“You know she’s pregnant, right?” When it looked like he was winding her up for another spin, I clapped my hand over his arm and lowered it.
“Oh, you mean that’s why my best friend’s turned into a nerve-racked homicidal maniac?” Garth continued to dance with Rowen, just in a more worried-husband-approved kind of way.
“Haven’t realized the homicidal part yet, but I’m about to get there if you spin my pregnant wife one more time.”
Garth took a good look at me, his shoulders slumping. “Look, I’m sorry, Jess. Really. I know Rowen’s pregnant, and I know you’re trying to treat her like she’s some porcelain doll, but she looked like she needed to dance. And this is my party goddammit, and I wanted to dance too. So why don’t you upend that beer so you can get shit-faced and totally forget the whole thing?”
At the reminder of the beer, I was reminded of the water. Shoving the extra one in my back pocket, I unscrewed the other one and handed it to Rowen. “Drink please.”
She gave me a look but took the water. “Ditto.” Her eyes dropped to my beer. “Please.”
Garth watched me with that observant expression I wasn’t used to seeing on him until lately. Whenever he looked at me like that, I felt as if he was inspecting a bomb about to explode and trying to decide which wire to cut to keep it from detonating.
“Where’s Josie?” I asked, hoping if I found her, I could distract Garth from continuing to dance with Rowen.
“Close by,” he answered.
“Don’t you think you should find her? It is you guys’s engagement party, right? Aren’t you supposed to be together, you know, as an expression of your commitment to each other?”
Yeah, I was totally making that up as I went.
One side of Garth’s face creased. “Unlike some guys I know, I don’t feel the need to stifle the woman I love with my unending presence. We’re okay being away from each other. You might want to work on that, Jess. Before Rowen gets sick of always being in your shadow.”
When the skin between my brows creased, Rowen noticed it. She smiled and shook her head. “Getting sick of you? Not possible.”
The blaring sound of the band came to a next-to-screeching halt, then broke into something slower and softer. Now that, that was better. Rowen’s face ironed out with hope, giving me a look that required no words. I returned a look that needed no words either.
“I saved this one for you, Jess.” Garth held out Rowen’s hand for me, and I took it like I hadn’t held it in months. Her hand was hot and damp too.
An MIA fiancée appeared over Garth’s shoulder. “Dance with me, Black.” Josie slung an arm around his neck and kissed the side of it, already swaying to the music despite the unconventional stance.
“With the way you just asked me, hell, I couldn’t say no if you’d just handed me a knife and asked me to stab my heart with it.” Garth tilted his head back so their faces were aligned before kissing her.
After a few moments of that, Rowen steered us away from them some. “I can’t be that close to them when they’re that close to each other.”
A smile started to come over my face. The music had slowed, so had Rowen, and on the edge of the dance floor, it was cooler than an inferno. “A little PDA isn’t so bad.”
She blinked. “That’s a little PDA?” As quickly as she’d glanced at Garth and Josie, she glanced away. “Yeah, and I’m a little pregnant.”
By that point, Josie’s hand was sneaking under Garth’s shirt past his collar as their kissing entered the for-adults-only zone.
“They love each other. A lot. That’s how they express it. It’s not like they give a crap what anyone else thinks about how they show it.” I pulled Rowen to me and wrapped her in my arms. Her hands found their spot behind my neck as her head settled against my chest. I felt like I was able to exhale some of the air I’d been holding for hours.
“I love you. A lot,” she said, her words vibrating against my sternum. “I know I give those two a hard time about the public display thing, but if you ever wanted to, you know, give it a go . . .”
“What do you mean? I thought we already did.”
Her head tipped up enough she could look at me. “Well, yeah, we kiss, we hug, we hold hands—”
“We slow dance,” I added, moving her as slowly as I could and still be considered dancing instead of standing in place.
Her gaze roamed the masses around us. “What if we got crazy and added a little crazed kissing to our slow dancing and really spiced up our PDA repertoire?”
“That sounds a little . . . crazed . . . given your condition.”
“Which condition are you referring to? The one where I’m so sexually frustrated that when I finally implode, I’m going to become one gaping black hole in the galaxy?”
I looked around to see just how many people were getting an education in my wife’s sexual frustration. Didn’t look like anyone other than myself though.
“Because for that condition, crazed sounds ideal,” she added.
When I started to think about what I could tell she was thinking about, it didn’t take long before I’d arrived at the conclusion that crazed didn’t only sound ideal, it sounded pretty damn tempting.
“It has been so long since I’ve seen that look on your face, I’d started to wonder if it was gone for good, but look at that”—Rowen’s finger circled my face—“there it is in all its glory. The one that says one thousand different words, all of them deliciously filthy.”