Page 34

SIXTEEN MONTHS LATER

NAVY

“Wake up, sleepyhead!”

I opened my eyes and frowned at Dalisay before I asked, “What’s wrong with you?”

“I want to be out on the water when the sun comes up.”

I sat up in bed and ran my hands over my face before I put my feet on the floor and looked up at my wife. “What’s wrong?”

“Do I need to speak slower or rephrase my request?”

I ignored her tone and as I walked toward the bathroom to brush my teeth I asked, “What’s the temperature?”

“It’s 55 degrees. You’re gonna need a wetsuit.”

I leaned back to look at Dali through the doorway and asked around the toothbrush in my mouth, “Did I do something wrong?”

“I don’t know. Did you?” When I frowned at her, she frowned back before she stomped one of her feet and yelled, “Can you please just . . .” Dali closed her eyes and took a deep breath before, in a calmer voice, she asked, “Can you please put on a wetsuit and go out on the water with me?”

The last few months had been hard on my wife, and as much as I had tried to be understanding, sometimes just hearing my voice pissed her off. She was going through a lot right now. I understood that because I was feeling it too.

In the hopes of having a child (or two, if we were lucky), we had stopped using any form of birth control the day we got married.

After a few months of no success, Dali turned to her aunts for guidance and tried all the natural remedies they suggested to try and boost her fertility.

I hated the thought of not knowing if it might be my body at fault, so I scheduled an appointment with my doctor so I could get my sperm count checked.

When it came back better than average, that caused Dali to spiral even further into trying everything she could to get pregnant.

We had sex in every conceivable position, which I didn’t mind at all, until a few months ago when it started to feel like an assignment rather than passion.

I didn’t voice that out loud because I liked my head attached firmly to my neck, but she started to feel it, too, and backed off a little bit.

She eventually started to accept that we may need professional help with conception, and Dali scheduled an appointment with a fertility doctor.

His initial tests came back with mixed results.

He explained that Dali was healthy and able to conceive a child, but with her age, it was just going to get more and more difficult.

He started her on shots and pills that would help boost her hormones and system and gave us a timeline of how we should progress if those didn’t help.

The shots made her difficult to live with - so difficult that I found myself avoiding her when I should have been beside her through it all.

It took an intervention from Corrie and Jodie to make her see that her behavior was borderline obsessive.

The girls swept her away for the weekend to help her relax and take her mind off things, and when she came back, it seemed like she had finally decided to let nature take its course.

Dali put on a brave face and announced that if it was meant to be, it would happen and then cried at night when she thought I was sleeping. The crying gradually slacked off until she was pretty much her old self.

But then the gloom seemed to take over, and a few months ago, my Dali turned into a woman I didn’t recognize. Worse than that, she turned into a woman that she didn’t recognize.

Our early morning surfing sessions had turned into early morning arguments and our late night snuggles became late night bickering.

Suddenly, she had taken issue with my breathing, saying it was too loud, and then she wondered if I’d always blinked this often.

There was a laundry list of other complaints, but those were the two hardest to overcome.

When I asked for advice from my father and brother-in-law, they both laughed at me and said I should be glad she hadn’t tried to poison my coffee yet.

And now, we were headed out on a cool morning into even colder water, and it seemed like she was doing her best to control her abject hatred of everything I said or did, which felt promising.

No matter how much I wanted to please her, I couldn’t stop breathing or blinking, but I had figured out how to chew more quietly than before and made sure I never wiggled my toes while we were laying in bed beside each other.

Honestly, that was almost as difficult as forcing myself to blink less often.

Once I had my wetsuit on, I followed Dali down the stairs to the storage room where we kept our boards, and within minutes, we were out on the water - the one place we could go where I didn’t seem to piss her off every other second.

By the time we got far enough out to enjoy the calmness around us, I had decided to approach my wife with an idea I’d come up with a few months ago.

As soon as we were both sitting up on our boards, I reached out and took her hand before I said, “Dali, I love you more than life itself and always will, but I think we need to get a divorce.”

“ What ?” Dali screamed.

“Hear me out, babe. It’s not in the cards for us to have a baby, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have one on your own.

There are so many children out there who need a loving home that it only makes sense for one or two of them to be raised by a wonderful woman like you.

But you can’t do that married to me. With my record, there’s not a chance in hell that any adoption agency would give you the time of day, but if we get a divorce and live separately for a while, you can get the process started.

Once you’re in the clear and the kids are yours forever, we’ll invite all the boys and their women to town and have the blowout wedding we didn’t have the first time. ”

“You’d let me go so I could become a mom?” Dali asked. When I nodded, she burst into tears and wailed, “That’s so fucking sweet, Navy!”

“I can have the papers drawn up this afternoon, and if we . . .”

“I’m pregnant!” Suddenly, all of Dali’s dreams came true. Not only was she going to have a baby, but I’d completely forgotten how to breathe and blink altogether. There was a dark haze at the edge of my vision when Dali poked me in the chest and asked, “Aren’t you going to say something?”

I finally sucked in a breath and then coughed a few times before I asked, “How far along are you?”

“I don’t know. I know I said I wasn’t going to get my hopes up anymore, but remember when you started getting onto me about eating better and taking care of myself?”

“Yeah.”

“I stopped eating because I was feeling sick. I thought maybe I was giving myself an ulcer or something, so I scheduled an appointment with my GP. She did a pregnancy test as part of my workup, and it came back positive.”

“Holy shit.”

“That doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods, but I wanted to tell you so badly that I just couldn’t wait”

“And I was gone last night,” I said sadly.

“You were doing bad things to bad people, and I’ll never fault you for that. However, after the baby gets here, I’m gonna need you to schedule those around his sleep patterns, okay?”

“His, huh?”

“His. Hers. Either is fine with me. All I know is that there’s a baby in our future that’s a little bit of me and a little bit of you and I already love it.”

“And I love you,” I said as I leaned over to kiss her, careful not to tip either of us as I did.

“You’d give me up to make me happy?” Dali asked.

“I never said I’d give you up, baby. I said that we’d divorce and live separately. But, as you know, I've gotten really good at sneaking in and out of places, and I’ll be damned if I ever spend a night away from my wife unless I absolutely have to.”

“Who’d have thought that the boy I had a crush on would turn into the love of my life?”

“You did, Dali, and when you want something, you never give up until you get it.”

“I’m stubborn like that, but you’re the perfect man for me, so it all worked out in the end.”

“Does this mean I can start blinking normally and wiggling my toes?”

Dali smiled before she kissed me again. When she finally pulled away, she whispered, “Don’t push it.”

THE END