Nineteen #3
I cross the hallway in three strides and pull him against me.
He collapses into my shoulder like a building whose foundations have given out, his whole body shaking with the force of whatever this is.
Adrian steps inside, closes the door quietly behind him, and stands with his hands in his pockets, watching us with the resigned tenderness of a man who has seen this particular brand of Luca-meltdown before and knows he has to let it run its course.
“I’m sorry,” Luca sobs into my collarbone. “I’m so sorry, I honestly thought she’d laugh it off, I just…I missed her, and I felt like she should know, and now she’s devastated, and it’s all my fault, and I should have kept my mouth shut, and…”
“Luca.” I hold him at arm’s length, my hands on his shoulders. His face is a disaster zone. “Breathe. Who are you talking about?”
He blinks at me through tears. “Freya.”
I stand there, Luca trembling in front of me, Adrian hovering silently by the door, Alexander watching from the hallway with an expression I can’t quite read.
And the anger, the clean, righteous anger I could have summoned so easily, doesn’t come.
Instead, what surfaces is something quieter.
Something that feels, improbably, like relief.
“She deserved to know,” I say. My voice is steadier than I expect. “I should have told her myself. But I didn’t. And you did. So, thank you.”
Luca stares at me. “You’re not mad?”
“I could be. But what would be the point?”
His face crumples again, and he launches himself back into my arms with enough force to knock me a step backward. Alexander materializes beside us, his hand settling on the small of my back, steadying me before I ass-plant to the hard wooden floor of my hallway.
“Let’s move this to the couch,” he says. “Before someone pulls a muscle.”
We migrate to the living room in a tangle of limbs and damp sleeves.
Adrian guides Luca to the far end of the sofa and sits beside him, one hand already moving in slow circles between Luca’s shoulder blades.
I’ve seen Adrian do this a dozen times, and it never fails to amaze me how a man who argues corporate law for a living can be so gentle with the people he loves.
Luca leans into the touch, his breathing gradually slowing. After a minute, he wipes his face with the heel of his hand and looks at me.
“I can tell her it was all me,” he says. “That you begged me not to say anything and I did it anyway. She’ll believe me. I’m very convincing when I want to be.”
“No.” I shake my head. “Freya needed the truth. All of it. And she got it. I’m not mad at you, Luca. I’m really not. This is on me. I should have told her when it first happens. I am the reason she is hurting now. Me. Not you.”
He seems to absorb my words before his face changes. He seems to visibly take a breath and when he looks at me again, his expression is so open and hurting that I feel for him. He looks so small and vulnerable in this moment.
“Thank God,” he whispers. Then, because he is Luca and incapable of sustaining earnest emotion for more than thirty seconds without defusing it. “Because I was fully prepared to throw myself at your feet and beg for forgiveness, and these jeans are dry-clean only.”
We all laugh. The sound feels like breaking the surface after too long underwater.
Alexander stands. “I’m making popcorn. And picking a movie. Nobody is allowed to veto my selection on the grounds that it ‘lacks emotional depth.’” He points at Luca. “That means you.”
“I am entitled to a vote!”
“You sobbed through the entirety of The Secret Life of Pets.”
“That dog was lost, Alexander! He was LOST!”
I watch them bicker, Adrian’s hand still moving in slow circles on Luca’s back, and something warm settles in my chest. Despite his fuck up. Luca is one of my people. And I know with the upmost certainty that this was a mistake, not made of malice, but of concern and maybe a bit of bad judgment.
Luca catches me looking at him and grins, his tear-stained face suddenly luminous with mischief. He points at Alexander, who is already halfway to the kitchen, and announces with the solemnity of a man bestowing a knighthood.
“THIS is a good man, Harps. I approve.”
Alexander pauses in the doorway. I watch his shoulders straighten, just a fraction, his chest puffing out in a way that is so transparently, boyishly proud that I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing.
And that’s when it hits me.
Not like a thunderclap. Not like the moment in books where the heroine looks across a crowded room and the world stops. It’s quieter than that. Smaller and more subtle.
Oh.
Oh shit.
I am falling for him.
The realization hits my chest, warm and terrifying and entirely, completely unavoidable.
I look at Alexander Hayes, forty-two years old, making microwave popcorn in my kitchen at ten o’clock at night, arguing about animated movies with a man who cried over a cartoon dog, and I think, Oh. This is what it feels like.
Not the fever-dream intensity of a one-night stand. Not the performative devotion of a marriage built on salvaged parts. Something that has taken root in the quiet spaces between ordinary moments and grown there, patient and stubborn, until I couldn’t pretend not to see it anymore.
I am falling for a man who brings me decaf coffee without being asked. Who listens to my son explain dinosaurs with genuine interest. Who holds me when I cry and doesn’t try to fix it. Who shows up. Who stays.
Oh shit.
Alexander catches my eye from the kitchen doorway, a bag of popcorn in one hand, and smiles. It’s the kind of smile that suggests he has absolutely no idea what’s happening inside my head, and I am profoundly, desperately grateful for that fact.
For now, at least.
Luca starts arguing about the movie selection vote. Adrian sighs and reaches for the remote. And I sit on my sagging blue couch, twenty-four weeks pregnant, officially divorced, surrounded by the chaotic, imperfect, fiercely loyal people who have refused to let me do this alone.
I find myself wondering if maybe…
Just maybe…
Some things are worth being terrified for.