Page 116 of The Write Track
The wedding happened weeks later—we didn’t see the need to drag things out—in Salem. Our friends made the trip, more than happy to hang out in the place of my birth, and Mom and her friends threw an amazing party that stretched well into the wee hours of the night.
Our home was Savannah, but we returned to Salem once a season to spend two weeks with my mother. Nathan was as in love with the city as I was.
True to his word, Preston II kept a tight leash on his son. I hadn’t seen or heard from the third Preston since that day at the cabin. I had no doubt that he was still plotting, but his father wasn’t going to allow him to play that game. No, Preston II had reined in his son to the point that there were almost no sightings of him on the Boston social media radar. He’d completely disappeared.
Rumor had it his father had forced him to move his real estate business to Tucson, which would be a fate worse than death to Preston. The guy hated anything that wasn’t East Coast snobby. Tucson would have been a kick in the pants to the junior Preston.
I hoped he was choking on the heat.
As for Nathan’s father, he was currently dating a lovely woman named Minnie. I refused to let Nathan make fun of her name. She was sweet, and she forced Andrew out of his comfort zone regularly. He’d been on a cruise with her and a trip to the Galapagos. He seemed to be living his best life, with regular visits to Savannah mixed in.
I’d never met the father Nathan had been so scarred by, the one he’d grown up with. I absolutely adored the one he’d ended up with.
My mother still wasn’t dating—she said it wasn’t a priority—but I had hope she would find someone before it was all said and done. Not anybody who wanted to tame her, because Taffy Oakley couldn’t be tamed. The world wouldn’t be a better place if that happened. Somebody who embraced her, though, eccentricities and all.
Just like Nathan had embraced me.
Speaking of my husband, as with everything in our relationship, the addition of a new soul had been fast. We hadn’t even been married a year, and we’d both agreed we wanted time together to enjoy being newlyweds. We hadn’t waited, though. Missing my period had been a surprise. Confirmation from the doctor had been a bigger surprise—it hadn’t been just the stress of a new deadline after all.
I’d been nervous when I told Nathan. Not afraid or anything—I knew he would go with the flow—but nervous because we weren’t prepared. He’d sold his house, and we were living together in my rental as we searched for the perfect place. We weren’t ready for a baby.
That didn’t stop him from whooping it up when I told him. He pumped his fist and proclaimed himself the most virile man in the world to get past all the birth control.
I just laughed. He was always funny, even when he was a moron, which was quite often.
He told me things would work out. We had time to find a house.
Then, miracle of miracles, the right house had appeared out of nowhere.
It wasn’t quite downtown, but it was only two blocks away. The house was big, with space enough for a guest room, a joint office, two baby rooms—you know, just in case we wanted a second one—and a huge porch that wrapped around the entire main floor. The best thing, though, was the backyard, which would allow Nathan to play whatever games he wanted to play with our future children, the first of which was a girl.
I thought telling him I was pregnant way before we were ready would be the worst part. I was wrong. Arguing about names was turning into a tempestuous cycle.
We were going through names of the final girls of our favorite movies to find inspiration. It wasn’t going well.
“What sucks is that the majority of the final girls were named decades ago, and all the names are dated,” he complained, his fingers dancing over my stomach. I was just easing out of the first trimester—thankfully, the morning puking was gone—and we were preparing to throw a party to tell all our friends. They were still in the dark.
We wanted to have a name to attach to the announcement. So far, that wasn’t going well.
“That is a problem,” I agreed. “I’m not screaming for a full twenty-four hours to push out a Nancy.” I cringed just thinking about it. “I want something cool and hip.”
“You do realize that people who use the word ‘hip’ aren’t actually hip, right?”
I ignored him. “What about Sally?”
“FromThe Texas Chainsaw Massacre?” He cocked his head, considering. “Sally Cooper.” He tried the name on for size. “That doesn’t feel right.”
“No,” I agreed, making a growling noise deep in my throat. “What about Erin, from the remake?”
“Pass. What about Alice?”
“From the fourthA Nightmare on Elm Street?”
He nodded.
“Pass. She’ll get teased about Wonderland too much.”
“Good point.” His fingers danced across my belly, which was mostly still flat. I’d tried forcing him to tell me he could see the bulge a few times, but he refused. He said he’d been trained never to comment on a woman’s weight, and it was one rule he followed religiously.
