Chapter 15 Lucas
Lucas
I cook like I clear a room: deliberate, quiet, eyes up.
Melanie hums along to some holiday playlist while I move around her kitchen, and for once my brain isn’t filing secondary exits—it’s cataloging the curve of her smile when the garlic hits the pan and the way she leans a hip to the counter to take weight off that sciatic.
Chicken piccata because lemon is apparently our brand now, roasted green beans, buttered noodles for the resident carb enthusiast (both of us).
“It smells like a five-star restaurant,” she says, padding in wearing my sweatshirt and her leggings, hair up, cheeks warm. The tree throws soft gold on her skin. I plate, pour water, drop a lemon slice in hers because I am both hydrating and thematic.
We eat at the table like people who do this on purpose.
She tells me a story about a client whose bulldog only posed when Mariah Carey played, and I tell her the G-rated version of a holiday party where a CFO tried to take a swing at a reindeer.
She laughs loud and true, and I think: I could stay here forever.
The thought is so clean and sudden it makes my chest feel too big for my ribs.
After dishes—she dries, I wash, we argue playfully over whose system is superior (mine), and then we migrate to the couch.
She’s half in my lap before either of us names it, my arm a bracket around her, my hand tracing idle lines on her forearm.
The movie is nominally on, and the tree reflects in the window.
The kissing starts the way it always should: slow and certain, that first yes that makes room for the next.
She tastes like lemon and peppermint, and when her fingers hook my collar I forget to be careful for a breath, then remember and go even slower.
The pressure in my chest expands—something I’ve only felt under fire and, apparently, under a woman I can’t stop wanting.
It’s not panic. It’s purpose. I want to build around this. I want to earn this.
And then the future knocks. Not hard, just enough to make noise.
After New Year, there’s Denver. My team.
My job. I could ask Dean to float me to a Saint Pierce rotation, to stand up a permanent post here.
It isn’t impossible—we staff where the need is.
But I don’t know what Melanie wants. Do I ask?
Tonight? Or do I protect this little pressurized bubble we’ve made and not poke any seams?
I bury my mouth in her hair instead. “You’re trouble,” I murmur against the crown of her head.
“Good trouble?” she asks, smiling against my throat.
“The best kind,” I say, and mean it.
We keep it to kissing, hands on a polite side of impolite, the kind that leaves you dizzy and steadied at once. When she finally tucks under my arm and falls asleep, I stare at the ceiling and make a quiet, ridiculous promise to a future that can’t hear me yet: figure it out. Whatever it takes.
The next day is errand-shaped joy. We hit the artisan market for gifts: she debates between two scarves for Amelia, and I pick the blue because I paid attention yesterday.
She finds a tiny wool cap with bear ears and holds it up to my chest to gauge scale.
My heart does that expanding trick again.
The barista at the Bean Flicker writes MEL + LUC on our cups like we’re a high school equation and the middle-aged couple at the next table grins at us like they know how it ends.
And then the air shifts. You feel a tail before you prove one—static at the base of the skull, the way reflections misbehave. We’re three blocks down Main when the hair on my neck stands up.
“Pause,” I say casually, steering her toward a storefront window dressed in fake snow and toy trains.
In the glass I can see us, the street behind, and the man thirty yards back who didn’t get the memo about looking where you’re “supposed” to look.
Average height, rental-car jacket, hat too low.
He adjusts nothing when we stop, and then he pivots to admire a wreath like he has all the time in the world. He is very good at being no one.
“Gingerbread?” I ask, keeping my voice light.
“Cinnamon roll,” she says, which is brave-speak for I’m fine, but I see you. Her hand sneaks into mine like it was supposed to live there.
I lengthen our stride, then shorten it, cut across traffic midblock, detour into the alley with the murals, pretend to take a selfie so I can clock the angle behind us.
He doesn’t follow us into the alley. Smart.
But he’s there again when we come out the other side, on the far sidewalk, nonchalant to the point of performance.
Mercer? Could be. Or a copycat. Either way I don’t like ghosts that keep their distance and learn my breath.
I thumb my phone open and drop a pin to the team channel, one-handed, message terse.
Possible tail. Male, 30s, average build, stone-gray jacket, navy knit cap. Main between Third and Spruce. Reflection discipline decent. Pace mirrors.
GUNNER: Copy. On the move from south lot.
DUKE: On foot from Birch. Don’t spook him yet.
We detour into a home goods store that smells like cinnamon brooms and overwhelm.
I steer Melanie to a display of overpriced tea towels and switch my stance, angling myself so I can see both door and mirror.
She nails the part she didn’t audition for—pointing at a fa la la towel like it’s our top priority, leaning into me like she’s just figured out she gets to.
“He here?” she whispers without moving her lips.
“Across the street,” I murmur. “Window posture. Hands in pockets, right elbow slightly out—might be a tell for a holster or just bad tailoring. No print I can see.”
“Duke?” she asks, all cool water.
“En route.”
She nods, jaw set, eyes bright. I think, not for the first time, that falling for brave is a hazard of my occupation.
I buy tea towels we don’t need to buy a minute. We exit as a couple bickering sweetly about whether anyone, anywhere, needs a towel that says Yule Be Sorry (we agree: yes). I clock our ghost again in the reflection of the bakery truck. He’s talking to no one. He’s listening to something.
“Left,” I say, and Melanie follows. We slip into the small crowd by the carolers, then cross with them like we’re just extra lyrics. My phone hums.
GUNNER: I’ve got a visual. That’s Mercer. North face, thirty-five-ish, lazy nose break, smoking habit he picks up and drops when bored.
DUKE: Two blocks west. If he follows you past the clock tower, I’ll cut him off at Mason. Lucas, don’t burn if you don’t have to.
“Define burn,” Melanie says softly, reading my face again.
“Break cover,” I say. “Make it a chase.”
“Let’s not,” she says, dry. “I’m very fast, but only to the bathroom.”
I huff a laugh I don’t deserve. The crowd gives us cover for one more block.
At the clock tower, I slow our pace deliberately, make a show of fishing in my bag for “chapstick” (gun hand free, other palm open).
Mercer slows, too. He’s not trying to be invisible now. He wants time. To watch. To learn.
“Your call,” Duke pings. “I can spook him and tail, or we hold pattern and keep him on the hook.”
I look at Melanie’s profile—the stubborn tilt of her chin, the calm. I weigh the options, run the branches. If we burn him, he bolts, and we reset the chessboard. If we let him watch, we learn what he wants to learn, and I don’t like being anyone’s study.
“Spook,” I send. “He’s close enough to our orbit I don’t want him thinking we’re predictable.”
“Copy,” Duke replies. “Take the next right and browse ornaments. Gunner, you on the far side?”
“Like glitter on a kindergarten floor,” Gunner says.
We do as we’re told. The ornament shop is warm and too bright.
I point at a glass lemon and make Melanie roll her eyes on purpose.
Through the window, I see Duke do the nothing that’s something—crossing the street at an angle that forces a decision without looking like one.
Mercer sees him. Doesn’t flinch. Then he does the smallest thing—touches his ear, pivots, and disappears into the flow toward the transit stop.
“On him,” Gunner says, already moving. “Don’t run. Don’t follow.”
I take my hand off the glass lemon like it’s a trigger and exhale slowly. Melanie watches me, reads the answer in my shoulders before I speak.
“He’s moving,” I say. “We’ll let the guys peel and see.”
“Do you need to go?” she asks. No guilt, just a question.
“I need to keep you safe,” I say honestly. “Staying with you is the job and the choice.”
Her hand slides into mine again like an anchor. The bubble reforms—not ignorance, just our perimeter, redrawn on the fly. We pay for the lemon because of course we do, and I walk her out into cold air and a day that’s decided to be blue.
“Do I get a debrief?” she asks, half teasing, half not.
“Later,” I say, scanning once, twice, then letting myself look at her instead of the world. “Over cocoa. With candy canes.”
“Good,” she says. “And Lucas?”
“Yeah?”
“If you want to ask me a big question sometime,” she says, eyes on the tree lot in the distance, voice soft but steady, “you can.”
It’s the kind of sentence a man lives on for a week. “Copy,” I say, swallowing a smile I can’t keep down. “I’ll make a list.”
She bumps my shoulder. “Of course you will.”
We head back to the car with bags cutting into my fingers and her laughter cutting into the part of me that’s been armored too long. My phone buzzes once more.
DUKE: Mercer peeled onto the Green Line. Gunner’s shadowing. You’re clear for now.
Copy. Heading home.
DUKE: Keep your bubble tight.
I glance at Melanie. Our bubble isn’t just ours. It’s work and choice, fear and cocoa, a tree and a wedge and a woman who tells me I can ask.
“Home?” I ask.
“Home,” she says.
And for the first time in years, the word doesn’t feel like a place I leave. It feels like a place I build.