Authors Note: I own nothing. No ownership rights to Beverly Hills 90210.
Epilogue
It took till our second year in San Diego before Bren agreed to marry me. I had asked casually since we arrived but I always saw in her eyes that it wasn't the right time. When I no longer found that look, I took her to our pier at sunset and got down on one knee; if you don't get down on a knee it doesn't count.
A month later Jim had walked her down the aisle in a little chapel in Baja. Brandon had stood beside me as we waited for first Val to walk down as the matron of honour and then for Jim and Bren, she floated down the aisle. I relinquished my wife only for four dances that night, her dance with her father, grandfather and then two with her twin; all our friends by then knew I never allowed anyone to cut in on Bren and I so they stayed clear of asking, I knew a good cut in could have life long consequences I never risked us that way. As my wife danced with her Walsh and Beeves family I danced those songs with Cindy, my mother and both of Bren's grandmothers.
We shared our Baja for that weekend with our family, the Beverly Hills gang and our San Diego friends. We vowed as I peeled off her strapless white silk gown that night that it would be the last time, Baja would only ever be ours from then on.
Two years later we amended that vow just before our last semester of college when we welcomed our first surprise. Our son who was adamant about being born even defying my wife's religious taking of the pill, he had been the first person we had willingly shared our Baja with since. By the time his second sister came along we had bought a house down there for our winter and weekend escapes.
San Diego had been renovated and sold a year prior so we were looking for a house driving distance from Beverly Hills. When the beach ranch came on the market just outside of our favourite little town, and it was big enough for horses, pigs and, Shadow and Rebel to run around I knew I had to buy it for my wife. It was that beach ranch idea that led me to San Diego which had helped her find her way back to me.
We loved the ranch, and even though we were a bi-coastal family spending part of the year in New York for the Tony Award winning Brenda McKay's performances and for me to be close to Washington to lobby for environmental policy reform, and then the other part of the year in LA with me working at my corporate head office as a financial backer for the best scientific minds in the country; helping them bring their sustainable innovations to life and to the market, while my wife worked on her ever growing film career, we tried to get down to Baja as often as possible. The ranch was unable to be our permanent home, though it was my wife, our kids, the dogs, and my favourite place on earth.
On those few but frustrating weeks every now and then, when Bren and I were unable to make our schedules work and we needed to rely on help from Cindy and Jim more than we liked too to keep up with the kid's routines, we ensured that we would clear the decks and disappear as a family down there to regroup. It was on one of those trips that Bren and I conceived our fourth and fifth child.
After the birth of our twin boys my wife booked me in for a vasectomy. Two pregnancies that had defied the pill had convinced her that I could will her pregnant, she was petrified that I'd actually get my joke of eight kid's if she didn't at least try and put a stop to it. I begrudgingly accepted when I realised that she may actually follow through on her threat of making me use rubbers again, even after I tried to convince her that as a rich as we were that the weekly expense of that amount of boxes may seriously put a dent in our bank balance. She told me it was the snip or risk bankruptcy, I smiled at her then and told her the third option is we could try and learn to control ourselves; even before the words were fully out I was laughing at the ridiculous suggestion. We had yet to figure out how to tone down our desire for each other, though in fairness neither of us had ever tried to we just learnt to accept that some days the laundry would pile up, takeout would be eaten and we would survive on little sleep but we would be blissfully happy doing it.
So I didn't get eight but with our five and then B's and Kelly's two we were close to it during our large Thanksgiving and Christmas family celebrations. When the celebrations extended out to our old gang adding on Andrea's one, Steve's three, and Donna and David's two it was a large group of kids; I was always thankful the night after they left or we arrived home that my wife had insisted that five was enough. The noise of that many was crazy.
Though on the second day of every school year when my wife and I would let our kid's play hooky so we could all have a lazy Peach Pit breakfast with Nat, followed by a day fishing off the pier. On those day's when I looked over at the little brunette kid's between us and I'd catch my wife's eye, on those day's I'd think maybe we could have had a couple more.