Chapter 23

Chapter Twenty-Three

Nolia

The world comes back to me slowly. The first thing I feel is his weight on top of me. My hands come up to touch the muscles in his back so I can trace them up and down. The enormity of what we just did sinks in slowly and stills my hands.

He moves away from me without saying a word. I feel him slip from my body which immediately feels empty and like I lost something that's essential to me. He comes back and shocks a gasp out of me when he touches me with a wet washcloth. I try to stay still as he cleans me and looks me over. Only then does he toss the cloth into the sink and come back to me.

He takes my face in his hands, so our gazes meet and I can't look away from him, "No annulment."

"What?" Why would he…?

"You heard me, sunbeam." He switches from dead serious to light and happy again, giving me emotional whiplash. "I'll make us breakfast as soon as I clean up. Are you hungry?" His eyes pin me to the bed and leave me in a state of confusion.

"Don't get up."

He actually winks at me before making his exit into the bathroom. Leaving me with a whole room of what the fucks!

It's like that for the whole rest of our trip with him throwing me down on the nearest flat surface and making love to me every time I mention doing something about our little accident or about the fact that we have been going at it like rabbits…and I'm not on anything.

When we get back, I am automatically thrown into wedding planning with my sister. I want to make this the wedding of her dreams. Because I wonder if maybe she can have that then so can I. I might not have had the same kind of wedding - and what I can remember of it was beautiful and sentimental. I carefully stowed the white dress I was wearing and the pressed flowers I carried in a box to keep it safe once we got home - but maybe I could work hard enough, fight strong enough, to make it all real.

I throw so much of my energy into my sister's wedding that I know Rome has noticed. I come home exhausted and have begged off two public functions we were supposed to go to because of how tired I was. Weary and worn down. And not sure at all that I can work any harder to make Rome want to stay. He canceled the first event – a gala for some charity he wrote a check for - but the dinner, he went to by himself. I stayed up and cried myself to sleep.

No man is going to be alright with a woman who falls into their bed too exhausted to make love. Rome isn't going to be okay with that. And I'm left to wonder how much longer I have with him. And when I told him we were having a bridal sleepover at my mom's so we wouldn't be sleeping together he never said a word. We haven't slept apart since the evening we got married and now…

I push back the thoughts crowding my mind and focus solely on my big sister. I'll break down and bawl, throw a fit and scream, rage over my broken heart after she gets her happy ever after. And not a moment before.

I key back in on the conversation going on around me as Summer, Pearl, Kat, Bea, and Mom all sit on the floor and do each other's nails. It's become kind of a thing for the girls to meet to do each other's nails. It's more about the food and the talk than how good we all are at it and it's become something I hold dear that I don't think I'll have once me and Roman implode.

And there I go having to fight back tears for the thousandth time tonight.

"If you've been tired, like the most tired you have ever been in your life and you're crying at commercials, I think you might want to take the test, baby."

"Mom! I don't think I'm pregnant…yet."

"Uh-huh," Kat rolls her eyes and grins, "and we didn't think we were either. Now we could open a daycare with all the children coming in the next three to four months."

What now?

"Just pee on the damned stick. I want to know if we're going to have our babies around the same time or not." Pearl starts bouncing up and down with the request.

Oh shit!

A nauseous feeling rolls up from my soured belly as I start paying a whole lot more attention to what is going on around me.

"It will be a nice gift to give Roan if it comes back positive. And probably the only time you'll get to give him this since I doubt he will be leaving you alone after this." Mom turns her eyes toward the porch where Roan is sleeping.

"I'll go get it! Where, um…is it?"

"In the upstairs bathroom closet. I have like thirty of them just in case we need to do further testing so grab a bunch of them, sweetheart."

I gain my feet, but am unsteady as hell on the inside as I make my way up the stairs. While I grab four or five for my sister, I pocket three for myself and wait for the time I can slip away to do my own 'testing'.