Epilogue Armand and Lucas in Position
I set the boxes down and surveyed the flat.
The walls were blank and the windows were bare, but it wasn’t hard to imagine this place fully Lucas-ed. The fancy fish tank already burbled quietly against the far wall, Timon and Pumbaa floating serenely in their little baggies as they acclimated to the water temperature.
I couldn’t wait to be living in a Homes & Gardens spread again, smearing ink all over Lucas’s pristine world.
“Skyler and Robin are getting the table,” huffed the love of my life as he set down the armchair he’d been carrying, then giggled in protest as I swept in to nuzzle his neck. “Armand, I’m sweaty and disgusting!”
“You’re beautiful and radiant,” I muttered against his temple. He gently extracted himself from my arms and moved farther into the room to check on the bobbing fish.
“Focus, this is serious business. No flirting while navigating heavy objects.” He glanced at me over his shoulder and flashed his ring. “Got it, ‘roomie’?”
I did not point out that this was clearly a double standard.
Mostly because I was distracted by the white gold and delicate swirls of lapis lazuli catching the light.
Mine was an answering blue with a thin band of gold running through it.
They’d been expensive, but only in my world, not Lucas’s, and he’d agreed to split the cost.
I’d worried—very obnoxiously, since it was entirely my damage that required the rings remain within my budget as well as his—that this meant Lucas was perhaps not flashing about the kind of extravagant engagement ring he’d always dreamt of, but he’d assured me that even if that were true, they were always meant to be complemented by an eventual wedding band.
And I was not going to have any say in how extravagant those were.
He’d agreed to stop buying me things, generally, but we’d compromised that splurging on his own wedding would not fall under that category.
Because Lucas Barclay had, naturally, been planning his wedding since he was six, and my eventual part in it was entirely incidental.
Which was fine with me. Better than fine. It was bloody marvelous.
“What are you smiling about?” Lucas gave me one of those shy looks that so utterly turned my head I forgot my name for a second. It was especially impressive—and embarrassing—that he had this effect on me with his hands wrist-deep in a slimy fish tank.
“Everything, love,” I said. “I can’t wait to be your flatmate again.” Not that living with his mother for the past month hadn’t been . . . Well, no, it had been wildly uncomfortable, actually.
The Barclay estate was opulent, palatial, even. So, I spent most of my time too frightened to touch anything. Mostly, I missed the soft-yet-firm domestic Lucas who liked things a very certain way and had no qualms about letting me know when I’d messed them up.
“Armand, that’s a kitchen box,” he tutted. “It doesn’t go in the living room.”
I picked up the box—which could have, as far as I knew, more fish in it—and moved it to the kitchen as a voice called behind me: “Incoming!”
I stepped out of the way as Finch and Skyler maneuvered in a large dining room table.
“No, no, that goes in the dining room. This is the living room!” Lucas bustled off to micromanage, while I quietly marveled.
For most of my life, I’d only ever lived places where the kitchen, dining, and living rooms all tended to be more or less the same room.
Yet here I was, not only engaged to a man who insisted on the difference, but in a position to pay half the rent.
Engaged. Proper cut and carried. And employed. At a uni of all places, and me without my bachelor’s.
“You good, Big Guy?” Finch poked his head around the kitchen island.
“Er, aye?”
He narrowed his gaze. “I don’t know, you seem weird.” Then his eyebrows shot up. “Oh dang, I think you’re happy.”
“Titch.” I honestly did my best to scowl but couldn’t stop smiling.
“No, ew, stop it.” He waved his arms at me theatrically. “It’s horrible, ugh.”
“Shut it and fetch more boxes, you doughnut.”
He was about to sass something in turn, when Skyler and Lucas came out of the dining room, mid-discussion of Skyler being a major subject of Lucas’s next photography exhibition.
“I mean, wouldn’t it be really boring staring at pictures of the same person?” Skyler asked sheepishly, fanning out the bottom of his sweatshirt. It was February, but still California.
“For you? Yes. For other people? That’s for me to worry about.” Lucas gave a self-deprecating little laugh. “But I definitely think I want to focus on portraiture. Maybe you’d let me shoot you too?” he asked Finch, who took a moment to respond because Skyler had stripped off his sweatshirt.
I cleared my throat and Finch jumped, coloring. “What? Shoot— Oh, me? Hell no, I bet people would pay money not to look at me.” He tried to play the blush off as humility. And everyone who was Skyler bought it.
“Robin, you know perfectly well that you have a compelling air of drama.” Lucas waved Skyler toward the door. “Before you guys leave, let’s you and me tackle that coffee table.”
Once they were gone, I said, “You’re right, Titch.”
“Huh? I am?”
I shrugged. “I am happy.”
He let his head roll on his neck and gave a performative full body shiver. “That’s so wrong.”
“I have dimension, you little shite.” I let my smile spread into a grin and leaned toward him across the kitchen island. “I won’t be flattened by your simplistic worldview. People can be more than one thing, contradictory things, even, and they don’t cancel each other out.”
“Uh-huh, sure. You’re balancing being a miserable bastard with also being a big happy dweeb?”
“Aye. And you’re balancing being a good friend with being in love.”
He stared at me with his mouth open, then shut it with a snap. “I’m taking your class next semester,” he said, then ran out the door.
Like hell he was.
I lumbered in pursuit, out into the bloody California bloody winter sunshine, when Lucas met me round the blind corner. I was about to start complaining at him when he indecorously but quite tenderly pushed me up against the wall and kissed me until I was a gasping mound of jelly.
“Sorry,” he whispered against my lips. “I know I said no flirting, but you’re really cute.”
I had to marry this man or I was going to die. I hooked my thumbs in the belt loops of his blue jeans—which he only ever wore for work or if I asked nicely—and pulled him close. “I’m not bothered. Love a hypocrite, me.”
And we kissed a bit longer.
I could imagine one day being the type of person who had both a dining and living room, who consistently worked at a desk rather than under one, who was happy and dweeby more often than he was miserable. So long as Lucas kept wanting to kiss me, anything was possible.
We were so different. Contradictory. But between his fire and my ice we might end up with something rather cozy. A life that quietly drove us off our rockers but always swung us back onto them again. Something infuriating, delightful, safe, and ours.
Perfect, on balance.