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Before: Happy Birthday Daddy


Nick

For Christmas, I gave Jason and his wife a vacation.

I gave AJ a soap on a rope.

On Christmas eve, Ashley and I sat in the living room on the couch in Los Angeles as It's a Wonderful Life played on TV and Zoey snoozed in her play pen. She was getting so big. Pink giraffe sat on a shelf. She'd stopped playing with him, much more interested now in toys that made noise, lit up, and generally annoyed the living daylights out of anyone around.

It was four months later and I was still recovering from the shooting. Chris was in jail and had been sentenced to 45 years. Relief cannot even begin to explain how we felt.

After the movie had finished, I hit the off button and we were left in the glow of the Christmas tree lights. Ashley leaned back into me and I kissed her shoulder. "I was thinking," I said quietly.

"Yeah?" she rubbed my arms.

"We should get married on January 31st."

Ashley looked over her shoulder at me. "That's like a month away."

"I know but... there's so much ish associated to that date now that it'd be nice to turn it around. You know?"

She rolled and kissed me. "I think it's a beautiful idea," she said. "You know our wedding planner's going to have a fit, though."

"AJ will get over it."

Ashley laughed. "May to January is a big leap backwards."

"He can do it. He says he can work wedding miracles. Besides, it'll curb him just in case he's got some ridiculous Walking Dead themed wedding plans in the works or something," I said with a laugh. Though I was really only half joking. I would not put that past AJ's twisted mind.

Ashley laughed, too, "Oh God," she said.

And AJ was indeed frazzled when we told him the change in plans. "You wanna move the wedding to WHEN?!" he shouted into my ear via telephone when I called him two days later.

"Relax," Rochelle's voice intoned from the second line. "It's okay Monkee."

"But that's like THREE months sooner than originally scheduled!" he wailed.

"Actually it's four," Rochelle said.

"FOUR MONTHS!" AJ wailed.

"I know you can do it," I told him, "I have the utmost of confidence in you."

And he did.

The night of my birthday, we all went out to a big dinner. Everyone was there, since everyone was in town for the wedding anyway. My mother, stepfather, Angel and her boyfriend, Aaron, BJ, Jason and his wife, Patrick, Kevin and Kristin, Howie and Leigh, AJ and Rochelle, Brian and his new girlfriend. Ashley smiled at me from behind her cup of soda as Kevin passed around champagne and Brian's girlfriend told a funny story about this one time she was photographing a cheetah. Everything felt perfect. Happy. Glowing.

AJ and Rochelle took Zoey home with them that night and Ashley and I went to a hotel room. I took a shower, and when I came out, Ashley had a small cake sitting on the table, lit with a single candle. In front of it was a box shaped like something a necklace or a bracelet would come in, wrapped in dark blue paper with a big green bow. She sat at the table, smiling, holding digital camera I'd given her for Christmas.

"Happy birthday to you," she sang quietly, in her best impression of Marilyn Monroe singing to JFK. "Happy birthday to you... Happy birthday Mr. Carter... Happy birthday to you."

I laughed and walked over and blew out the candle. She turned on a lamp as I took a finger full of frosting off the base of the cake and sucked it off my finger. Ashley's eyes sparkled. "I have two presents for you," she said.

"Oh yeah?"

She nodded. "One is in that box," she said, pointing to the wrapped gift on the table. "And the other is in that bed." She pointed at the bed.

"I like that one," I said.

Ashley laughed. "You might be whistling a different tune after you open the box."

I eyed her. "Nothing that fits in a box is better than you," I said.

Ashley nodded at the box. "Open it."

My fingers pulled apart the paper, the ribbon falling to my feet. Inside was indeed a box like you get at a jewelry store. I looked up at her, "What did you do?" I asked, laughing, expecting a watch or something.

"Well, I didn't do it alone," she said.

"Rochelle helped? Now I'm really scared."

I opened the box.

"No, Rochelle didn't help me with this one," Ashley laughed.

Inside the box, laying on a layer of cotton, was a pregnancy test.

And it had a big blue plus sign in the little window.

I looked up at her.

Ashley had a grin on her face.

"Happy birthday, Daddy."




Ashley

After I'd given Nick my second gift - a remix of Number 27 - we laid on the bed in each other's arms. Nick's hands rested on my stomach. I moved to look up at him and I asked, "So was this one better than the one in the box?"

"No," he whispered, "But if there'd been anything else in that box it would've been."

I laughed and rolled over. I stared at the scar on his chest. I kissed it softly, then looked up at his face. He was beautiful with all his battle wounds, all his little chips and dings. They were things that made him my Nick, things that had changed him. I rubbed his leg with my toes softly. "We're gonna be married," I said, "I'm gonna be your wife and you're gonna be my husband and we can have sex every single night if we want to." I slipped my fingers through his.

"That sounds good," he said.

I laughed. "And we're gonna have a baby."

"I hope it's a boy," he whispered.

"You'll love it whatever it is."

"You're right, I will. I already do."

"I'm so excited. I wish it was the 31st already."

"No you don't. Cos then it'd be all over," he said.

I shook my head, "No. It'd be just starting."

"Hmm," he hummed, pulled me closer, wrapped his arms around me. My ear pressed to his chest and I listened to the irregular heartbeat, made even more irregular by the bullet that was lodged in there somewhere under layers of Nick. "That's true," he said. "It's really only just the beginning of our story."