“What?” I ask lamely.
“Darlin’, she looks like your twin now at five. Add ten years to that and I’m going to go out of my mind when boys start coming around.”
His parents laugh and Molly joins in, but I just look at him. Right when I’m about to respond he opens his mouth and shocks me again.
“You give me more girls and I’ll have to buy more guns though. You give me some boys and I’ll make sure they know how to help me clean those guns. I figure though, with me being a cop, there isn’t going to be a single knucklehead that messes with my girl.”
“What’s a knucklehead,” Molly questions, breaking into my thoughts.
“Boys are knuckleheads,” Lee tells her. “And I don’t want knuckleheads near my girl.”
His parent’s laughter grows.
“That’s me, right?” Molly inquires.
“That’s right, little lady. You’re all mine forever and ever.”
She twitters a laugh that sounds like a happier version of her chirpy bird giggles.
“Mommy, I love being Leelee’s girl.”
I don’t hear his parents laughing now. My eyes don’t leave Molly’s when I nod and tell her how much I love that too. But I don’t need to see his parents to know how happy they are for their son.
When Molly’s arms reach out and wrap around both mine and Lee’s neck, I hug her back and close my eyes, loving every second of our little threesome. But my thoughts are confirmed when I hear his dad, gruff voice that is thick with emotion, tell his son four words that make my throat thick with emotion.
“Proud of you, son.”
AS PROMISED, LEE’S WORK SCHEDULE and the rain finally synced up. Last night, while watching Lee and Molly have the cutest tea party I’ve ever seen, it started to rain. Not just any rain, this one shook the whole house with its power. Lee stops, teapot in hand mid pour, looks at me across the room. His smile was no less knee-melting, but it held a youthful excitement to it that had me pausing.
I’ve seen a lot of Lee smiles in the past. The ones when I first started coming around, before we came together, held mischief. After our first night together, they held promise of his determination. Then, while I was busy ignoring and avoiding, even though his smile still held that determination, there was also a small hint to what my avoidance was doing to him. A little dip on the left side that prevented his dimple from coming all the way out, a little dip that showed me it cost him to keep his distance. Now, the only smile he gives us is one that expresses his love toward Molly and me.
Until this one.
This new one that I’ve never seen.
And mixed with the love on his face, this exuberance toward something as simple as rain, gives my heart pause before picking back up as if it’s in the race of a lifetime.
It’s feels freaking amazing.
“It’s raining, darlin’,” he told me.
“Cats and dogs,” Molly jokes.
He looks across the expanse of the tea party covered table. “Yeah, little lady, huge dogs and fat cats. Do you hear how loud they are?”
She giggles, “You’re silly, Leelee!”
He puts the teapot down and runs his hand over her ringlets, nodding, before standing from his spot and walks around the coffee table until he’s standing just feet in front of me.
“It’s raining,” he repeats.
I nod.
“And I’m off tomorrow,” he oddly states.
I nod again because really, he’s telling me something I already know.
“Change of plans. Can you lose a day of writing and it not affect your deadline?”
“Uh, yeah?”
“Can you really? Or are you just telling me what I want to hear? There isn’t a right answer, baby, if you can’t take the time, we won’t. You told me last week that you were stressed about your deadline with your editor pushing into the time you needed to have it to formatting.”
Okay, so to be honest, I can’t really give up a day. I’ve been working on my first self-published title I’ve released in three years. A title that means the freaking world to me because the plot mirrors mine and Lee’s relationship closely. A second chance love story that holds so much of me between those pages that even if I wasn’t on deadline panic mode, I would still be in panic mode.
The Healing Hand, with the urging of my grief counselor, was what I needed to take the last pieces of my pain, guilt, and grief into a tangible form that would help me heal. It’s been an emotional journey the last eight weeks that I’ve been working on it, but Lee’s been by my side every step of the way. He held me when the scenes became too much that I had to stop. The tears that I shed during those chapters, cathartic in the sense that each warm drop felt like it leaked the pain straight from my soul.