Chapter 13 Lucas
Lucas
I didn’t expect happy to feel like this…
like all the furniture in my head finally slid into the right place.
The tree glows in the corner, the credits song from Muppet Christmas Carol drifts through the room, and Melanie’s laugh keeps catching me off guard in the best way, like a door opening to fresh air.
I sit there and let myself picture it—Saturdays with grocery lists and strollers, a car seat that lives in the back of my truck, her hand stealing fries off my plate, a small person in a snowsuit shaped like a starfish.
It’s a future I don’t know how to operationalize yet, but my pulse settles just thinking about it.
I make myself a promise I intend to keep: figure it out.
Build the bridge as I walk it. Let her set the pace. Don’t screw it up by sprinting.
The music swells and fades. She shifts, grimaces, and pushes a palm into the small of her back. “Okay,” she says through a wince, “my body would like to file a complaint.”
I’m up before the sentence lands. “Sciatic?” I ask, already offering my hands.
“Baby’s practicing parkour on my nerve,” she says, standing slowly. “Sitting is… not it.”
“Arms around my neck,” I tell her gently. “Let me be the counterweight.”
She hooks her arms over my shoulders, trusting, and I settle my hands at her waist, thumbs pressing the muscles that have been fighting gravity all day.
We sway—small, slow—a lazy dance with no music but the radiator and our breathing.
I take some of her weight, tip her pelvis the way a physical therapist once showed me to save a teammate’s back after a long flight.
“Better?” I ask.
She exhales, tension draining from her face. “Oh wow. You just turned my spine back on.”
“Occupational hazard,” I say, smiling. “I know a few tricks.”
Her eyes find mine and hold. The room narrows to green and gold and the electric hum of close. Heat builds at the edges of the space we’ve spent days keeping careful. I can feel her deciding, feel myself answering.
I dip my forehead to hers, breathing the same small square of air, and say the truest sentence I’ve got. “I didn’t know home could be a person until you.”
Her fingers tighten at the back of my neck. The light in her eyes changes. “Kiss me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The first brush is careful, checking doors and windows, and then the second is warmer, longer, turning intention into language.
She makes a sound I want to memorize and pulls me closer by the collar.
My hands bracket her ribs, thumbs skimming the line of her sweater, and for a minute everything is just mouth and breath and the low, impossible relief of getting exactly what you’ve been trying not to want too much.
When we come up for air, she rests her forehead against mine. “I want to go slow,” she whispers, voice a thread that ties around my chest, “but I need you to touch me.”
My restraint stands up, stretches, and reports for duty. “Slow I can do,” I say, and mean it. “You call it. I follow.”
She nods once, decisive, and laces her fingers with mine. The small smile she gives me is so brave it hurts. “Come with me.”
We move together, unhurried, past the glow of the tree and down the short hall. I hit the light in her room and then think better of it, leaving the door mostly closed so only the soft spill from the living room finds us.
I take a beat, scan without letting go of her hand—habit I’m not interested in losing. Street quiet. Building quiet. Phone on the dresser, face down, volume up. Safe enough to be present.
She watches me with that look that says she knows exactly what I’m doing and likes it anyway. “You always working?” she murmurs.
“Just making sure we get to keep this,” I admit, returning to her. “Now I’m off-duty.”
“Good,” she says, and tugs me closer.
We kiss again, deeper but not faster. I learn the tilt of her chin, the pace that makes her sigh against my mouth. When I map the line of her jaw with my knuckles, her lashes flutter; when I trail my mouth to the soft place below her ear, she shivers and whispers my name like thanks.
“Tell me no if anything isn’t right,” I say against her skin. “Humor me.”
“I will,” she promises, and I believe her.
I keep my hands where they’ve been wanting to go all night—her back, her hips, the curve beneath her shoulder blades.
I knead the muscles that took the strain, careful of new weight and old aches.
She melts under my palms, breath hitching when I find a knot and work it loose with slow pressure.
It’s practical and it’s not. I can feel the exact moment relief turns to heat again, see it in the way she arches, in how her fingers slide under the hem of my shirt to find skin.
We shed a layer, both of us losing our shirts. Nothing frantic. Fabric moves as the air finds us.
She traces her fingers through the grooves of my muscles, up my chest and over my shoulders. I watch her as she studies my body.
The room smells like pine and laundry soap and whatever it is her skin does to my judgment. I keep one palm at the small of her back, a steadying point, the other moves to her belly.
“Hey, Peanut,” I whisper, ridiculous and awed. “Permission to proceed?”
She laughs, breathless and bright. “Permission granted.”
We tip onto the bed with care, me bracing so she can half-sit, half-sprawl without strain.
I line us up so her back’s supported and her hips aren’t fighting angles they don’t like.
When I slide my hand along her thigh to anchor us, her breath stutters.
When I press a kiss to the hollow of her collarbone, she makes that quiet, sincere sound again that ends up somewhere I’m not prepared to talk about.
“Lucas,” she says, and it’s a request and a reward. “I know my body isn’t like it was when we first had sex.”
I shake my head, hating that her mind is going there. “Mel,” I whisper, looking her straight in the eyes. “I want you to believe me when I say this.”
She nods.
“Back when I first met you I thought you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever met.
When we spent that weekend together I thought I was the luckiest man in the world.
” I run a hand over her belly. “But now, you’re so much more beautiful than you were that night, and now I know I’m the luckiest fucker in the world. ”
“Lucas,” she whispers. “I’m glad my baby is going to have you as its father.”
I kiss her. Slow, steady. I can feel my chest expanding with something I don’t have a better name for yet—a pressure that isn’t panic, a fullness that makes my hands gentler.
It’s new. It’s not complicated, and it’s clear.
I want her happy. I want her safe. I want to be the quiet in her nervous system and the heat she asks for when the cold sneaks in.
When the temperature edges too high for good sense and doctor’s orders, I ease us back with a kiss that lands like a promise and a breath that says not tonight, not like that. Her smile tells me she heard it, and her hand on my jaw tells me she agrees.
“Thank you,” she whispers, thumb brushing my cheekbone. “For not… rushing this movie.”
“Best movie I’ve ever seen,” I say, pressing my mouth to her palm. “Five stars. Would rewatch.”
She laughs, soft and sleepy, and tucks herself under my arm like she belongs there—which, I realize with bone-deep certainty, she does.
I pull the blanket up, switch my brain to the setting where it listens while I rest, and let my hand settle over her stomach again.
The baby rolls once, like a satisfied cat.
I swallow hard against the ridiculous urge to tell a tiny person I’ll never miss their Tuesday.
“Go to sleep,” she murmurs, eyes already closed, like she can feel the way I’m wired and loves it anyway.
“Working on it,” I say, pressing a kiss to her hairline.
In the quiet that follows, my mind does one last sweep—wedge in place, chain set, phone charged, threat picture clear—and then, for the first time in longer than I can remember, I let it go.
Not all the way. Just enough to dream about a tree in a small living room and a woman who leans into me like I’m steady ground.
I promised myself I’d figure this out.
I will.
One slow yes at a time.