EPILOGUE

Charis

I WANT TO SAY WE LIVED HAPPILY ever after, but I don't literally know that. I mean, it's only been, what, five years since we had our duh, we're meant for each other lightbulb moment. Who can see into the future? Disaster could always strike. You never know.

I can say that earthquakes are not a risk where we are, although ashfall is. But that's pretty much everywhere in the Pacific Northwest, so…. if a big asteroid ever does land, Asher thinks we're fucked, but I'm optimistic. Ry just accepted an oncological research position in Atlanta, so worse comes to worst, we take to our bikes and move everyone over there. Or something.

Will our hybrid bikes actually work though? Maybe we'd better switch up to something more all-terrain, assuming we're dealing with a wide crater in the Rio Cuarto size range, which, granted, was an outlier. And that reminds me, we'll all need industrial dust masks…

Anyway I'd love to tell you we have four kids at this point and live in a mansion, but actually we only have the one little guy—well, one and a third if you want to be technical about it.

I happen to know this one is gonna be a girl, but we have a bet going. So I'm just gonna lie back and wait until the amnio settles it. But let's just say Asher's ass is toast.

In this area he's pretty thick. He hasn't linked it up that I called it on 1)our first, 2)both of Doug's, 3)Mel's 4th, 5)Megan's first…anyway I could go on, but you get the idea.

Let's just say I'm at a hundred percent at this point.

As for the mansion, nope, we're still in our house. If we do leave it, we'll probably sell it to Asher's parents, because Erica spends so much time over here anyway putting her touches on things.

She's (gulp) teaching me to make fudge. It's her third attempt at teaching me something kitchen-related, and I am seriously determined to do this. At Christmas last year Asher kept rubbing it in how none of his pecan pie was left but nobody touched my green beans. I will fucking show him I can be a goddess in the kitchen if I want to.

What I most like about this place is whenever my parents come to visit, we can always say, oops, we simply don't have the room for overnight guests unless you want to sleep in the living room. No to the day bed? Aw, too bad.

It's weird to think I'm starting to be friends with them. Even weirder to think that telling them, "no, sorry, you can't 'house sit' the place on Koh Samui, ever ever," ended up with my laying down the law about everything and their backing down. It's like now I'm a mom, they've stopped pretending to be anything other than immature idiots. As long as they don't try to parent me or grandparent the little guy (I will not go over the whole incident at Long Beach; suffice it to say they are never babysitting), I'm okay with them in small doses.

I wish I could tell you I'm still planning to go for tenure in the next few years, but honestly, I'm loving this online educator path way more than my postdoc work. Yesterday I took on a student in Pakistan who Totally. Got. Foucault. So we'll see. Partly it depends on what funding and certifications Warre Wethers can get from the feds and private sources, and what happens with that international consortium on education, but things are looking good.

Oh, and you will never believe who we ran into last year. Aura Renaldi! Well, that's not her last name anymore; I can't remember it right now; I was too busy staring at her when she told us. I just remember her hubby's a psychiatrist, which seems so perfect, you know? She's gained a bit of weight and she's become…wait for it…mellow.

Asher seemed really, really happy to see her. I had a freakout moment about that, I'm embarrassed to say, and we had a tiny—itty bitty—fight afterwards.

But I'm glad it happened, because a little part of me always wondered when things didn't work out as expected between Aura and Karl whether Asher ever had any regrets…but yeah, the answer to that would be no. Asher freaking adores me, which he totally should, since I adore him.

Adore. Worship. Revere. Yup. He is so. Fucking. Amazing. And I'm not just saying that because of the pregnancy hormones, which are, admittedly, pretty extreme. Or what he did with his mouth last night. (All in the interests of "getting them ready to give milk." He is so transparent. But OMG, it was goooooood.)

He really is the best. Despite my trying to explain again that the baby absolutely cannot hear yet, he insisted on giving our little guy that lecture on probability theory while holding his cheek against my uterus. Just. In. Case. Because for some reason, he thinks it's essential that kid #2 understands her odds of being a girl. Which I know are a hundred to one because I have The Gift, as I stated. As far as I'm concerned, this cat is totally out of the box. Erica could start buying pink. But whatever.

Asher

DID I JUST HEAR CHAR HAND you her there's-a-remote-possibility-we-might-not-live-happily-ever-after crap?

Yeah, you can go ahead and give that all the respect it deserves—none. I'm a hundred percent certain things will keep getting better, no matter what shit life throws at us. So far, though, all I'm seeing here is diamonds.

Even I, minor love deity that I am, didn't expect my life to rock this much after getting married, and it's not exactly on a downward trend.

I mean last Saturday after the dude fell asleep, she rubbed cinnamon butter all over her lips—hey, it's not my job to understand where preggo babes come up with this stuff—and put her mouth on my—fuck, was that the kid?

Fuck, I gotta go. Sounds like Char forgot to move the potty from the bedroom again and—ah, fuck. All over the fucking rug. Yeah, you know someone's getting tied up for this shit…

To My Husband

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