I heard Amalea murmur, “An unexpected honor, but one nonetheless, to be here to hear this joyous news,” thus proving she was total class.
But I was listening with half an ear because I was fully feeling the vibe, looking at my brother’s smile and experiencing it again, almost exactly twenty-four hours after I’d just felt it.
That feeling you get only a handful of times in your life, if you’re lucky.
That feeling that I was lucky to get often.
That feeling of sheer beauty.
* * * * *
I was curled up in Ren’s armchair in his non-TV seating area downstairs.
It was the dead of night and I’d twisted the chair so I could look out the window at a sleepy street disturbed only by the occasional car.
I couldn’t sleep, and not for the reasons people normally couldn’t sleep.
No, mine were different.
“Jesus, Ally.”
I turned my head to see Ren’s bare chest, pajama-bottomed legs (and the rest of him) through the shadows walking down the stairs.
“Woke up, you gone, not in the bathroom, you worried me,” he kept talking as he moved across the room toward me.
“I’m cool. Just couldn’t sleep,” I told him.
He stopped by the chair and looked down at me.
A nanosecond after his eyes hit me, he crouched in front of me and reached out a hand to wrap his fingers around my ankle.
“Is everything okay, baby?” he asked in his sweet voice.
He’d read me.
“Yes, Ren,” I said quietly, then explained just how okay it was. “Jet is having Eddie’s baby. Ava and Luke are on their honeymoon. Stella’s recorded an album that’s coming out soon. Tex is marrying Nancy. My man has accepted me as I am and I’m looking at office space tomorrow to start the job that I was meant to be doing. Your mom and sisters like me. My dad likes you. And my best friend, who I made a blood pact with when we were kids that she was going to marry my brother, we’d be real sisters and she’d name her daughter after me, is carrying my brother’s baby.” I shook my head. “So maybe it’s no. Everything’s not okay.” I leaned into him. “It’s very okay.”
“And that makes you not able to sleep?” he asked.
“I don’t know how to feel this happy,” I answered, and his fingers around my ankle tightened.
Then he let me go, got to his feet, but did it bending over to pluck me out of the chair. He turned, sat in it and arranged me in his lap.
“Ren, it’s okay. I’ll be—”
His arms around me gave me a deep squeeze and his voice was thick when he said, “I want you this happy for the rest of your life.”
Oh God.
Again with the melty!
I lifted a hand to his jaw, but tucked my forehead into the side of his neck.
“You willin’ to work on that with me, Ally?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” I answered.
“Good, baby,” he whispered.
He held me close.
I slid my hand from his jaw to press it against his heart and lay in his arms, feeling it beat.
After some time, Ren spoke.
“My girl, she feels deep.”
He was not wrong.
I said nothing.
He gathered me closer. “So fuckin’ deep.”
I pressed my forehead into his neck.
We again lapsed into contented silence.
It was me who broke it the second time.
