To Thatch and Cassie: You’re still assholes.
New York, NY
I offered a wave and a nod toward two of the doormen of my building and stepped onto one of the private penthouse elevators.
For a Wednesday, the official hump day of the week, today had dragged on like a motherfluffer, but now that I was finally home, I couldn’t have been happier. I had a new wife with the perkiest set of chest balloons in the free world and a baby on the way.
A family might not have been in line with a younger Thatcher Kelly’s priorities, but these days, with the help of sappy suckers like my buddy Kline Brooks, I was starting to understand what real luck looked like.
On the ride straight up twenty floors, I sang “Walking on Sunshine” in my head, whistling and adding a bee bop bippity in between all the lines of the chorus. I was obnoxious, but I didn’t care. Men with the world at their fingertips should be annoyingly happy. We should sing and dance and just about shit our pants to talk about all the awesome stuff we had going for us anytime someone presented the opportunity.
The elevator dinged its arrival, and with a hitch in my step and a big-ass grin on my face, I stepped off and directly into my wife’s and my Manhattan penthouse.
Yes, that’s right, my wife.
Just last weekend, in Phoenix, Arizona, I’d proposed to Cassie and finally convinced her to marry me. And I hadn’t wasted any time. Right then, after she’d said “yes,” in the middle of a football field with our nearest and dearest by our sides, together, we’d said “I do.”
Now that I was officially off the market, I was sure there were millions of sad ladies out there, but what could I say? I was a happily married man, and that was never going to change.
There was no other woman out there for me. Cassie was my soul’s beautiful, wild, and sometimes completely insane counterpart.
We fit together like a nut and bolt, and getting her to marry me was, hands down, the best achievement of my life. Well, that and knocking her up with my son. It was hard to believe, but in just a little under seven months, our baby boy would be here.
I can’t fucking wait.
“Honey, I’m home!” I called out as I slid off my shoes and headed down the long entry hall and toward the kitchen.
“Did you get the Chipotle?”
Just hearing her voice made me smile like a fucking lunatic. Whenever I was away from Cassie for the whole day, the sound of her voice was like a real-life angel had been sent to earth just for me. It wasn’t that I was completely codependent, but a man’s dick learned the sound of its siren’s call, just like Pavlov’s dogs learned to anticipate the sound of that fluffing bell.
“What? I was supposed to get Chipotle?” I questioned teasingly, even though right here in my big hand was the brown paper carryout bag filled with our food. My girl was one of the best at jokes, and playfulness was kind of our thing. If one of us wasn’t screwing with the other, something was off in our world.
“You didn’t get my burrito?” she screeched, her voice dropping to a scary, demon-like octave and stopping me in my tracks.
Ah, fuck. I had to stop doing that.
Seriously.
Crazy Cassie could take—and dish out—jokes and pranks with the best of ’em, but pregnant Crazy Cassie was on another level, and somehow, I was always forgetting that. Pregnancy hormones, the evil fuckers, sometimes made it feel like she’d been possessed by an extremely angry female who enjoyed telling me how much she’s learned from true crime shows a little too much.
“I’m kidding, honey!” I quickly corrected. “I have the Chipotle!”
Truth be told, because of Cass’s current food cravings, we’d had Chipotle every night this week. But you wouldn’t see me complaining about that, intestinal repercussions or not. No fluffing way. I would shit my brains out until we filled the entire New York sewer system if that meant making Cassie Kelly happy.
When I stepped into the kitchen, my beautiful wife was standing by the counter, her perfect braless tits practically spilling out of her tank top, her belly ever-so-slightly rounded out—only showing if I looked at it hard enough—and a defined scowl on her face.
“Thatcher, I swear, I thought I was almost going to have to murder you.”
See what I mean?
“No homicide necessary.” I held up the bag as evidence that I should live to see another day. “I got your burrito. Just the way you like it.”
Without saying a word, she snatched the bag from my hand, grabbed some napkins and plates and cutlery from the cabinet, and walked into the living room. All I could do was stare at her unbelievably juicy ass as she went.
“Wait…we’re not eating at the table?”
“Fluff no!” she called over her shoulder. “A rerun of last year’s National Spelling Bee is on tonight!”
Oh, hell yes. Watching those genius little fuckers had become one of Cass’s and my favorite pastimes. In the past month alone, we’d probably binge-watched the last ten years’ worth of National Spelling Bees. I couldn’t specifically prove that the bun in her oven was going to be able to destroy each and every one of them, but I’d be willing to defend it as more than a feeling. You didn’t mix together the DNA of my wife and me without getting a pretty smart little genetic cocktail out of it. As a Kelly, I was blessed with both brains and brawn. Dick and wit. Girth and mirth.
Honestly, having me as a father was pretty much like winning the jackpot in the chromosomal lotto.
With the television on and last year’s National Spelling Bee front and center on the screen, and Cassie and her glorious tits sitting beside me on the couch, I unwrapped and plated our burritos and passed my wife’s plate to the top of her curled-up knees before even glancing at my own.
Damn, this is going to be a good night.
Good food. Good company. Good sex.
I looked forward to it all.
Cassie sighed contently and bit into her food like an adorable savage. Satisfied that she was all set, I picked up my own burrito and leaned over my plate on the coffee table to scarf down a big bite without dropping all the fillings everywhere, and I looked to the TV over the top of it.
A little brunette by the name of Kelsey Mahir walked to the front of the stage. She couldn’t have been older than nine, and she looked fluffing focused.
“Eudaemonic,” the spelling bee pronouncer stated.
“Eu-dae-monic,” Kelsey repeated. “What is the definition?”
“Eudaemonic means producing happiness.”
Kelsey stood there, her little brown pigtails hanging toward her face as she looked down at her shoes and tried to mentally work through the word in her head.
“C’mon, Kelsey!” I cheered toward the screen. “You fluffing got this, kid!”
“Spell the shit out of it, Kels!” Cassie chimed in, her focus completely fixated on the kid on the screen and her burrito currently ignored.
I almost reminded her to eat, but then I remembered that she was pregnant and, unless I wanted her to go praying mantis on my ass and bite my fucking head off, I needed to let pregnant Cassie do whatever pregnant Cassie wanted to do.
Instead, I quietly took bites of my burrito and waited patiently for the kid to spell her word. I felt a little like time was a vortex as she stood there, contemplating her answer, but you couldn’t really rush greatness.