Two Punks In Love

Plans Change

Adam grunts in agreement. "The real question is...when and where?"

I stare at the barn loft door. Since the moment Kat sent Quarterdick packing, our wedding was back on, in my mind. But we haven't talked about it. After we fully reconciled in that barn loft, I put Kat's promise ring back on her left hand, but even before that, I had ordered her a new engagement ring. I don't feel right, giving her the old one back. We are in an entirely new place. A new pact is required for our marriage.

"Before the babies come, I hope." Is all I say to Adam.  "I want them to be...legitimate."

He squeezes my shoulder. "They were conceived in love and abide in love. The technicalities don't make a damn, brother."

"They do to me."

It doesn't make any sense that I have a hang-up about being a "bastard." I am technically "legitimate." My parents were married seven months before I was born; Ross signed my birth certificate. Ross Gallant is my legal father, and I am his legal son. But everything I thought I knew changed at one eventful LA party when I was twenty-one. I never want my kids to question the family story at some later date. I don't want them to think...rock star dad knocked up his girlfriend, and it took us being born to seal the deal.

I want my kids born in wedlock. I don't want them to have any doubt that our family was planned and wanted and worked for.

I want them to know what I know about my own father. As imperfect as Ross is, I know his commitment to me came from a love for my mother. A love that could not be broken by lies or disease.  A love that saw the three of us through times that seemed impossible for love to survive. A love that has delivered me to a peace greater than the traumas I suffered. I love my children more than my own life, but I want them to understand—the love I bear them is fortified tenfold by the commitment I have for their mother.

I know she feels the same. It's just down to the perfect moment, now.

She appears at the ground level barn door, walks toward me in a sundress. Her beauty and her love and her pregnancy shining.

I stand stock still, and she keeps coming, til the babies bump up against me, and she delivers a kiss. "Knock off, okay baby? The work and the beer. We have to be in Chattanooga at eight..."

"We're done for the day, and it's light beer," I assure her.

It's a long-standing joke in SCIC that light beer is the same as water. She's not buying. To prove it, she pulls the can from my hands and takes a slow sip. I remove it from her mouth, immediately and dump it on the ground.

"I thought it was water," she murmurs with a smile.

"Rockstar water," I remind her. "Not an appropriate babymama beverage."

"Right," she says, with a swat to my ass.

Goddamn, I love this woman.

I dip to her collarbone, take a gulp of her, but she's turning away in embarrassment, looking at Adam and Preston as a means to quell my desire.

"So...Prez...you're heading home tonight, right?"

Sometimes Prez crashes on one of the couches in the barn. But tonight, I imagine Adam and Mac—without their two children and Mac solidly over her first trimester morning sickness—will be taking advantage of our romantic loft bed. Prez needs to go the fuck home to Chattown.

"You know it," he winks at Adam.

"I'll cook breakfast in the morning," Kat offers to Adam, who grins big.

"I'll work up an appetite, then."

There was a time when Adam and I would have high-fived over such a blatantly positioned sexual innuendo, but we are maturing. We merely smirk at one another while Kat rolls her eyes and Prez pops another  beer in frustration.