STORM

“Think it’s enough?” Nick asks when he sees me glancing into the big cooler on wheels. It’s filled with eight good-sized red snapper.

I shrug. “It’s Tuesday. I doubt we’ll get more than a dozen catch-of-the-day orders. We should be fine.”

“All right,” he says. “Might as well head back in.”

The trawler is far bigger than we need, but Nick loves having a boat, and it might as well be one we can use. Today is a typical day – most of the morning spent on the water, followed by evening at our restaurant, Nicky’s By Night, pretending to be working but in reality, just putzing around, socializing with customers, and having fun.

I know, it’s a hard life.

Nick spins the wheel and points us back toward the beach at Surfer’s Paradise, where Nicky’s is located, and hits the throttle. The motion wakes Samson and Delilah, who come bounding up from their napping spot in the galley and join us on the deck.

As always, it’s a beautiful day in Gold Coast. Nick wraps his arms around me from behind and sets his chin on my shoulder. It took a while to get used to that bare chin, not to mention the close-cropped hair that he’s sported since we moved to Australia eighteen months ago.

It does make him look younger, though. Officially, he actually is younger, thanks to shaving a few years off his age on his new passport. I added a few just to bring us closer to meeting in the middle.

“Happy Tuesday, Mrs. Webber,” he says in my ear.

“Happy Tuesday, Mr. Webber,” I reply.

It’s a ritual we came up with where we celebrate every single day, just because we can. We’re lucky that we have the luxury of doing that, just like we had the luxury of living anywhere in the world that we wanted to. Ultimately, we chose Oz because it’s about as far away from New York as you can get and still be in the civilized world.

The trawler chugs into the harbor and we settle into the berth that costs us a lot more than we make from selling our catch of the day. But that’s the price of happiness, I guess.

“Oi! How’s your snapper?”

I shake my head and chuckle as Louise ambles up to the boat. As always, she’s got a shit-eating grin on her face.

“Even after a year, that joke hasn’t gotten old,” I say.

“I know.” She grins. “It’s a keepah.”

Lou is our manager at Nicky’s By Night. We met her and her husband James at a casino on our first night in Gold Coast, and we hit it off right out of the gate. Lou is a few years older than me, but we’ve been inseparable for over a year. When we found out she used to manage a Nando’s in Brisbane, we took it as a sign, since Nick and I don’t know the first thing about running a restaurant.

“What brings you to the docks?” Nick asks, rolling the cooler down the gangplank.

“Hugh from the dairy’s got a bit of a payment problem,” she says.

“We paid the bill,” I say. “I know we did.”

“That’s just it – you paid it twice.”

“Tell him to keep the extra as a tip,” says Nick.

Lou shakes her head. “Youse two’ve lost the plot, I swear. You can’t run a business when it doesn’t make money.”

“Sure we can.” I grin. “We’re rich.”

“But you won’t be if you keep doing things like payin’ the dairy man twice!”

Nick and I share a secret glance. We both know that if Lou got a close look at the books, she’d see just how much money Nicky’s is losing, and if she did, she’d seriously start to question our backstory. We’d rather that didn’t happen.

“How would you like a raise?” Nick asks.

Lou’s eyes go wide. “There you go again! Every time I question youse about money, you give me a rise in pay!”

“Do the checks bounce?” I ask.

“That’s not the point!”

Nick and I clasp each other’s hands as the dock runs out and we step onto the stretch of sidewalk that will take us to the restaurant. Lou follows, fretting.

“You’re going to get wrinkles,” I say.

“Bloody right,” she grumps. “And you’ll be bloody paying for my eye tuck.”

Nick leans in to my ear. “Happy Tuesday,” he whispers with a grin.

* * *

It’s after midnight, and I’m the only one who isn’t drinking. Which is lucky for James and Louise, because they need a ride home.

“I like this Happy Tuesday thing,” James slurs, finishing his umpteenth Jim Beam and Coke. “You guys came up with it yourselves?”

“It’s a philosophy,” says Nick. “Celebrate every day, because you never know which one is going to be your last.”

Lou frowns and sucks back the cherry from her cosmo. “It’s easier when you have money,” she says.

“Speaking of that,” Nick says. “We got some tonight.”

He wanders over to the front counter with the bag of cash receipts. I can see just the slightest weave in his step.

“I do believe my hubby might be just the tiniest bit shnockered,” I whisper to Lou.

“Speaking of that,” she says. “Have you…?”

“Not yet,” I say quickly.

“Any reason why not?”

“I’m waiting for the right time.”

“There’s no right time, girl.”

Before I can say anything back, I hear a sudden slam from the front of the restaurant. From my vantage point, I can only see Nick, hands in the air, backing up slowly.

“Nick?” I call. “What’s – ”

Then I see what he can see as a man in a hooded sweatshirt emerges from behind a stub wall. He’s pointing a sawed-off shotgun at Nick’s face.

“Stay where you are,” Nick says evenly. “Everything is fine.”

For a moment my heart stops and my mind invents a scenario: he’s a member of the Volkov family. It’s over. Our idyllic life has come to an end.

“Oh my God,” I whisper. “They found us.”

Then I see the man reach for the bag of cash and I realize he’s just a robber looking for anything he can get.

“Take it all,” Nick says. “Whatever you want.”

The man turns to face James, Louise and me. He gives us an appraising look.

“Give me your shit, too,” he says.

James pulls himself up to his full height. He’s a tall man, and has the weight to back it up. Plus he’s drunk.

“What if I tell you to piss off, wanker?” he growls.

“James,” Nicks says, shaking his head. “It’s not worth it.”

“Fucking punk,” he mumbles, and suddenly the man with the gun is charging him. He jams the barrels directly into James’s chest.

“Who’s funny now, fuckface?” the guy barks.

I barley have time to register Nick’s movements before it’s all over. He covers the space between him and the gunman in one second flat, reaches for the guy’s wrists and twists, simultaneously twisting his own hips. The result is the gunman being tossed in a perfect circle and ends up with him landing flat on his back on the floor.

Nick cracks open the gun and ejects the shells, then tosses it behind the bar.

James has gone white as a ghost.

“Jesus, Nick,” he mutters.

“No worries,” he says, crouching down to grab the intruder by the collar. “This fella is just misguided. Isn’t that right, buddy? You’re going to change your ways starting right now, hey?”

The guy’s eyes are bugging out of his head. “Ab-absolutely,” he stammers.

“That’s right,” says Nick, leveling him with a cold stare. “Because you never know when the guy you try to rob is someone like me. But instead of letting you walk out under your own steam, maybe he’ll jam both barrels in your mouth and blow your fucking head clean off.”

This glimpse of the old Nick is disconcerting, and yet somehow exciting at the same time. He gives the guy one final kick in the ass and watches him bolt out the front door.

Nick comes over and sits with us, tipping back the last of his beer before realizing that James and Louise are goggling at him.

“What?” he asks.

I have to bite the inside of my cheeks to hold back a totally inappropriate laugh.

* * *

“We’re lucky Lou and James were drunk,” Nick says. “Otherwise I don’t think we could have convinced them not to call the police.”

He puts a glass of wine on the table in front of me on our back patio. As always, it’s a beautiful night, so we’re outside enjoying it. He pops his bottle of beer and sits down next to me, looking up at the sky. The dogs are taking advantage of the cooler night air to snooze in the grass.

“I have to confess,” I say. “There was a moment when I thought the past had caught up to us.”

Nicks takes a pull of his beer. “Me, too.”

“You were pretty magnificent, though,” I say. “Nikolai Chernenko came back for a brief visit.”

“Very brief,” he says. “It stopped being fun really quickly.”

“Really? You’re sure you don’t miss it? Not even a little?”

“Not even a little,” he says. “I like Happy Tuesday. And Happy Wednesday. And Happy Every day.”

“So this hawk’s now a dove? Is that it?”

He leans in and kisses me hard. Even now, his touch can take my breath away.

“Still a little hawk left?” he says.

“Yeah,” I sigh. “A little.”

We look up at the stars. Our place in Gold Coast isn’t anything like the house in Montauk. It’s maybe 2,500 square feet, and being right in the city, we don’t get the ebony black skies where we can sit all night and count the stars. But we can still see enough.

“Crazy how the constellations are totally different down here,” Nick says. “I’m still not used to them.”

I grin. “No crazier than the two of us down here, a world away from where we used to be. We’re as different from those two people as these constellations are from the ones we used to know.”

He smiles. “That’s deep.”

“As someone once told me, I have unplumbed depths.”

He chuckles and finishes off his beer.

“You haven’t touched your wine,” he says. “It’s an Australian shiraz, your favorite.”

I look down at the table for a moment, then back up at him. I’ve been dreading this moment. And dreaming about it. We’ve never talked about it before, and now – now I guess we have to.

“Babe, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, but… I wasn’t sure if it was something you wanted to hear.”

His brow knits. “O-kay…”

I put a hand on top of his. Here goes nothing.

“We’re going to have a baby.”

His face goes slack. I knew it. He’s in shock. He doesn’t want this.

“Babe, I’m so sorry – ”

He blinks at me. “Sorry? What for?”

“It’s just that, we never talked about kids, and I didn’t know if you…”

“If I wanted a baby?”

“Yeah.”

He leans into me and takes my hands in his. “Storm,” he says, gazing into my eyes. “I’m over the moon.”

My heart soars. “You are?”

“Honey, I’m not getting any younger, no matter what my passport says. I’ve been waiting for the right time to ask you if you wanted kids.”

“I wasn’t sure I was ready,” I say. “But then it happened, and I – I started to get excited.”

He beams at me. “This is incredible,” he says. “Before I met you, I honestly thought I’d just live and die alone. The idea of being a father never even entered my head.”

“I felt exactly the same way. I couldn’t take care of myself before I met you, let alone a baby. Motherhood felt like just a pipe dream back then.”

Nick grins. “It’s another miracle in a series of miracles.”

“I guess it is.”

He takes my hand and leads me out into the yard, where we lie down in the cool grass and look up at the stars. I can hear Samson and Delilah snoring softly on the other side of the yard.

“Both of us did a lot of things wrong in our lives,” he says. “But this – this is something we’ve done right.”

“There is one thing we’ve always done right,” I whisper, taking his hand and placing it on my breast. “In fact, I think we’re pretty damn good at it.”

He leans over me and unbuttons my blouse as my hand reaches for the waistband of his cargo shorts. One thing about moving to Australia, it’s expanded Nick’s wardrobe options from jeans and black T-shirts to cargo shorts and short-sleeved beach shirts.

I slough off my top; the night air feels deliciously cool against the skin of my bare breasts. He undoes my skirt and pulls it down, until I’m fully naked and feeling the texture of the grass against my body.

His cock is already at attention by the time I get his shorts off. His fingertips stroke my belly, raising goosebumps all along my skin.

“Sometimes I think about the first time you touched me that day in the dojo and it makes me shiver,” I whisper. “You still make me feel like that now. Like a real woman.”

He sighs as my hand finds his shaft and strokes it, gently but firmly.

“I was always so in control of myself,” he sighs. “And then you touched me, and I lost it. You made me go crazy, to the point where all I wanted was to feel you.”

“And now?” I ask.

He puts his lips on mine and our tongues find each other. His hands roam across my breasts, then wander down below. I’m instantly wet, and suddenly all thought of foreplay is gone.

“You tell me,” he says, pushing my legs apart and pulling me toward him like an animal. I quiver uncontrollably as he thrusts into me all the way to the hilt.

We’ve done this hundreds of times, and each time is better than the last. But now, there’s something different. An urgency that I haven’t felt since those early days, when we were exploring each other, discovering new pleasures.

“My Storm,” he moans as his thrusts pick up speed. “Always and forever, my Storm.”

My hips move in time with his thrusts and I spread my legs as wide as they can go, pulling him down to me. I wrap my arms around his neck and put my head beside his so I can nibble on his neck as he drives himself back and forth inside of me.

This isn’t just desire or fun this time, but a deep need to feel him inside me. To celebrate the pleasure that he brings me, to share the passion that bonded us, that made our child.

“Nikolai,” I whisper in his ear. “My sweet, sweet Nikolai.”

His muscles ripple under my hands and I grip onto them as the beginnings of the earthquake start to pool in my belly. His thrusts are coming so fast now, so deep, I won’t be able to hold on for long. It’s like that first time at the pool, where we lost all control, needing to feel each other, to release our burning passion.

He rolls onto his back, carrying me with him so that I’m on top now. I collapse on top of him, my breasts mashed against his chest, as he grips my hips and revs up the desire to a jackhammer, driving my consciousness right out of me until there’s nothing left but a bolt of lightning running through me, every cell ready to burst with pleasure.

“Oh God, Nick,” I pant. “I can’t… I can’t hold on…”

He wraps his arms around me for dear life as he thrusts one last time before erupting inside me like a volcano, over and over and over, making me shudder until I collapse on top of him, the sound of my heartbeat rushing through my ears.

We lay like that in each other’s arms for a long time, our sweat evaporating in the cool night air.

“You’re going to be an amazing mother,” Nick whispers finally.

Tears well up in my eyes. “And you’re going to be an incredible dad.”

“Two broken people who managed to fix themselves,” he says. “Because of each other.”

I dab at my eyes with my palm. “When did you become a poet?”

“Last week,” he says. “I watched a YouTube video.”

I giggle, weeping at the same time. “Another pop culture reference for Nikolai,” I say. “He’s on a roll.”

“Storm?” he says.

“Yeah?”

“I think we’re going to be okay.”

I lay my head against his chest, feeling his heartbeat against my cheek, the lion’s strength and the sweet tenderness inside it, and I smile.

“I know we are,” I say. “After all, we’re miracles.”