Third In Line

Chapter Thirty Five - Big Game James

"Orange juice" Harry had decided. He was out of breath, his heart was pumping furiously, and he needed to cool off. Emma was already in the shower doing the exact same thing.

The walk from the master bedroom of their apartment to the kitchen was one of his favourite routes through the house, and not only because of the fridge at the end. Emma had filled every wall space with family photos, most of them taken by her being the keen photographer that she was. He loved to watch the story that was unfolding in the pictures, from the shots of his wife at the premiere of her first movie, along to the dinner where she met Kate, and then the night they first met.

Emma had been taking snaps of her life for years, but the majority of the ones on the wall came from the time they started dating. There were pics of them together, out at restaurants or enjoying the country. He particularly liked the one from their little adventure in a forest in Washington, where she was cuddling with him by their tent whilst a baby grizzly bear cub was caught walking by in the background. They spent hours marvelling and giggling over that one photo.

There were some more artistic shots on their wedding day, when Emma had handed the camera over to her sister Beth to take all the behind the scenes shots.

She still looks just as ravishing as the day I married her.

The wall of photos was eventually cut off by a doorway into the living room, but more pictures adorned the wall to his right. There were much more family pictures on this side, the most recent photos she had taken. Jamie was much more prominent, appearing in almost every picture they had up there. The girls were up there too, his nieces, his brother and sister in law, the Yorks and the Tindalls. Everyone.

It was no surprise that his wife had a selfie with pretty much all of his family members, she was just that friendly and fun that nobody could resist her. Even Granny, who was so weirded out by the selfie obsession still allowed Emma to get one of the most informal pictures of the Queen that Harry had ever seen.

The lobby was next, and then the family room. Again family photos were still there, but now gifts and ornaments were taking up most of the space on the walls. He always enjoyed looking at the sports photos of him with different national teams, most of them England or Team GB, which Emma had cheekily hung up around a large USA flag.

Everywhere he looked he seemed to see another reason why he'd chosen the woman that he'd married, whether it was her energy or her ferocity, her approachability and friendliness, or her incredibly dry and cheeky sense of humour that was so strange coming from an American. It was all there.

He'd often find himself stopping to stare at the walls, at all the effort that he and his wife had put into making the place their own. He'd lost count of how many times he'd come down this route and forgotten what he was doing or where he was going, but not this time.

"Orange juice" he repeated to himself before his attention was taken completely by an old photo album that had been left out on the table.

The kitchen was perhaps the cleanest place in the apartment, mostly because Emma was obsessed with keeping it tidy. The rest of the home often built up so much clutter over time, but the kitchen was always neat and tidy. His wife had a habit of reorganizing the kitchen drawers whenever she was feeling frustrated, which happened quite often in their lives.

She's so cute about it though. I'd come home and she'd be in the kitchen with all of the drawers pulled out and stacked on the counter, completely empty. She'd look at me innocently as if she wasn't doing anything strange, but I knew her well enough to know she couldn't help herself.

The magnets that adorned the fridge kept his smile going, some of them were more pictures of the family, and some were little figures or letters. Down by his knees several blocky letter magnets were arranged to spell "J-MAN", no doubt put there by his son. That was his latest nickname, among the dozens of others he and Emma thought of whenever their son was around.