Remembering Us (28 page)

I exhale slowly as soon as we enter our apartment on Friday night. It feels so good to be home after the insanity over the last few days. Nothing like getting two years of your memories back in a span of a few hours, a trip across the country, and a visit to a prison to wear a girl out.

I have to laugh or I’ll cry from exhaustion.

Adam must feel the same because we’ve been utterly quiet the entire time back from the airport. Both of us lost in our own thoughts. He’s barely said anything about his dad or his meeting with the parole board. All I know is they meet with his dad next week for his actual hearing, but will take Adam’s statement into account.

The man could be free in a week. Or back in jail for the next fifteen years before he becomes eligible for parole again.

“Hey.” Adam nudges me and I drop my bag on the kitchen table. “You want something to eat?”

I turn to him and grin. “You’re going to cook?”

He scoffs and opens our takeout drawer. Of course not.

“Name your pleasure.”

You, I think. By the look I give him, Adam clearly knows what I’m thinking.

“Food, woman. What do you want to eat?”

I raise an eyebrow, and I laugh at his exasperated look. “Fine. Pizza is good. Fast and easy.”

“That’s what she said,” he says, laughing, and he smacks me on the rear with a menu.

I roll my eyes. I’m amazed that after just a few days together, our banter is relaxed and … loving. I feel like maybe he should be making me pay penance for the last few months of stress and anger. Or there should be an awkwardness. But there’s not. It’s relaxing and strange at the same time.

“Do you mind if I go take a bath while we wait for our food?” I ask, but Adam’s already on the phone with Martino’s ordering gyro pizza.

He waves me away and I skip off to the bathroom, laughing at how much I love that pizza and how thankful I am of the day he took us there when I wanted to go to all of our favorite places.

He took me to every single one of them. And now I know why they’re my favorite. And how special they are to me.

I’m soaking in the tub filled with a relaxing bubble soap when Adam walks in. He changed his clothes into a skin tight white t-shirt and a pair of green athletic shorts. I almost swallow a mouthful of bubbles.

“I thought you could use this.”

He sets a glass of white wine on the counter and I lay my head against the back of the tub, letting out a low moan.

“God this is good,” I say, swallowing a crisp Riesling and closing my eyes. “This feels like heaven.”

I look at the glass when I pull it away and frown into it.

Then I look to Adam. He’s bending down on the side of the tub, crouched into a squat and his arms are crossed on the edge of the tub.

He’s smiling at me, amused by my frown. “Do you really think I’m so clichéd that I would put an engagement ring into a wine glass?”

He kisses my nose quickly and squats back down. His eyes scan every inch of my completely hidden body in the tub. By his frown, I can’t tell which one of us is more disappointed.

“Of course not.”

“Good,” he says, and then he sets the opened blue box on the ledge right next to me.

I drop the glass of wine into my bath water.

“Oh shit!” I yell, and I dive my hands under the water to get the glass.

Adam’s hands grab my arms and I freeze. I look at him, hearing my pulse beating in my ears.

“Leave the glass in the water and look.” He nods towards the box. “The first time I gave this to you, I was so nervous that it wasn’t as big as you’d expect.” He bites his bottom lip and his noses twitches. “You told me-”

“That I couldn’t give a shit about the size of a diamond, just that I get to have your arms around me every day for the rest of my life.”

He presses his lips together and his eyes get wet. My own eyes water right along with him. I can’t believe I just made Adam get teary-eyed. I don’t know what has made me more emotional – the engagement or seeing him like this.

He swallows slowly and does some sort of man swipe across his cheeks with the back of his hand.

“I want more than anything to know that’s still true.”

“It is,” I tell him without a doubt in the world.

I lean toward him, as much as I can in the narrow tub, and let him take my hands.

The drowned wine glass is completely forgotten.

He takes the ring from the box and holds it right in front of the ring finger on my left hand.

“Will you marry me? Spend forever with me?”

“Yes,” I say, swallowing tears. “Again. Of course I will marry you.”

Once he slides the ring on my finger, I reach behind his neck and clasp my fingers together. Adam leans over the edge of the tub as our lips meet, but it’s awkward and uncomfortable, so I pull him to me.

The next thing I know, he is in the tub with me, completely dressed, and he has me situated so I’m sitting on his lap. I’m straddling him in our narrow bath tub and the bubbles and water are splashing all over the sides of the tub as our arms move ferociously over each other’s skin. My hands lift his shirt off his body, and he pulls away when we have to separate so I can pull it over his head.

He leans back, admiring my body with his hands and his eyes.

“I’m the luckiest man in the world. You chose me, twice. I will never let anything bad happen to you again, Amy.”

“I know,” I tell him with absolute conviction. “I love you.”

Adam wouldn’t have ever let anything bad happen to me in the first place. The mud slide was an accident and not his fault at all. I only hope someday – and someday soon – he can let go of the guilt he carries.

Our mouths reconnect passionately and we move against one another. My hands free Adam from his gym shorts and he goes to work, pleasing me until the water gets cold and the pizza arrives.

It’s the best memory I have of us. Ever.

And I hope I never forget it.

Seven months later …

“Hey, wake up sleepy head.”

I shift back into Adam’s arms, ignoring the sun light coming in through the windows in our room.

It’s freezing cold in Denver right now, and I know we had at least another six inches of snow last night. The only place I want to be today is in his arms, under our warm comforter, with maybe some coffee and sex.

Okay. Lots of sex.

“I don’t wanna go,” I whine, and laugh when I end up on my back.

Adam’s smile is a few inches from me. His elbows are next to my shoulders, propping him up. My eyes roll back into my head when he presses his erection against me and my legs widen instinctively.

“It’s Tilly’s birthday, today,” he reminds me.

As if I need reminding. You would think she’s turning thirteen with the insane way my mom has been the last few months planning her birthday party.

“Come on, there’ll be ponies to ride and everything.”

He’s joking. But there probably would be ponies if it wasn’t the middle of February.

I grin, clasp my hands together behind his neck, tug on his hair, and pull him to me. He lets me, even as he lets out a low laugh that makes my stomach warm.

“I’ll come,” I tell him right before I crush his lips to mine. “I promise.”

He sets out to immediately prove me right. An hour later, we’re finally finished with our showers, dressed, and almost ready to head to my parent’s house.

“You nervous about today?” he asks, giving me a strange look.

“No, I just know it’ll be a lot of planning talk.”

Because not only has my mom been insane about Tilly’s birthday, but I decided to try to help mend my relationship with her by giving her full reign of planning my wedding.

Adam and I would have preferred to get married last fall in the middle of a park somewhere with our closest family and friends.

Instead, we’re getting married in June on the anniversary of my accident and first engagement. And instead of there being our closest friends and family joining us, the guest list – last I heard anyway – is around three hundred of my closest strangers, family, and family friends. I’ll know about ten of them.

But it’s made my mom happy, and secretly, I enjoyed getting hauled to dress shop after dress shop, trying on thousands of princess looking dresses.

“What’s she on now?” he asks as he struggles with his tie.

This was another concession Adam and I decided on together. My parents are finally starting to accept that I’m not the daughter they wanted me to be, but instead of immaturely shoving it in their faces just to prove my point, we dress how they would like us to whenever we’re together.

And on the flipside, the last time we were there, my parents actually smiled at me.

My mom hugged me and then Adam. And when I asked them for help in giving me a loan so I could start my own coffee shop, Hooka Two, they handed it over gladly.

My dad’s expertise has been beneficial, and for the first time in my life, I’m doing exactly what I want to do. I run my own business, and now that the economy is picking up, Adam’s job as an architect for a local home builder is growing, too.

The only thing we’re not growing out of is our apartment. I’ve decided I’m completely in love with the tiny little place and don’t want to move anywhere else, even if we can afford it.

“Invitations, I think,” I tell him, while finishing up my make-up in the bathroom mirror. “And then we still have flowers and place settings and cakes. Who knew a wedding took so much work?”

“No kidding,” Adam says, and not for the first time since my mom turned our wedding into Denver’s event of the year. “I think Zander and Kelsey definitely had the right idea.”

“You’re the one who said it would make my mom happy to do this for me.”

“I know,” he says, coming up to me and spinning me from the mirror so I’m wrapped in his arms. “But maybe I’m just a bit jealous that Zander’s already had the wedding night and you and I have another three months to wait.”

He places a kiss in the crook of my neck.

I laugh, but I’m just as jealous as he is. We just got back two weeks ago from their Caribbean destination wedding. It was only Zander and Kelsey, her parents, and me and Adam for the entire week. Fabulous doesn’t begin to describe how much fun we had. It was almost like our own honeymoon, just months before the wedding.

“If you’d like,” I tell him, kissing the skin above his tie and giggle at his freshly shaven jaw. I take a few steps forward, pushing him backward and into our bedroom. “I can give you a preview of exactly what’s to come.”

We fall into the bed and our smiles disappear. His eyes go as hazy as I know mine are. I wiggle against him and he moans.

“You’re killing me.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want that.”

I hop off the bed before he can stop me and reach down to pick up a new pair of brown leather riding boots on my way out of the bedroom.

“Tease!”

I shut the door to our room on him, laughing. I can’t believe this is my life.

“Happy birthday, dear Tilly, happy birthday to you!”

My entire family stands around Tilly’s high chair, with her very own personal cake in front of her, laughing while we encourage her to blow out the candles.

“No!” Ann shouts, and grabs the one lit candle right before Tilly’s hand grabs it. We watch as she plants her hand directly into the middle of her cake and proceeds to smear it all over her face, getting very little in her actual mouth.

But she loves it.

Tilly’s full of giggles as she reaches for another handful and uses both hands to try to lift her cake directly into her mouth. The cake falls apart, but she manages to get one large bit into her mouth. The rest of the icing covers her nose and her cheeks down to her chin. I’m pretty sure she has some in her eyelashes, too.

“Hey Tilly,” I cheer, getting the chubby cheeked one-year-olds attention. “Where’s your head?”

“No!” my mom gasps, and my sister throws her head back, laughing. It takes a quick second for Tilly to register my question. And then she plants her frosting covered hands directly onto the top of her head.

With happy tears in her eyes, Ann looks at me. She’s trying to be mad, but we both know she’s not.