Epilogue
Selena
Markus clings onto my nipple, sucking greedily. I sit by the window in summertime, rocking back and forth on the chair with a blanket laid over my knees. The sunlight is framed in the wide window, dappling me perfectly. I wish I could take a photograph of how this moment feels, my son feeding from me, my man on his knees across the room, trying to put the rocking horse together.
“How is it I can dissemble and reassemble a bike but I can’t figure out this damn thing?” he mutters, trying to jam two pieces of wood together. “That just doesn’t make any sense to me. No sense at all.”
“You shouldn’t say ‘damn’,” I chide.
“Damn, damn, damn.” Dante smiles. “You think my son’s gonna have a clean mouth anyway?”
I pout, and he just wriggles his eyebrows and then winks at me.
My mind drifts back as I sit here. It can’t help but drift back. There’s something strange about breastfeeding, I’ve found. I always end up sinking into reminiscing, into thinking about everything that led up to this moment. I think about Dante and I walking around this house with the realtor, a three-bedroom in the suburbs, me telling him it was too much and him kissing me right there in front of the stuffy realtor and telling me I deserved it. I think about Dante placing his hand on my belly the first time Markus kicked, grinning and laughing and shaking his head.
“I just don’t believe it,” he kept saying. “I know how stupid it sounds, but I don’t believe we made that. It’s too crazy. It’s just too damn crazy.”
I think about when we found out we were pregnant. I had just quit my job to try my hand at freelance writing, and I was sitting at home on my laptop when it struck me that I hadn’t had my period. Five days late, and yet somehow it had slipped my mind. I charged to the store like a woman possessed. When I sat on the toilet bowl, the pee wouldn’t come. Years and years of needing to pee without a toilet in sight, and now it wouldn’t come! But finally, after too many glasses of water, I managed to produce the goods. Dante returned wearing his leather after a job. He knew something was different right away, and it didn’t take him long to figure out what.
He read my face as he’d become so good at doing, reading my features as though they were a book written only for him. “Really?” he said, hands shaking in excitement. “Really, Selena? Really?”
“Really,” I told him.
The next two hours were a blur of sweat and sex and mad writhing.
“Husband,” I whisper.
He glances up. “Wife?”
“I just like saying it,” I tell him. “Husband, husband, husband.”
He grins at me sideways. “Wife, wife, wife. That little fella makes you crazy when it’s feeding time, I swear.”
I stroke his head, his thin sparse hair. “Maybe,” I admit.
My mind drifts back to the wedding, which was easily the best day of my life apart from the day Markus was born. And even the day Markus was born was only incredible because Markus was the result of it. The bleeding and the panting and the straining don’t factor into it at all! I think back to the conversation with Mom a couple of days before, sitting beside her bed as she sat up, smiling at me and eating a banana. Just that simple act, Mom eating food which hadn’t been pre-mashed, was astonishing in itself.
“It’s amazing,” she said. “It’s just amazing. Look at this.” She munched the food. “I’m an eating machine, Selena. I think I’ll be ready for steak and fries and ketchup and burgers and … ooh, I’m in food fantasy heaven right now. Cheese and biscuits and coffee and …”
I remember walking down the aisle with my heart in my mouth. The function room we were married in was split down the middle with Mom and her nurse on one side and about fifty bikers on the other, but Lion walked across the room, smiling all the while, and wheeled Mom’s chair across to the biker side. “You’re family now, ma’am,” he said. Dante winked at him and Mom beamed like it was her wedding, and I didn’t mind. I could’ve stood there for hours watching her smile and flirt with all those bikers.
I remember the moment Dante slid the ring onto my finger, the serious look in his eyes. I wondered if this was real, if I had really met a biker in a bar and now I was standing here in the most beautiful dress I had ever worn, pledging my life to the best man I had ever met.
“I do,” I said, and my fate was sealed.
I remember the wedding night in the penthouse suite, sitting in a hot tub with Dante’s hand between my legs, and then the two of us making love until we ached like we’d just run a marathon. I remember the arguments, too, screaming about our pasts and about our broken souls, but most of all I remember the reconciliations, coming together to heal and love.
Markus blows a spit bubble and I know he’s done. I cover my breast and lift him up, kissing him on his soft head.
Dante is still messing around with the rocking horse.
“Is this seriously giving you this much trouble?” I ask.
“I know,” he says. “I agree. I don’t understand it. Look. Come here a sec. Put the little guy down.”
I carry Markus to the cot and place him down, arranging him so that he’s safe and comfortable, and then go to Dante. He shows me his problem: a tiny hole which a slightly too-big pin has to fit into. “Every time I push it in, it slips to the side,” he explains.
“Okay. What if I hold it and you push it?”
“Hold it tight, then.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a weak ickle woman.”
“No offense, ma’am, but I’ll talk to you any way I damn well please.”
We both laugh and I hold the wooden rocking section. Dante pushes, squinting at the hole, and finally we hear the click.
“Okay,” he says, standing. “That should be it.”
I stand up and nudge the horse. It rocks back and forth. “Yep, you’re a genius.”
“Only took me an hour,” he says. He strolls over to the cot, leaning down and stroking Markus’s head. “Sleep well, little demon.”
“Little demon?” I scoff, as I always do.
He turns on me, his cocky smile on his face. “I’ve got my little demon and my big demon.” He nods at me.
“Big demon? What about me is big? I think I’ve done a wonderful job of losing that baby weight.”
“What about this bit here, eh?” He pinches my belly.
“You’re a wicked man!” I slap him away. “I’m having a beer, and you’re not allowed one.”
“Yeah? We’ll see!”
He leaps past me and jogs into the kitchen. I run after him, giggling, and then jump at the fridge just before he opens it. I hold it closed, though he could force it open if he really wanted to.
“It looks like we’ve got a stalemate on our hands,” he says. “How about this? You let go, and I promise to lick you until you lose your mind tonight.”
My body fires up at the prospect. It’s been over a year and he still has the capacity to do that to me. I don’t think it’ll ever go away. “You better,” I say, removing my hand.
We sit on the porch with our beers, watching the slow setting of the sun. “This is the life,” Dante says, sipping his beer slowly. “Kid, woman, house, family.”
“But you never wanted it,” I point out, teasing. “Remember at the Howes barbeque when you got drunk and told me how you regretted getting married and having Markus?”
He shoots me a look of mock anger. “You’re so good at twisting my words, ma’am. What I said was I never wanted any of this until I met you.”
“I know,” I assure him.
I take his hand. He squeezes mine and we turn to the red-purple sky.
“This is a beautiful life,” I say. “And there’s so much ahead of us. Raising Markus, maybe having another kid, college, holidays, sitting here and drinking beer … perfection.”
“Perfection,” Dante agrees. “But I could think of something to make it even more perfect.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“You, exactly how you look right now, except naked from the neck down.”
I slap him again, but our eyes meet and our lust flares. We leave our beers unfinished on the porch as we quietly creep upstairs, falling upon each other with the passion of first-time lovers and the intimacy of long-time partners.
THE END
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