stop there and look at the two air mattresses that had been blown up. On one was Lily and her boyfriend of the last two years, this really nice guy named Abner. On the other mattress was Kyra and her boyfriend, a guy I didn’t like anywhere near as much. They were fully clothed without a single blanket or pillow anywhere around, but totally passed out, one of the guys and Kyra snoring like chainsaws.
On the couch was the greatest surprise of my day, Thea.
To be fair, Thea and Kyra, both, coming to my birthday party in the first place had surprised the hell out of me.
Lily wasn’t surprising at all. In the year since she had finished her undergrad, she had gotten a job back in Houston but moved into her own place, even though she spent the night at our house more often than at her condo. Rip and I had assured her she could move back, but she had insisted she was fine on her own.
But Thea and Kyra? Some days I wanted to think that things between us were the same as they had been before, but they weren’t. I could accept that now. I could get through my life knowing that I loved the hell out of my sisters and that they loved me back, but that everything that had happened almost five years ago had changed those little ties between us.
It didn’t help that I could see it in their faces every time we talked. The hesitation. The worry that I would ask them something they didn’t want to answer. The worry that they would say something I didn’t want to hear.
Even though there was only one topic I didn’t want to hear and it started and ended with a “D.”
But I wasn’t going to think about that person tonight or tomorrow or any other night. The dream I’d just had had been enough. Plus, it was my freaking birthday now, and I’d had a great night, and nothing was going to get to me at this point. No, siree.
So I kept on creeping through the house, heading into the kitchen that we had never gotten around to opening because the wall there was structurally important, and I didn’t want to spend money redoing especially when I bought all my appliances and gotten granite countertops for the price it would have cost to put in a supporting beam. All thanks to the money Grandma Genie had left me in her will.
The door closed behind me quietly as I flicked on the lights and headed for the cake I’d put in the fridge hours ago.
The pretty, two-layer white frosting cake with blue glitter on it that Rip had made me that was halfway gone now.
Pulling it out, I sliced off a nice, big slice and set it on a plate, pulling out a fork before setting the cake back into the fridge.
I had barely sat down at one of the stools under the brand-new island we’d gotten installed two years ago when the door swung open again and a big, familiar body was there.
I smiled.
“Whatcha doing, baby?” the giant hunk of a man I could look at every minute for the rest of my life, asked, as he stood there in a tight, white undershirt that clung to every inch of that solid upper body. The cut-off navy blue sleeping pants he was wearing right then hadn’t been on his body before we’d gone to bed.
“Getting a piece of this awesome cake,” I answered him, sliding the plate toward him an inch and raising my eyebrows. “Come split it with me.”
Rip smiled that freaking smile that went straight to my heart before he came over, pulling out the stool beside mine with one hand while the other one slid through my hair to cup the back of my neck. I’d been letting it grow out lately, and the cotton candy pink and blue strands just barely grazed my shoulders now. I wasn’t even a little surprised when he leaned over and kissed my neck before scooting the stool even closer to me, one thigh straddling the back of mine while the other one grazed the knee closest to him.
“I wake you up?”
I slid the fork through the tip of the cake as I answered him. “Not even a little bit. I had a bad dream and figured I might as well come down here and get a slice while you finished up.” We both knew I still
struggled going back to sleep on nights like these, but usually I woke him up when I did or stretched out on the bed until I could press up against him to relax so that I could fall asleep again. He never minded, and honestly, our best conversations were always in moments like those, when we could tell each other things that weren’t so easy or pretty.
His answer was a grumble as I held the fork up to his mouth and he took a bite.
“Thank you for everything,” I told him as I slipped the fork out of his mouth, looking at those pink lips for a second longer than I needed to, before dipping the tines back through the cake and scooping more into my own mouth.
Man, it was delicious.
A big, warm hand landed on the middle of my back and gave it a circle. “You have a good time tonight?” he asked quietly.
I nodded at him and smiled before swallowing.
All of our coworkers and their girlfriends or wives had come, some of their kids, had too. Mr. Cooper and Lydia. My sisters and their boyfriends. Lenny and her gang. And even two of Rip’s friends and their ladies.
Rip and Lydia had made all the food. He’d made the cake. Lily had bought the snacks. Lenny and Mr. Cooper the drinks.
All to celebrate my birthday. In the house that I had bought, and that over the years, Rip and I had fixed up even more. A house that was under both of our names now. A house that we had made even more of a home together. A place where our little baby daughter woke up in the middle of the night and her daddy got up to feed her or change her diaper or just snuggle her like it was the greatest honor.
He never woke me up to help, but half the time, the monitor told me what was going on anyway. Most of those nights, especially if he left the little device in the room, I just lay in bed and listened to him talk to her, patiently, with so much love it felt like I’d burst. It wasn’t hard at all for me to accept he was such a great dad.
I mean, before things had gone to hell, Mr. C had been a great father to him. Rip had told me stories here and there of the things they had done while his mom had still been alive. He’d had a great role model.
Things between him and Mr. Cooper weren’t great, but they weren’t bad either. It might have helped that after Mr. C’s heart attack, he had taken to working half the hours he had before, only doing scheduling. They had even hired another mechanic too, to help out Rip since he had to take over more of what Mr. Cooper did.
They hardly argued anymore. They didn’t agree half the time, but they didn’t fight. I doubted I would ever see them hug or talk about anything that wasn’t work or family-related, but it was something. I’d even seen Rip pat Lydia on the back twice.
If that wasn’t something I didn’t know what was.
So right then, I leaned over and kissed him right on the mouth. “Every year is the best birthday ever.”
Rip didn’t smile as I pulled away from him, but he watched me with those eyes, and I wondered what he was thinking. But when his hand slipped underneath the back of my black tank top, those fingers I knew like the back of my hand, giving my bare skin another rub, I stopped thinking about everything else. The cloud of bad birthdays before hovering in the dark corner of my head, the dream, my sisters in the other room, how lucky I was, just… everything.
At least, I stopped thinking about everything for the ten seconds he waited to say in that quiet, quiet voice, “I’m gonna give you your birthday present now.”
That had me raising my eyebrows again. “Right here where anyone can walk in?”
He had a grin on his face as he rolled his eyes and shoved the stool back, getting to his bare feet and circling around the island toward the cabinets above the refrigerator. He opened them easily, pulling out a shoebox-sized thing wrapped in white paper with blue ribbon.
I didn’t need to ask to know he’d wrapped it himself. He always did and he never half-assed it. Not ever.
He closed it and turned around to head back toward me, a funny expression on that handsome face. “What? You’d never look up there. It’s only pots and pans.”
Years and countless cooking lessons with Rip later, and I still hadn’t gotten much better at it.
He didn’t take a seat again as he set the box down right beside what was left of the cake we were sharing.
I smiled up at him as I undid the ribbon and tore open the wrapping paper as quietly as possible. It wasn’t a shoebox but just a regular gift box with a lid on top. “I’m going to be pretty excited if you got me a new respirator,” I told him as I lifted it and set it aside.
If I thought it was weird that he didn’t chuckle, I didn’t think much of it, because the pictures in the box stole every thought out of my head.
I knew I was lucky. I knew that life had worked out in a way that I never would have even dared imagining. I knew that I had so much love
in me, I would fight to the death for it.
I was fully aware that I wouldn’t change a single thing that had ever happened in my life because it had all gotten me here. With this man. With this life. With these people that I loved and loved me back.
But as I looked down at the stack of pictures in that box, I wasn’t sure whether to be excited or just a little devastated.
Because I had never seen the face looking back up at me. Not once. But I knew whom it belonged to. Somehow. Some way. I knew.
The woman couldn’t have been any older than eighteen. She was sitting in a pose with a purple gown and cap on, holding a fake diploma in one hand, her expression tight but smiling. Light olive-skinned. Medium-haired. She didn’t have the Miller green eyes, but why would she?
“Know who it is?” Rip asked quietly, setting his hand back on my spine.
I gulped and barely managed to get out, “My mom, right?”
That big hand went up and down before he confirmed, “Yeah, baby.
It’s your mom.”
I pulled the top picture off and stared down at the next one. It was another graduation picture with a different background, with her sitting in a different position, still smiling tightly at the camera like she would rather be anywhere else.
It was my mom. My mom.
“Took me three years to find this. She was on the drill team for a year. Supposedly she was really good at art, but she didn’t like school much,” he spoke quietly. “You two look a lot alike, I think.”
I flipped to another picture to find the same woman sitting in a drill team uniform, that same expression on her face.
It was my mom.
“She left home right after graduation and no one knew where she went,” Rip kept talking. “No one knew she passed away. They didn’t know about you or your brother. I thought for sure they were making it up, but they weren’t, Luna, baby. I could tell they weren’t. They had no idea about you…”
I had to swallow. Press my lips together. Blink because my eyes started burning all of a sudden, and I didn’t know what to do. Flicking my gaze up, my hand went to his—to that hand I held every chance I had
—, and I asked him before I could think twice about it. “Who is they?”
Lucas Ripley leaned down and brushed his mouth over mine, then pulled back, his free hand going to my cheek. “Your mom’s family, baby.
If you want to meet them, you’ve got a grandma and an aunt staying at a hotel, right now, a couple miles away that would really love to see you tomorrow.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah.” His thumb brushed my cheek again. “You all right with that?” he asked softly, with tenderness in that rough voice. “You okay with making the family just a little bigger by meeting them?”
You’d have figured he would have gotten used to my hugs over the years, but he hadn’t. He still sighed into my neck like it was something new, and wrapped his arms around me as tight as ever when I threw my arms around him suddenly. Squeezing him tightly. Squeezing him like he meant the world to me and had made my life ten times better by just existing. By just being the person that he was.
I was seriously the luckiest person in the world.
