My Valentine

Bradley,

Here we are, love -- tomorrow is exactly one month til our due date. So hard to believe as I sit and think about the road that led us here.

I wonder how we'll ever begin to explain our story to this son of ours -- so complicated and messy -- yet so very simple.

Our love story sure didn't start how I had expected. Being asked out by my boss and knowing it would all have to be a secret. Our friends trying to set us up when we were already together. Getting ready for events or weddings at your apartment together, but then driving separately.. pretending. To the outside world, we were coworkers and casual friends. But in the confines of your apartment, we fell in love. A fast, intense, and scary kind of love. The kind that tears you apart, yet puts you back together. The kind that makes you want to run sometimes -- but luckily -- the same kind that you can never really let go of.

So many missteps, mistakes, cases of bad timing, and lapses in judgment. But never giving up was not one of them. No matter the chaos whirling around us, the second we were together again, time would just slow down. Fear would melt away. We both knew it was something different, as it would always just fade back to the first night in your apartment.. when you held me for hours. I had never felt so safe. So at home. And before either of us could fall asleep, you took a deep breath, looked me right in the eyes, brushed your hand against my face and asked, "Is it okay if I kiss you?"

To this day, you're somewhat mortified that you asked. And yet, I remember it as the moment "we" meant something. I saw it as loving, respectful, cautious.. and so very endearing. I nodded with the faintest of yeses escaping my lips.

I would never be the same.

You tell me now that you spent many nights watching me sleep, thinking how lucky you were. Truth is, we both did. I would lay there, in the crook of your arm, with my head on your chest. Your heartbeat whispering out to me like a lullaby. I knew it as if the beat were a song written just for me.

We taught each other everything we needed to learn.

And through all the starts and stops -- the on-again, off-again -- we never lost each other. Weekend trips "as friends." Wedding dates "as friends." We made it so complicated. But at the end of the day, you were still the guy that would drive me home, hold my hand, slow dance with me to Michael Bublé in the dim light of my bedroom, and then kiss me goodnight. Even if nobody else knew -- it was always you and me.

I'm not sure anyone but us will ever know the whole story. But if our son ever asks if that kind of love exists -- the camp out on their doorstep, stand out in the rain, chase them to the airport, hold a boombox over your head kind of love -- we can say, emphatically, "Yes."

We lived it.

As you've said many times since, "We always found our way back to each other."

Thank you for finding your way, and living this love with me every single day.

Ever since that first kiss, you have always had a piece of me. <3

With love,
Your forever valentine