Reclaim - Aly Martinez Page 0,112
progress—changing and evolving faster than the seasons. But through it all, we held on to each other, leaned on each other, and loved each other without condition or restraint.
Around the five-year mark, time sped up for us. People had been asking us for years when we were going to settle down and get married. We always laughed because we were as settled as two people could get. It was just without a ring on her finger, which somehow made it less permanent. We didn’t need a ring or a piece of paper though. Nora and I were happy.
Until Thea had a baby.
Joseph James Stewart changed our lives all over again.
With Ramsey and Thea living in Washington State, we didn’t get to see them as often as any of us would have liked, but for Joseph’s first Thanksgiving, the whole Stewart/Hull/Cole family flew out.
Watching Nora’s blinding smile as she smothered that baby in kisses breathed an urgency into my veins that was somehow as primal as it was romantic.
We’d talked about kids. We both wanted them. It just never seemed like the right time.
But hadn’t I been the one to once tell her that time was wasting?
We were lying in bed later that night when she announced, “I want a baby.”
“Oh, thank God,” I breathed, slapping a hand over my heart. “I’ve been sitting here for the last three hours trying to figure out how to ask you for a baby when I haven’t even proposed yet.”
She laughed. “You don’t have to propose. I locked you down years ago.”
Rolling onto my side, I brushed the hair off her face and asked, “Okay, but what if I want to get married? And not just because I want babies, but also because I want a baby and have loved you my entire life and, while our love has never been anything other than forever, maybe it’s time we let the world in on that?”
She leaned in and brushed her nose with mine, murmuring, “Then let’s get married.”
It wasn’t exactly a proposal, but it was us.
We went ring shopping as soon as we got home, where she picked out a modest diamond that made me roll my eyes. It was safe to say it was not the rock I slid onto her finger when I got down on one knee later that night after a candlelit dinner that, while cliché, also made her cry, so I took it as a win.
We might have dated for five years, but Nora and I went from zero to sixty in a matter of weeks after that. Not even a month later, we surprised the whole family with a beach wedding in Jamaica. It was something fun and different for us, even if Thea was pissed we hadn’t let her plan the trip. It also served as something Nora would later call a babymoon because Owen Ramsey Cole was born nine months later.
That little boy immediately became our entire world. As I’d expected, Nora was an incredible mom, and to hear her tell it, I was doing a damn good job breaking the mold from my childhood too.
Ramsey and I gently set the giant Christmas tree down, the tree stand making it even taller, but with mere inches to spare, it cleared the ceiling. Collectively, we all blew out a sigh of relief.
“All right.” I clapped. “Ladies, let the decorating begin. Ramsey and I will be—”
“Oh, no you don’t. We have lights to hang and popcorn to thread. Boys!” she called. “Time to decorate!”
A stampede of kids came barreling from the playroom. Ramsey and Thea had welcomed Andrew a few months before Owen was born, so along with Joseph, those three were like a pack of wolves destroying everything in their path.
Owen slammed on the brakes the minute he saw me, skidding across the wood floor on socked feet. “Daddy!” he yelled as though I’d just come back from war and not a twenty-minute trip to pick up the tree. He was a daddy’s boy.
And yeah, I fucking loved it.
It was scary how much he looked like me. His hair was darker, but the blue eyes were mine—something that thrilled his mother.
My mother, on the other hand, had never come around to the idea of me being with Nora. We hadn’t spoken in years, but after Owen was born, I’d thought she’d at least want to know she had a grandson. She hung up on me. And to be honest, it was startling how much I did not