Hollie Porter Builds a Raft

5. Our Raft, Our Rules

5

Our Raft, Our Rules

“Four to six weeks? Four to six weeks?”

Ryan stops rubbing my shoulders and tilts my head so he can kiss me upside down, like that scene in Spiderman, only without Spiderman and the rain and—never mind.

Four to six weeks?

He mutes the hockey game and pulls me up so we’re facing one another. “She’s just excited. Mom gets like this when there’s a big event on the horizon.”

“But isn’t an imminent baby enough to freak out about? Sarah’s going to explode if she gets any bigger. I was watching her belly today on the plane. It’s like ALIEN—the baby rolls and her whole belly does the wave.” I shudder. “Like it wanted to punch its way out and then eat everyone on the plane. And then we would’ve crashed and the mutant baby would’ve swum to shore and eaten all the people.”

“I’m canceling Netflix. It’s warping your imagination.”

“You didn’t see her belly.”

“Hollie Porter, how many babies did you deliver in your prior career?” Ryan smiles and tugs on my earlobe.

“It’s different when I don’t have to witness the actual event. Usually just a lot of screaming and the hee-hee-hoo breathing they teach at birthing classes, which can be remarkably loud in the telephone speaker. The paramedics or cops or whoever gets their first—they do all the dirty work. Emphasis on dirty.”

“But, Auntie Hollie, that’s your future niece or nephew in there. And he or she is gonna think the world of you.” Ryan’s eyes twinkle with an alarming amount of hope, a wistfulness that suggests he’s daydreaming about the future fruit of his own loin. And while a nice loin it is, let’s leave the fruit dreams for later.

“I don’t even know what I want in a wedding. Do you?” I have to get this conversation away from babies.

“You being there is important. Also, it would be nice if I get to peel you out of a dress at the end of the night …” He slinks his hand under my shirt and springs the clasp on my bra, but I slap him away and push his shoulders back with both hands.

“Ryan, I’m serious. If we don’t give your mother something to chew on …”

He cradles my ring hand atop his fingers. “Do you like it?”

“A little.”

He smiles, clenches my hand, and kisses my bejeweled finger.

“These two smaller diamonds are from one of my mother’s anniversary rings, from my dad.”

“Ryan …” I examine the setting with new eyes—the almost embarrassingly large center diamond offset by the two smaller but no less brilliant stones—a gift from Ryan’s father to the woman he adored, and now shared with me?

“She didn’t offer these before …” With Alyssa, he means. Alyssa, the beautifully perfect, model-fit former girlfriend who was almost Mrs. Ryan Fielding but bailed when she realized that the hockey-wife life she sought was not to be if she stuck around. “My mother—she knows this—us—it’s the real deal. She adores you, Hollie Porter, so whether it’s four weeks or six weeks or a Friday or a Tuesday or the last day in November four years from now, I want you to be happy. Whatever you want, I want. No pressure. Okay?”

But by this time, those big sloppy tears only sissy girls make are sliding down my face and then our lips are crushed together and Ryan whispers against my head, “Remember—our raft, our rules,” just before he returns his hands to freeing the girls from the confines of their lace and satin imprisonment.

(P.S. I’m grateful to share with you that they have fully recovered from the Great Sriracha Debacle of Burning Doom. Ryan and I have also discovered that whipped cream is wholly appropriate topping for use in bedroom sports.)