I’m sitting on the porch when Lucas arrives home, fanning myself with a booklet. I don’t get up to greet him.
“I’m too fat to get up and greet you!” I call, and he strides over and kisses me on the mouth, deep and passionate as the very first time.
“You’re beautiful,” he says. “You hear that?” He gets to his knees and places both his hands on my massively expanded tummy. “Your mommy is the most beautiful, wonderful, amazing woman in the world, you hear?”
I reach out to muss Lucas’s hair and grin. It’s so cute the way he talks to the bump. And it’s not only now that the bump is huge and cumbersome. He’s been doing it since a few weeks after I moved in, when we found out I was pregnant.
“And your daddy is a charmer,” I say.
“Better believe it, little bird,” says Lucas. Every time he calls me that I go a bit gooey. “And you agreed to marry me. But I guess I have that kind of woman, huh? Any man alive who wouldn’t work his ass off every day to charm someone as beautiful as you would be a fool.”
“My feet look like balloons,” I say, deadpan.
“I love balloons,” he says, and he gets on his hands and knees to try and kiss my bare feet. I squeal and giggle and try to bat him away, and soon we’re both in fits of laughter. He scoops me up from my chair as though I were light as a feather, and starts to carries me inside.