Epilogue.
There's no one in the entire world who would plan to get married two weeks after getting engaged.
Except for Roger and Rosie.
It was two weeks of her asking him about the reception, what time they should get married, how many people should come. And him only being interested in the dinner portion of this process (but he did help out with a lot of the things as well).
But the absolute one that fucked them off the most is the location.
Rosie didn't have any preference since she didn't really have a surviving family in Croatia, but Roger really preferred for it to be somewhere sentimental. Like, Annecy, or Berlin. But the costs and time to plan out their wedding weren't ideal for them. They wanted to get married before tour started.
It ended up being London.
The city where Rosie fell hard, head over heels for this British guy with a big nose, and the same place where Roger figured out—She's it. I'm going to spend my entire life with her. And despite their ups and downs, that happened to be true.
Because of course, couples who get engaged on their driveway always stay together.
And that's a fact. Rosie and Roger are the living epitome of it.
"And they say you can't plan a wedding in two weeks," Rosie whispered to her, now-husband, Roger with her head resting upon his shoulder. She held out a fist. "Teamwork."
He laughed. He can't believe that this woman—this piece of artwork that God has sent to him—is his wife. "Teamwork," and he fist bumps her. "God, I can't believe you agreed to marry me."
"Well, the deal is done." She intertwines their hands together. "I'm stuck with you."
Their engagement was a quite the talk at the studio. Rosie's co-workers were of course supportive of the twenty-eight year old Croat and the next stage of her life. But the team—oh boy, they went fucking wild.
Engaged? You just got engaged this morning?
It was from John to the Freddie to Brian to Chrissie to Veronica to Mary and to their staff that the news had spread. Not to mention Jonas who was so excited for having somehow made the couple be together. Roger's family knew about it soon as well—Winnie, his mum, literally sobbed her eyes out on the phone with them because Rosie was going to be her daughter-in-law! And the fact that Roger got his shit together and was going to finally get married, she sent her congratulations to her thirty year old son and her twenty-eight-year-old now soon to be daughter-in-law who also returned a thanks for the relationship advice she gave each of them some weeks back , his sister who just about lost her shit, and William, his brother-in-law to which it was a surprise to because he never really expected Roger to pop the question anytime soon.
And the last of them all—social media.
It was quite a weird photo for an engagement post. Roger had asked a neighbour to take a photo of them in front of their garage with Rosie still in her red sweater and Batman sweatpants, but he was so eager to share it with the entire world, he could care less if out of all places—they got engaged in their driveway.
To Rosie's surprise, it was quite a news story in Croatia, and as a result, she had reconnected with some of her childhood friends in Dubrovnik. One of them being Nevenka, the girl whose family practically kept her alive, fed her, nourished her and saved her from the wrath of her mother's alcoholism. After ten years, they finally met once again the day of the wedding. Let's just say some tears were shed when she surprised Rosie in her dressing room.
But the biggest crybaby of all was Roger.
The day of the engagement, he cried on the phone with his mom. But after that, he went back to strong and mighty Rog...up until the actual wedding day because he couldn't wrap his mind around the fact that he was marrying Rosie.
When the doors opened at the end of the aisle to reveal Rosie—hair donned in possibly the most beautiful and complex thing ever and the white dress, ballgown-style and detailed with the train right behind her—he cried.
Is this real? He sniffed, his jaw left slightly ajar as he stared at the beauty that was now his wife. Is this real life?
Roger's best man, John, actually had to come over and see if he was alright because he was crying quite a lot. But it was tears of joy, and him screaming I can't believe I'm marrying her over and over for about one hundred times.
A walk down the aisle and eight million tears later, and Ružica Špiljak became Ružica Špiljak-Taylor.
Maybe they were a few weeks late, and maybe this might be the weirdest wedding ever, but there wasn't anything else that they could have ever wished for.
They actually left the wedding reception an hour earlier because they really wanted to go home. Everyone was having such a good time, but they were tired. Okay, maybe Rosie was the only one who was tired because Roger had other plans in the bedroom that night...
Which proved to be a hassle the next morning because they were rushing around the house in order to make it to their honeymoon flight to Geneva, Switzerland (Roger suggested that they honeymoon south of France, but Rosie said she didn't want to be "basic" like all the other married couples).
Also, thanks to a Swiss friend they had who gave them all the tips and mouth-watering good restaurants of all of Switzerland, Roger and Rosie made the best of their honeymoon. And by that, Roger had to shed off a couple of pounds when he got back to London.
Rosie indeed did not feel like the same Rosie that cried herself to sleep on their eighth anniversary. Neither did Roger.
This thirty reasons why thing went from this desperate act of saving their relationship to renewing it and them into the greatest versions of themselves. It's no longer long and invasive arguments but it's her climbing into his arms after a long day and resting her head on his chest as he runs his fingers through her hair. And it's falling in love with each other everyday, minute by minute, one second at a time.
A relationship is hard to maintain, they've both come to terms with that.
Maybe they weren't the best at trying to keep it the past couple of months, but you can count on them to work harder now. Because these wedding bands aren't coming off any time soon.
Make it three months later, and Rosie has finally opened up about her mother's alcoholism. No longer is she ashamed of it and the outcomes, but more on sharing the consequences of alcohol abuse within the world.
She has bloomed and blossomed into things she never thought to achieve. Self-love, acceptance, and understanding. She knows that things will never go as planned because that's just how it is.
Every day, when wakes up, she kisses Roger on the lips and giggles when his nose scrunches. Her hand caresses his cheek, and his to her nose, and that is when they realise how fucking in love they are with each other.
When Roger turned to the grand old age of thirty-one, Rosie celebrated. More notably, an Instagram post with the caption thirty one has never looked so good.
Because honestly, he does look so good. She doesn't know how he pulls it off.
All he does is joke about being old, but Rosie thought otherwise. Thirty-three is the new twenty-one, Rog!
But when she turned twenty-nine, she is heading towards the big thirty, though she doesn't look a day over twenty-two. Her mind is on other things—she is regularly keeping up with Nevenka, and Roger keeps trailing his fingertips on the skin of her belly.
And on their nine year anniversary, they celebrated it right at the clock—midnight. It was a walk through London, hand in hand with a brief stop to a supermarket because they wanted ice cream.
It's dark and peaceful, much unlike their precious anniversaries. Not of old age, the spark is still lit bright inside of them, but sometimes you just want something different. And on this day, they are smiling and laughing under a street lamp as Rosie's hands land on Roger's chest, bringing their lips together for one of millions of kisses.
Five weeks after, and after a week of morning sickness and vomiting, Roger waited on the couch in the living room for Rosie to arrive home from the doctor's.
She had been quite sick lately—headaches, vomiting, not to mention her period was way overdue. So it came to their conclusion that Rosie could possibly be pregnant, which was a fifty-fifty chance considering that she was on birth control and occasionally forgot to take it, so Roger is trying not to get his hopes up.
When she came home, he immediately came right up to her, and she pulled out a picture—a sonogram—from her backpack.
"I'm seven weeks pregnant."
A full range of emotions overwhelms him as he grins and scoops Rosie into a hug. This is amazing—he feels happy like never before.
Roger was going to become a father!
But Rosie? He actually can't tell if she's happy or sad because she's crying.
"Ljubav, baby, why are you crying? We're having a baby!"
"I know we are!" she exclaims, smiling. "I never thought it would actually happen."
He pulls her closer into the hug where her head lays on his chest, and her hands rests on his back, tugging his sweater. "We're having a baby. Our kid. Can you believe this? God, this is the best day ever."
(He lied. The greatest day ever was their wedding day.)
And it seemed that she had forgotten that it's going to be quite a while before she can actually have the baby because when she was told that her due date would be around mid-March. But trust me, she was ecstatic about the little human growing in her womb.
The news was made public on her fifth month of pregnancy, and she was beginning to show by then.
(Before, she had told all of her suspecting co-workers, "Oh, don't worry about it. I'm just fat.")
"I do look kinda fat, huh?" She looked at herself in the mirror, in a dress that used to her flatter her body so nicely now interrupted by her small bump.
She had gained some weight from the pregnancy, and she wasn't used to having such a belly. It was a shocker to her—maybe she hadn't thought of this whole pregnant thing all the way through.
But Roger thinks she is gorgeous in every way possible, even if she does gain ten pounds from this kid he put inside of her. He wrapped his arms around her waist and hands on his growing child. "What fat? If any of us need to work out, it's me. I need to lay off the potatoes."
"That's true, but—" She huffed. "Don't you think twenty-nine is a little too old to have a kid?"
"Too old?" Roger is in disbelief of this girl. She thinks that she's too old? "Look me! I'm thirty-one, and you're calling yourself old?"
"Okay, maybe I'm not that old."
The real question is—how is Rosie going to survive the pregnancy? By six months, they want to keep the gender of their child a secret until the actual day, but it's keeping her awake for countless night and by eight months, she takes her maternity leave from the studio.
She is constantly in their home, lying on the bed while eating a cheesecake Roger brought home just yesterday. Her hand rests on her belly by default, watching an episode of Hell's Kitchen with Roger alongside letting her rest her head upon his shoulder (she needed him to help because honestly, being pregnant gave her hell).
"I swear this kid better be a world class football star or a rockstar because mama didn't raise no quitter," she said. Pregnancy is a hard thing to endure. Their little kid is constantly keeping Rosie awake at night as she turns to one side and then to the other and back to the same one over and over again.
Roger laughed at her statement, nodding his head at the same time. "He has my genes. Of course he's going to be a world class rockstar, or he has yours, he can also be a world class footballer."
"Do you realise that our kid has the options of playing for either Croatia or England? Do you realise how hard of a decision that is?"
"Not really. But he should play for England. Or the drums like me" Roger smiled at the thought of his little mini-me playing a small set of drums alongside him
"He?" Rosie raised an eyebrow at Roger. "I think it's going to be a girl. I can feel it."
He chuckled. "No, I really think it's going to be a boy."
"But I'm pregnant with the kid! Whatever—boy, girl, it can change, you know."
At thirty-eight weeks, Rosie is done with this pregnancy and is ready to pop this baby out of her body and call it a day. Her body is tired of carrying an actual human being, her entire body hurts, and not to mention—her bump gets in the way of everything.
When Roger presses his body close to hers, he always seems to forget that there's a bump in between them. And as a result, they can't even have sex because of it.
But apparently, their baby has already inherited Rosie's sorry I'm late genes.
It's already March and way past the due date, and at this point, Rosie just came to live with the fact that the baby is late. She had contractions there and there, but she was glad that she didn't have to endure labor yet.
She walks around the studio during on a concert day, an hour before it even begins, and she doesn't even care if she's on maternity leave and technically not supposed to be there. She is the epitome of "fuck you I do what I want" after all.
At forty weeks, her belly has grown quite big. Roger compared it as to how many footballs could fit in there, earning himself a death glare from his pregnant wife.
"What if it never comes out?"
"It's going to come out some time, ljubav." Roger rubs circles on her arm as he sits next to her, fully clad in his rock god clothing. The band is playing today, and he's excited, but he can't pass off an opportunity with his wife before going with the boys. "The doctor said it should be coming out either this week or next week, if not, we can always go back and you can get induced if you'd like. Just give it some time."
Rosie nods, before kissing him and leaving for her seat with the crowd. But she doesn't even make it far when she stops, hands on the wall as she receives another contraction.
Contractions are a bitch, she thought, putting her hand on her belly. They're stronger this time, leaving her grimacing in pain against a wall, and she doesn't even notice what's happening until there's liquid on the floor.
Of course, out of all the situations, their child decides to be born right before a concert.
I can't believe this kid. She quickly waddles back, finding Roger talking with John and Brian, tapping his shoulder.
He looks back to find his wife holding her belly with a sour expression. "Rosie? What are you—"
"My water broke."
"Your—what?"
The baby is coming.
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Roger's eyes were practically popping out of the sockets because his wife is in labor, and he's about to become a father, but more importantly, she's literally going to explode if he doesn't take her to a hospital now.
Explaining the entire situation to the person in charge of the concert and basically everyone possible, changing back into his street clothes, getting her in the car, her making a fuss about the liquid getting everywhere, dragging her into the emergency room, demanding that his wife be in a room, and what seemed like thirty million years later, he's holding her hand as she's in the middle of birth.
Her forehead is sweaty, she's crying as the doctor tells her to push, squeezing Roger's hand with a death defying grip.
"I'm never having sex ever again," she pants.
"Are you sure about that?"
"Fuck you, Roger," she hissed, unamused from his remark. "You put this kid inside of me, and you are going to hear me push a human out of my body."
"Push again!" the doctor chimed. "Push again, Ms. Špil—"
"Taylor!" Rosie exclaimed, her breathing heavy. "It's Mrs. Taylor! I've told you a million times already, I'm married!"
Roger laughed at her yelling. After all, he did marry her.
And it was a good thing he did, because she became the mother of his child. Their daughter.
The birthing process was a literal pain down there, and Rosie exclaim multiple times that she wanted a break, but it all worth it the moment she heard her daughter's screams throughout the hospital room.
Roger was there for it all. The drive to the hospital, the contractions, the birth and now, he cut the umbilical cord, crying.
He was a dad. At the grand old age of thirty-one he finally became a father.
He called Mama Taylor about the birth of their healthy baby daughter, and she was right on the next flight to London. Mama Taylor finally got her dream grandchild. Roger's nephew and niece finally had another cousin to play with.
When he first held his daughter in his arms, wrapped in a blanket, he smiled. "She has my eyes, ljubav. I hope she's not as blind as me. And she has your nose, thank God. She's not going to be walking around with my big nose."
Rosie let out a breathy chuckle. "So, what's her name?"
Roger paused. He blinked at her, and she blinked back, waiting for an answer.
"Shit, we don't have a name."
"No, we did!" she exclaimed. "Well, you did. But except you were so sure that it was going to be a boy that you only had male names."
Oops. "Łucja is a good—"
"No."
"Okay, what about Amalija? Vanja? Or Željka? That one is pretty cool."
"But those are all Croatian names, Roger."
"Then what do you have in mind then?"
Rosie kept quiet for a little bit, giggling at herself causing the Brit to look at her strangely. "Pants."
"No, we are not naming our daughter after your succulent that did not live past Berlin." Pants Taylor. His mother would kill him if he named her that. "I don't want our daughter to have such a basic name like Anna or Isabella. It should be unique, like her mother and father."
"That's true," she said, putting a thumb to her chin. "What do you think she looks like?"
"She looks like a Łucja. No, a Świętosława. She looks like a Świętosława."
Rosie sighed. "I'm not going to name my child a name that I can't even spell, Roger. And when the fuck did you do so much research on Croatian names?"
"A few weeks ago...Okay, well, I for one think that since you're named after a flower, that it's appropriate for her to be as well. So I think we should call her Daisy."
"No."
"Then what?"
Rosie paused and just looked at their baby.
She was so beautiful—Rosie's nose, Roger's eyes, and everything in between, who knew they could make such good looking children? Though, Roger would say that's Rosie's gene, and she would say the same about him. Either way, their baby needs a name, but she can't stop thinking about the fact that they made her, and she placed her in this world.
"She looks like a Poppy."
Roger tilted his head a little. "Poppy?"
"Mhm."
She looked up to find Roger in a thinking stance, his eyes aimlessly looking at the corner of the room before reverting his focus back on their child. He nodded. "We have a winner. Poppy Taylor."
And although she was as small as her mother, Poppy Taylor was a pain to care for. So much that Rosie thought all newborns were a pain in the ass to care for—the pregnancy, the birthing process, and caring for the little one every two hours to sing lullabies and feed her to put her back to sleep, only to repeat the same process two hours later.
Despite the fact that Roger was going to be gone most of the time, since Poppy had been born in March, it didn't strain the relationship between him and Rosie. He always had his fair share of waking up at four in the morning when he was back from tour to put Poppy back to sleep, changing diapers, and sleepless nights. And no matter how many times he's out of the house, Rosie only keeps falling in love with him over and over again.
Because in the end, he always comes back.
Now, it's midnight and Rosie lies in bed under the covers, waiting for Roger to come back from putting Poppy to sleep in her room. She's thirty years old now, Roger's at thirty-two, and Poppy—four months.
"She's asleep!" Roger walks triumphantly into the room after having spent almost an hour to put Poppy to bed. He falls into bed right next to Rosie. "I don't know how you manage to put her to bed in fifteen minutes."
She props herself up with an elbow. "I guess she is like me after all, minus the blue eyes. If we have another kid, I bet he'll be like you."
He nods. "I—uh..."
"What?"
"I want another one." This time he looks at her in the eyes, almost as if he were pouting. "Ljubav, I want another baby."
"Rog..." she groans, smiling at the same time.
"Why not? Come on, let's make another baby right here right now," he said, only to have her shake her head laughing and bury it in his chest. Soon, he joins in with the laughter and kisses the top of her head.
It's moments like these that makes him think that life is truly beautiful. Twenty-two year old Roger Taylor never really expected to live this kind of life, but here he is, married to the most amazing woman in the universe and father a lovely little Poppy.
As Rosie rolls over and lies on top of his chest, her hand goes to caress his cheek. "It's our ten year anniversary today," she breathes.
He smiles. "I know."
"Can you believe we've been together for ten years? Ten years!"
"And I'm glad to have spent those ten years with you. There's no one, and I mean no one, in their entire world that I would have rather been with ten years for. It's only you. It's always you."
She smiles, intertwining their hands together and leaning in for a kiss. "Do you think we can hold on for a couple more decades together?"
"Always."
THE END.