EPILOGUE
ONE YEAR LATER
So much had happened this past year, but most of it was good. Dominick was released from the hospital a few days after he had awoken, once they made sure the swelling in his brain had gone down. We returned home, and I babied him to death for a while until he was fully healed. He acted like it drove him crazy, but I think he secretly enjoyed it.
Jeff never made good on his threats, which we were both thankful for. About two months after the accident, Dominick got a call from Jeff's father saying that he had returned home and was back to his old bullshit. Dominick sent him all the money he had collected from Jeff's paychecks. What the man did with it, neither of us know nor really care about.
Both Tammy and Marcus started coming around more, and by coming around more, I mean actually hanging out at the condo with us. Tammy and I had fun taking turns cooking dinner for each other. We eventually made it into a routine where one Sunday, they would come to the condo for dinner, and the next Sunday, we would go to their house.
It took a while for Tammy and Marcus to adjust to my relationship with Dominick, but eventually Dominick and Marcus became like best friends. They got so close, in fact, that Marcus ended up being the best man at our wedding.
Dominick flew his parents in from Virginia so that his father could give me away. It was strange seeing his parents again, since I had only really spoken to them a handful of times when we were kids, but they welcomed me into the family with open arms.
Speaking of being flown in, we decided to have our wedding at the Ayana Resort in Bali, Indonesia . Since we didn't have many guests, it was easy for him to fly everyone in for the event.
The wedding was more than anything I could have imagined. Tammy helped me get dressed in a stunning Vera Wang wedding gown. The bottom of it had the typical flowing white train, while the top was embroidered with black leaves and flowers. She mumbled that she wished she would have been able to splurge on such a dress when her and Marcus got married.
Dominick spared no expense. Everything was the finest of the finest. At our reception, there was an ice swan and a dove release. I thought it was a bit pretentious, but he insisted on making the event memorable for all. Just marrying him was memorable enough for me. It was the only memory of our wedding that I'd ever truly need.
Once the wedding was over, our guests enjoyed a night at the resort before being flown home so that we could have our honeymoon in private. We took a bicycle tour and cooking class together, but for the most part, Dominick preferred ravaging me in our room.
By the time we returned home, I felt more exhausted from the sex than anything else. My body was so sore that I had to put him on a sexual time out, to which he replied that it was the first sign we were actually married.
In other noteworthy news, I got my associates degree and am now working on my bachelors. Dominick and I are starting to go house hunting. I want to live in the same neighborhood as Tammy, but the houses there are huge. With so many bedrooms, we'd have to have a lot of babies to fill them.
Tammy and Marcus were finally able to conceive through in vitro. They used it as a last resort, having painfully gone through every other procedure you can think of to get pregnant. I felt bad for them that it had taken so much, but at least they were finally getting what they had waited so long to achieve. In all honesty, I was kind of hoping they would hold off until I was pregnant so that Tammy and I could have our kids at the same time. But I could certainly understand her not being willing to wait.
Dominick only wants one kid, but I want a whole liter of them. He doesn't want to start a family until after I finish college, but since he's not making me work while I go to school, I don't really see the point of waiting.
“I'll get a baby off of you eventually,” I teased him one night while we were curled up together watching television.
“It's hard to get a baby off of me when you're on a sex strike.”
“It's not my fault you broke me.”
“You're not broken; you're just married. Babies don't happen without sex, you know.”
“You're insatiable.”
“Just trying to give you what you want.” He shrugged with a grin.
“I want babies.”
“Wait until after you graduate. We have all the time in the world.”
It was a nice thing to hear him say and actually be able to believe it. There was a lot of time before my biological clock started to run out, so I suppose there was no point in rushing it. All in good time.
That seemed to be the mantra of our relationship. All in good time. No matter how much I had wanted to rush things, they had gone at a snails pace. Our relationship. Telling Tammy about us. Having babies would probably be the same. That was alright though. Everything worked out in the end.
Slowly, we had built a life together. Maybe it still wasn't conventional, but it was perfect for us. There would be ups and downs in the future, I was sure. But we were together now, completely, finally. And at the end of the day, that was all that mattered.