Prompt: family


"Have you ever thought about it, about looking up your birth parents," you ask, watching as Holly expertly dices an onion and tosses it into the hot wok on the stove.

And maybe you should have waited, maybe until she put the knife down or maybe later, when you were laying together in bed in the dark. Like last night when she told you, about being in the system, about foster care, about being adopted when she was six by the Stewarts.

She pauses what she's doing, and you can see the way her shoulders shift, the way her breath catches in her chest as your question sinks in.

It takes a moment before she's ready to answer, and you can see your partner patiently gathering her thoughts, figuring out what she wants to say and how she wants to say it, all playing out over the gentle, strong muscles of your lover's back.

When she's ready, Holly takes a deep breath and turns to face you.

"Yes," she says, her eyes large and soft and calm, "here and there, my more rebellious teenage years, once or twice after I came out. But I never followed through. My biological parents are just genes–my parents are love and hugs, bandaged knees and bedtime stories, baseball games and driving lessons and an entire wall of newspaper clippings from the times I was mentioned in the paper. I don't need to find the people who conceived me, I've got my parents and you and our friends."

"And that," Holly said, hooking her fingers into your belt loops and pulling you close, "is family enough for me."

You nod.

Sometimes family is who you're born into.

Sometimes family is who you pick up along the way.