Chapter 2 #2
Luke pressed a hand to his chest like she'd wounded him. "My deepest apologies, Your Majesty. I meant dictator. Very different from a dinosaur."
"Are you sure?"
"Positive."
"...Okay. You're forgiven." She vanished back into the fort with the swift, total forgiveness only five-year-olds are capable of.
"Eli tell you about the cover story?" Luke asked, voice lower now, just for me.
"The maintenance day thing? Yeah."
"Load management." He said it like the words tasted bad. "I’m twenty-three and officially on load management. Guys who actually need maintenance days are thirty-five and have bad hips."
"Would you rather the alternative? Coach finding out you hid a concussion during the Cup Final?"
"No." A beat. "I'd rather nobody ever find out I needed a maintenance day at all."
"Your ego is a fascinating patient."
"It's very fragile right now. Be gentle with it."
I looked between the two of them a second too long.
I couldn't believe Lily had decided, somewhere in the space of one morning, that he belonged in whatever world she'd built in her head, and Lily didn't hand that out easily.
She spent the first twenty minutes with any new adult deciding whether they were worth the trouble.
Something shifted low in my chest before I could stop it.
I put the sensation away. He was being good to a five-year-old for an afternoon. That wasn't the same thing as being good for anything longer than that, and I'd built an entire life on knowing the difference.
"Mommy!" Lily spotted the grocery bags behind me and half fell out of the fort scrambling for them, taking one wall down with her. "Did you get apples?"
"I got you apples."
"And cheese sticks?"
"Those too."
She threw both arms around my waist like she hadn't spent half the morning lobbying for exactly this. "You remembered."
"Of course I remembered, sweetheart." I kissed the top of her head. "I missed you."
"I missed you for a hundred years."
"You were asleep for one hour."
"Felt like a hundred."
Luke laughed at that. Goodness, he was beautiful.
I hated how much I noticed that. Once you start noticing the good stuff, it gets a lot harder to stop noticing everything else.
The way the afternoon light sat in his hair.
That his voice still had a rasp in it from a bad night's sleep.
The dimple that showed up every time Lily said something wildly unreasonable and expected him to agree.
I held onto the grocery bags like it could keep my sanity in check.
He’s injured, Dani, and you’re responsible for monitoring him. A guy with a head injury and a rest order, currently violating it on the rug. That was the whole story, and I intended to keep it that way. My life ran on a simple schedule: work, Lily, bills, repeat.
There wasn't a slot in it for a hockey player with terrible judgment and an irresistible charm. There definitely wasn't one for wondering, even for half a second, how he would likely be an excellent father if he had a child.
"Mommy?" Lily tugged my sleeve. "You stopped."
"Did I?"
She nodded, already towing me toward the kitchen. "Come make grilled cheese."
I let her pull me. Behind us, I heard the couch cushions shift.
I didn't even turn around. "I know that sound."
Silence. Then, less confident than before: "...Maybe?"
I looked back. Luke had made it about halfway to standing, one hand still braced on the arm of the couch, wearing the exact guilty look I'd spent years watching patients try on right before they got caught doing precisely what they'd been told not to.
"What did we talk about this morning?"
"I was gonna help."
"With what?"
"Groceries. I mean you've had it rough the past few hours."
"Thanks, but no thanks. I've survived worse. I like it when people listen to medical advice. You would be helping if you did that."
"I heard you, but what would you have me do all day? Stare at the abyss?"
"Maybe sleep? Do less strenuous activities."
His eyes dropped to the bags, then came back up to me. "I don't like sitting around while everybody else does the work."
I knew that particular itch better than I wanted to admit. I tipped my head at the couch anyway. "I’m fine. Sit."
He looked like he wanted to fight it. Instead he let out a breath and dropped back onto the cushions. "Bossy."
"I prefer medically qualified."
From the kitchen, Lily hollered, "Mommy! Uncle Luke!"
"What?" we said, at the exact same time.
A beat of silence. Then her delighted cackle rang through the house. "You sound the same!"
Luke looked at me. I looked at him. And for one second, against every rule I had, we both laughed at the same thing.
By early afternoon Lily had lost interest in ruling her kingdom, and we took the fort down together, cushions passed hand to hand, blankets refolded into something resembling their original shape.
Somewhere between the folding and the stacking, Luke ended up next to me in the kitchen, sleeves shoved up, chopping vegetables with more focus than the task strictly required.
"You don't have to help with this."
"Beats sitting there thinking about not being on the ice."
"How bad is that? Not playing." I kept my eyes on the onions, giving him the option to duck it if he wanted.
He didn't. The knife stayed even against the board, but his voice dropped a bit.
"Bad. Three years backing up Bryan. Every season I tell myself this is the one I get real minutes.
Every season it's fine, we won, doesn't matter who was between the pipes.
" A short breath, almost a laugh. "Except it matters to me. "
"You're allowed to feel that."
"Try telling my coach that."
Maya came in a minute later, and Lily launched herself at her aunt's legs with the force of a small, delighted missile. The two of them disappeared toward bath time in a wave of giggling and running water, and then it was just Luke and me and a half-finished dinner and a house gone quiet around us.
"Traveling nurse," he said, sliding the chopped peppers into a bowl. "That's a whole life. So it means you won't be in New York for long?"
"Yeah. Three months here, six months somewhere else. It's good money, but it keeps Lily and me going." I didn't look up from the onions. "The only bad part is that Lily usually doesn’t have any other family around."
"That's rough on a kid."
"It is." The next part came out before I could stop it. "I keep telling myself the flexibility's worth it. Some nights I'm not sure who I'm trying to convince."
He didn't hand me anything easy back. Didn't tell me it'd work out, or that I was doing great, all the things people say when they don't actually know what to say and want credit for saying something anyway.
He just nodded, like he understood exactly what it cost to build a life around never staying anywhere long enough to plant something.
"I get that," he said. "Wanting to actually land somewhere for once."
I looked up, and the kitchen felt smaller than it had a second earlier.
"Yeah. Anyway, you need to eat now and go to bed," I said quickly, before the moment could get any bigger than it already was. "I'm going to be checking on you throughout the night again just to be sure."
"Looking forward to it." The grin came back, careful now, like he was choosing it on purpose.