I jerked on the lapels. “Don’t make me hurt you.”
He laughed. “Okay, okay. But I do have a question for you.”
Chance plucked my hand off his jacket and slipped a ring on my finger. “How’s this one?”
I pulled my hand away to look at it. The stone glittered in the lamplight, brighter and bigger than it should have been.
“How did you afford this? I know what you make!” I couldn’t stop staring at it.
“Mom sent me hers to trade in for something new. She wanted you to have the best.”
Tears pricked my eyes. “Is she still asking if I’ve fixed my hair?”
“Nope,” he said. “She knows you’re kind of stuck until the baby’s born.”
It was true. It turned out that hair dye was bad for babies, so I’d been chalking my roots with various colors. I looked like a Rainbow Brite doll.
“You said you had a question,” I said. “I can’t answer until you ask it.”
He smiled down at me, his lazy grin warming me up like it always did.
“Jenny Gillespie, mother of my grain-of-sand, alien-tadpole, Brannah-baby, are you going to marry me after all this?”
I gazed up into the night sky. “I think I might like to negotiate some bullet points in the contract.”
He scooped me up in his arms. “You better just answer me.” He pretended to stagger. “And fast, before I can’t hold you any longer.”
I grabbed his lapels again. “Yes, Chance McKenzie, father of my accidental dropped-condom failed-pill-taking grain-of-sand Brannah-baby, I will marry you.”
He leaned in to kiss me, but I put my fingers on his lips. “I would like to negotiate that pizza now.”
Chance snapped at my fingers with his teeth. When I moved them aside, he caught me, his mouth on mine, warm and tender.
A flash fired, lighting up the night.
I pulled away and looked over. It was the hired photographer. He gave Chance a thumbs up and headed back to the party.
“You’re sneaky, Chance McKenzie,” I said to him.
“Oh, you just wait,” he said with another of those lazy grins that I adored. “You’re going to love the headlines about us in the morning.”
“What can they say about us now? Hunky singer sweeps pregnant nobody off her swollen feet?”
“The baby could still be an alien love child.”
He walked back up the path, carrying my bulky body in his arms, until we were in sight of the party. A great cheer went up in the crowd, and Paul stopped the song onstage. “Did she turn your sorry ass down?” he asked into the mike.
Chance shook his head, and they began a new song, one I’d never heard before. Chance set me carefully down on the ground and headed up onstage. I knew he’d been writing some new material. But I had no idea there was going to be one about me.
As he took the mike from Paul and looked down, I made my way to my spot at the stage, at his feet, just like the first time he’d sung for me.
And when he gave us the words to the opening line, I knew that so much more than fate had a hand in everything that happened to us, good, bad, amazing, or tragic. And people like Chance were here to capture those feelings, however they came, and let us feel them, figure them out, and always sing along.
THE END