I swipe her hair over one of her shoulders, kiss her neck and place my hands on her hips. I lean forward to speak into her ear.

“Hold on tight.”

“You can’t deny we do that right.”

She smiles up at me, her eyes soft and hazy. The only time Olivia’s eyes are not alert and pointedly cold are when she’s pinned beneath me — or when she’s recovering from being pinned beneath me. I’ve trained her to say I love you when she orgasms. If she doesn’t say I love you, she doesn’t get an orgasm — she learned that the hard way. It’s payback for all the years she wouldn’t tell me. Afterward, it takes her at least an hour to return to her normal spitfire mode. But, for an hour after sex I have her soft and submissive. I like to call it the ‘temporary taming of the shrew.’ I live for those hours, where’s she looking up at me like I’m the man. Sometimes, I can even get her to say it.

You’re the man, Caleb. You’re the man.

“As opposed to doing it … wrong?” Her eyebrows lift. “Is there a wrong way to do that?”

“Everything that’s not you feels wrong, Duchess.”

I can tell she’s pleased by my words. She scoots closer, throwing her leg over my waist. I trail my fingers lightly along her spine, and when I reach the ‘world’s greatest ass’ I lay my hand flat and stay there.

She wiggles and I know what she wants.

“Again?” I suck on one of her fingers and she shivers.

“Again,” she says. “And again, and again, and again…”

Epilogue

Olivia and I never marry. We took too many casualties in our struggle to be together. It seems almost wrong to get married after what we did to love. One night while we’re in Paris, we make vows to each other. We’re in our hotel, sitting side by side on the floor in front of the open window. Our view is of the Eiffel Tower, and we’re wrapped in the blanket we just made love on. We are listening to the sounds of the city, when suddenly she turns to face me.

“Mormons believe that when they get married in this life, they stay married in the next. I was thinking that we should convert to Mormonism.”

“Well, that’s most certainly a viable option for us, Duchess. But, what if we’re married to our first spouses in the next life?”

She grimaces. “I’d definitely be less f**ked than you.”

I laugh so hard we both fall over backwards onto the carpet. We shift our bodies until we are lying with our faces inches apart. I reach out to touch the small oval she wears on a chain around her neck. It’s our penny. She had it made into a necklace that she never takes off.

“Wherever we go in the next life, we’ll be together,” I say.

“Let’s not go to hell then, that’s where Leah will be.”

I nod in agreement, then I look in her eyes and say, “I’ll do whatever I have to do to protect you. I’ll lie, cheat, and steal to make you okay. I’ll share your suffering, and I’ll carry you when you’re weighed down. I’ll never leave you, not even when you ask me to. Do you believe me?”

She touches my face with the tips of her fingers and nods.

“You’re strong enough to protect your heart and mine, and your heart from mine. I’ll give you everything I have because from the day I met you, it’s belonged to you.”

I kiss her then I roll on top of her.

And that’s it. Our hearts are married.

We fight. We make love. We cook huge meals and fall into food comas for days. After she defends a murderer and wins the case, she sells her share of the business and we move into our house in Naples. She says if she keeps defending criminals, she’s going to go to hell and she really doesn’t want to spend eternity with Leah. She opens up her own practice, and I work from home. We have a vegetable garden. Olivia has a black thumb and kills all of the plants. I nurture them back to life when she’s not looking and then convince her she has a green thumb. She’s very proud of her (my) tomatoes.

We try to have a baby, but Olivia miscarries twice. When she is thirty-five, she is diagnosed with Ovarian Cancer and has to have a hysterectomy. She cries for a year. I try to be strong, mostly because she needs me to be. But, during that time it wasn’t Noah I was afraid to lose her to, or Turner, or herself, it was cancer. And cancer was a foe I didn’t want to f**k with. Most days I just begged God to keep her alive and make it go away. That’s what I asked him — make it go away — like I was five years old and there was a boogeyman in my closet. God must have heard my prayers, because the cancer never came back and the boogeyman was vanquished. My hands still shake when I think about that time.

I wish I could have given her a baby. Sometimes, when she’s at the office late, I sit in what would have been the nursery and think about the past. It’s a pointless game of torture, but I suppose it’s a consequence of being a flawed, stupid man. Olivia doesn’t like it when I think. She says my thoughts are too deep and they depress her. She’s probably right. And I would hate for her to see what I see; the fact that if we’d just done things right, if I’d fought harder, if she’d fought less, we would have been together sooner. We could have had our baby before it was too late — before her body made it impossible. But, we didn’t, and we’re both a little broken because of it.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are no set rules in life. You do what you have to do to survive. If that means running away from the love of your life to preserve your sanity, you do it. If it means breaking someone’s heart so yours doesn’t break; do it. Life is complicated — too much so for there to be absolutes. We are all so broken. Pick up a person, shake them around and you’ll hear the rattling of their broken pieces. Pieces our fathers broke, or our mothers, or our friends, strangers, or our loves. Olivia has stopped rattling quite as much as she used to. Love is a God-given tool, she tells me. It screws things back in place that were loose, and it cleans out all the broken pieces that you don’t need anymore. I believe her. Our love has been fixing each other. I hope to only hear a tiny jingle when I shake her in a few years.

Leah remarries and has another baby. Luckily, it’s a boy. When Estella is nine, she comes to live with us. Despite the “stepmother” status, Estella loves Olivia. They share the same sense of humor, and too often, I find myself the target of their jokes. Some nights I come home and they’re sitting side by side on the sofa, legs propped on the coffee table, MacBooks open, stalking boys. Olivia wishes she’d had Facebook when we were young. She says so every day. I’m not sure who’s more confused by their immediate chemistry — me or Leah.