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In the end, all it had taken was for Joey to accept Bannon Bullock’s invitation to Homecoming last year. One look at the basketball captain’s wandering hands on the dance floor, and Jax had finally laid claim. Joey’s virginity had lasted all of a week after that.
“Please. You can’t use that excuse until they’re actually here,” Beckett argued. “There’s no crying, no diapers, no late-night feedings.” “Are you kidding me? There’s already crying and late-night feedings. Summer got matching onesies in the mail yesterday, and I found her sobbing over them and a bowl of cold spaghetti in the kitchen at midnight. She’s the one who ordered them!”
“Ladies,” he said, pulling the first plate off the tray. “Who gets the sausage sandwich?” Six hands flew up around the table, and then a riot of giggling erupted. “I’ll take that sausage off your hands, Jax.” A breathy blonde fluttered her eyelashes at him. Moon Beam Parker, with her waist-length, stick straight hair and pale blue eyes, wasn’t one to shy away from the Pierce men.
“It’s not just about you. Hell yes, I want to be tied to you in every way I can be, and I want to see every dream of yours come true, but I also want what’s best for this place, for our family—because they’re as much yours as they are mine—and it just so happens that this works out for everyone. But it doesn’t work without you. I need you. We need you.”
“God, you’re sexy when you know stuff,” Gia sighed. She took her husband’s face in her hands and gave him an R-rated kiss.
“Sure you can.” Summer grinned. “It’s called being honest. Jax is a big boy. And if there’s a family resemblance down there, he’s a very big boy.” Gia snickered. “Sorry, pregnancy hormones. Where was I before the penis sidetrack?”
“Huh,” Joey said. “Are we just going to pretend that it’s not weird having Summer giving advice about honesty in relationships?” “Har har. Very funny. I’ll have you know I’m a reformed dishonest relationship haver.”
“Joey, what Summer here is trying to say between penis jokes is that you could have everything,” Gia told her.
Because I realized I didn’t have to change everyone else in my life to make me happy. I just had to remember who I was.”
That’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? Mattering. Connecting. Resonating.
“If we waited to go for something until we feel worthy, no one would ever do anything.” “But if I can make a go of this place—” “If you can, you can. If you can’t, you’ll do something else. That’s what life is all about. Living. Trying. Loving.”
“Don’t ever let anyone make you feel less than, and that includes yourself,”
What did matter is we took a moment, a slice of a day, and did with it exactly as we wished. A lesson I could never iterate in a father’s lecture but one so essential to the way a man lives. Find your slice and live it.
I’d learned long ago that actions spoke louder than words with my Phoebe. A man could say “I love you” ‘til he was blue in the face, but send her out on the porch with fresh lemonade while I do the dishes or surprise her with a ridiculous and completely sappy bouquet of flowers picked in the fields, and she heard me loud and clear.
Joey read the text and made a hmm noise. “What’s that noise mean?” Jax asked. “Your mom just said I’m one of her kids, which makes what we just did in this bed illegal and gross.”
“Well, I like Al. She loves you in like a family way. Like if anyone here tried to screw you out of something, I could see her showing up at their house with a chainsaw and a smile.”
There is nothing like being a parent. A piece of you is walking around the earth maybe with your eyes and your wife’s smile. And that piece of you has to grow up and build his or her own life, feel the pain of that life, and find the joy in that life. When you see that piece of you hurt and scared, it is a horrible, helpless feeling. Because you just want to fix it, swoop in and take over and solve the problems and protect them from this hurt.
But you can’t. Because they aren’t just a piece of you. They are a human being learning how to survive and thrive in this world. And if you clean up every mess and bandage every scrape and shield them from every hurt, you take that self-reliance away from them. And that is what turns children into good men and women.
It was one of the dangers of love so young. Being half of a couple often comes before being a whole person.
She’d effectively shut down every attempt by Summer and Gia to talk it out or commiserate or whatever else girls wanted to do when their feelings were hurt by idiots with penises.
“Hmm. Well, you know there’s really only one thing that’s going to repair your relationship with me since you’ve been lying to me for all these years,” Joey said, delicately sipping her tea. Phoebe rolled her eyes and pulled a battered recipe card out from under the couch cushion. “Mercenary,” she said. “Thank you, Great-Aunt Felicia,” Joey said, triumphantly holding up the raspberry cream cheese coffee cake recipe.
