Thanks for sticking with Olive and I for 100 chapters. I won't swear that I have another 100 in me, but I do have more of this Manoso family to share. Ranger and Steph still belong to Janet.
"How's Aubrey doing?" Steph asked Harper.
As important as our daughter is, my wife wouldn't neglect someone else's needs.
"She's struggling a bit," Harper answered, "but as my grandmother would've said, 'she's one tough broad'. She'll be okay. If I were in her place, after I found out my husband had a relationship outside of ours, and had been murdered because of it, I'd find his body, kill him all over again, and then probably feel like dying myself for a good couple of months afterwards."
"If you don't want to see me go apeshit again, Harp," Kane warned her, with a look in his eyes I recognized and felt myself too many times since I met Stephanie, "you won't even joke about that. In fact, you're not allowed to say it again period. We clear?"
She risked two-day's worth of beard growth to press her lips to his jaw in a soothing gesture. "Sorry, Baby. I didn't mean it that way."
I know her history so I knew what set him off. As a ten-year-old girl, she was picked up at school by a trusted family 'friend', which turned into an assault that day. She told, and luckily her parents and the legal system worked for her rather than against her. But life as she'd known it was over regardless. She suffered bouts of debilitating depression and anxiety because of it, which resulted in three separate, thankfully unsuccessful, suicide attempts between the ages of thirteen and twenty-seven. I'll never forget the first call I got from Kane about her. He was slightly drunk and crying as he worked through his rage on her behalf.
"My girl slept with a fucking noose under her bed for weeks before using it," he'd told me back then. "What kind of fucked up shit is that? If her mom hadn't planned for a surprise visit at the exact right time, I wouldn't have found the woman I'm going to convince to marry me. That asshole got three square meals a day and prick-points for good behavior, while my baby kept hurting like that? That asshole needs to be undead just so I can tear the fucker apart myself."
I had kissed Steph's bare shoulder that night, whispered that I had an emergency to see to, and left her bed to head to Kane's place. It had taken me three hours to talk him down, but I would've cancelled my week if that's what it would have taken. My loyalty and responsibility extends far beyond a battlefield. Kane had met his future wife at a support group his mother had started. He'd been there for a surprise visit of his own for his mom with a "I just got back ... I'm taking you to dinner" plan in place, but after one glance in Harper's direction, she became his dinner date from almost that day on.
Though I have noticed Steph briefly glance at Harper's neck and wrists, and at all that's left as a reminder of that dark time in her life, I didn't feel it was my place to tell her story, even to my wife. But the now Mrs. Cole didn't have any issues explaining her own, so she answered Steph's questioning look. My wife wouldn't ask, but she wanted to.
"The first ten years of my life were incredible, but the twenty between that time and when I met my super-man here ..."
She stopped as Steph covered her mouth with a hand to try to catch a laugh before it could get out.
"What?" Harp asked her.
"I'm sorry. I know this isn't the time to laugh, but you called Kane your Superman ..."
"Clearly because I am," the man being discussed said, flexing an arm dramatically just to make them laugh.
If I were a different man, or just a younger version of myself, I would've shown him what a real bicep should look like ... right before I punched him out for being so fucking cocky.
"You are to me," his wife told him.
It would sound placating to anyone else, but Steph and I knew she meant what she said.
"And that's why I laughed. Ranger has always been my Batman. I wanted to be Wonder Woman. Now Kane's Superman, so I guess we'd better pick a super-Shehero to represent you."
"My girl's one of a kind," Kane added. "No one can come close to representing her."
"Except for you," I told him, feeling as Steph would say in reference to Olivia ... like a proud Papa.
Once they graduate to becoming my men, my duty to take care of them becomes a lifelong one. Their pain is my own, and their contentment I celebrate right alongside them.
"He is my better half," Harper shared.
"I know that one," my wife added. "I do better just to make my hubby look better and feel prouder. I have him and now also Olive I want to be proud of me."
"It's the same with me and our little one on the way. I was stuck for decades in a depressing, desperate, and painful, state, but meeting Kane and wanting to help him through his hurt and anger, led me out of my own."
The fury in Kane's eyes is back. "I'm trained to handle anything. You as a tiny, precious, little girl were never fucking meant to."
I didn't have to see it to know that she reached for his hand under the table.
"I'm stronger, and a better person overall, from what I've been through ... exactly like you are. And I have you, our baby, and some new friends," she glancing at us for a moment. "I honestly wouldn't change anything because it would alter what I have now, and I'll never be willing to do that."
I felt Steph's hand slide into my own. I tightened my fingers around hers in acknowledgement.
"You do have a whole building full of new friends," my wife told her. "And I know exactly what you're saying ... Ranger saving me all the time made me want to not only return the favor, but he also gave me a reason to save myself."
