51. You Don’t Have to Earn Me
YOU DON’T HAVE TO EARN ME
ANDERS
“We’re home!” Luca’s voice carries through the lake house a second before the front door slams shut.
The conversation that had been happening around me immediately dies.
Emelie looks up first. Then Jen. Then Vince.
Everybody has been waiting. Nobody has said it out loud, but everybody has been waiting.
The last hour has felt like a countdown to something. Either Luca was going to come back ready to tolerate this relationship, or he was going to come back ready to burn the entire house down around us. The fact that I haven’t heard sirens yet feels promising.
Luca rounds the corner first, looking entirely too pleased with himself. A knot immediately forms in my stomach.
“He killed him,” Emelie says flatly. The words are barely out of her mouth before Parker appears behind him.
The relief that floods through me lasts exactly half a second. “Jesus Christ.” Parker’s nose is bleeding. Just enough to leave a streak of red running down toward his mouth. One side of his face is already beginning to darken with what will undoubtedly become a black eye by tomorrow morning.
For a second, nobody says anything. Then Vince lets out a low whistle. “Damn.”
“You hit him?” I ask, already moving. The question is directed at Luca, but I don’t actually wait for an answer.
I’m across the room before anybody can stop me.
Parker’s eyes find mine immediately. Whatever joke he was planning to make dies the second he looks at me.
Something softens in his expression. My chest tightens with relief because suddenly I know that whatever happened out there, they’re okay.
Maybe not perfect and maybe not completely healed, but okay.
“Oh my God, Pet’ka.” My hands find his face before I can stop myself. I tilt his head gently toward the nearest window, inspecting the damage while Parker watches me with an expression that makes my stomach flip. “You’re bleeding.”
“I’ve been bleeding professionally for twenty years.”
“Dude. That’s not funny.”
“I thought it was a little funny.” I shoot him a look. Parker smiles. The sight of it nearly makes my knees give out. “We settled it like men,” Parker says proudly.
Luca immediately snorts. “We absolutely did not.”
“I got punched.”
My brother grunts. “You deserved it.”
Parker turns to look at me. “It was worth it, baby.” I glance between them. The easy—easier—familiarity catches me off guard, and something settles inside me knowing this hasn’t completely torn the two of them apart. “He still hates this.”
Luca points at him immediately. “I do.”
Parker sighs happily. “But we’re okay.” He reaches up and cups my cheek with his bloodied hand.
The gesture should probably disgust me, but instead I lean into it as his thumb brushes across my skin.
His eyes drop to my mouth before he kisses me, and the taste of copper and scotch immediately fills my mouth.
Behind me, Emelie lets out a noise of pure outrage. I don’t even bother opening my eyes. My arms slide around Parker’s neck as I pull him closer.
The last few hours have been torture, especially the endless wondering about what Luca might say. Now that he’s here, and now that I know the world hasn’t ended, I don’t want space between us. I don’t want anything between us.
Parker makes a soft sound against my lips before wrapping an arm around my waist and lifting me off the floor.
The room immediately erupts. “Put him down!” Luca shouts.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Vince groans.
“Absolutely not,” Emelie says.
At the exact same moment, Jen walks into the room. She stops so abruptly that I almost laugh. “Oh my God.”
I bury my face against Parker’s shoulder.
“Put him down,” Luca repeats. “I swear to God.”
Parker finally lowers me back to the floor, though he doesn’t go very far.
One hand remains firmly planted at my waist while the other slides into my hair.
“You need to go talk to him,” he murmurs quietly against my temple.
I glance toward Luca, who immediately pretends not to notice.
Parker presses one final kiss to the corner of my mouth before resting his forehead briefly against mine.
The smile that spreads across his face is small.
“Happy, happy, happy,” he whispers. “So happy.”
I follow Luca out to the back deck. The house behind us is still loud. Between Emelie losing her mind over Parker and me kissing in the middle of the living room and Jen walking in at the worst possible moment, nobody seems interested in settling down anytime soon.
I can’t focus on any of that, though. For the first time all day, Luca and I are alone.
I thought this was what I wanted. For hours, I’ve been waiting for him and Parker to come back so I could figure out how the conversation went.
I needed confirmation that the two most important people in my life were somehow going to survive this.
Now that the waiting is over, I suddenly don’t know what to do with myself.
Luca leans against the railing with a beer in his hand and stares out across the lake. The breeze coming off the water ruffles his hair slightly. For a few moments, neither of us says anything. The silence isn’t awkward. It never really has been with Luca.
“You gonna stand there all day?” he finally asks.
A laugh escapes me before I can stop it. I walk over and lean against the railing beside him. “You broke Parker’s face,” I immediately point out.
Luca snorts into his beer. “He asked me if hitting him would make me feel better.”
I turn toward him. “Dude. Seriously?”
“Yeah. The fucker’s been screwing my baby brother behind my back. We weren’t in town frolicking and lallygagging.”
“Luca, you broke my boyfriend’s nose.”
“Boyfriend?” Luca scoffs.
I stare down at the bottle cap sitting on the deck boards near my feet and try to think of a way to start this conversation. Nothing feels right, so after a few seconds of turning useless options over in my head, I settle on the truth. “I’m sorry.”
Luca immediately groans. “No.”
I blink. “What?”
“No.” He points at me with his beer bottle. “We are not doing that, mano.”
Confusion washes over me. “Doing what?”
“The fake apology shit.”
Heat immediately creeps up my neck. “I wasn’t giving you a fake apology.”
“Sure.”
“Dude. I wasn’t.”
Luca raises an eyebrow. “You were about to apologize for being difficult, complicated, a burden, or some combination of all three.” I open my mouth, then close it again. Luca lets out a long breath and turns back toward the lake. “You know what the problem is?”
I shake my head. “What?”
“I spent eighteen years trying to make sure you knew I wanted you.” The words hit me so hard that I physically flinch. “So why the hell do you still act like I got stuck with you?”
My throat tightens immediately, and I look away before he can see it. “You gave up everything for me,” I say, my answer coming easily. “And I know you hate when I say it, but it’s true.” Luca doesn’t interrupt or argue. He just waits. “You were twenty years old.”
I can picture the apartment he barely spent any time in because he was constantly on the road, the overnight flights, the early morning practices, and the endless cycle of games, travel, interviews, and expectations that consumed every part of his life.
Somehow, in the middle of all of that, he also had to learn how to be a parent.
He had to carry the exhaustion and the responsibility of being a twenty-year-old trying to build a hockey career while raising a toddler, a kid that wasn’t supposed to be his and whose own father didn’t want him.
“Andy.” The way he says my name makes my chest tighten. “I never wanted another life.”
I look down at my hands. The words should make me feel better. Instead, they make me feel worse, because I know he means them. I know Luca well enough to recognize when he’s lying, and if there’s one thing my brother has never lied about, it’s how much he loves me.
The problem is that love and sacrifice have always been tangled together in my head.
I can still remember sitting on the examination table while Luca argued with the doctor because he thought they weren’t taking my concussion seriously enough.
He couldn’t have been older than twenty-three or twenty-four, and had only had me for about a year.
Most people that age were worried about rent or relationships or whether they were drinking too much on weekends.
Luca was threatening medical professionals because somebody stitched my forehead crooked.
How the hell am I supposed to look at a lifetime of moments like that and not see sacrifice?
And now I’m thinking about every time he’s told me he loves me and every time I’ve immediately followed it up with a reason he shouldn’t.
The realization makes me feel a little sick.
“I chose you.” Luca’s voice is quieter now, but somehow it lands even harder.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.” I finally look at him. “You know it up here.” He taps the side of his head. “You can repeat the facts. You can tell people I adopted you. You can tell them I fought for custody. You can tell them I raised you.” His hand drops to his chest. “But you don’t know it here.”
The lump in my throat becomes almost painful.
“I chose you,” Luca says again. The words aren’t angry as much as they’re pleading.
“I chose you every day. I chose you when you were easy, and I chose you when you were a pain in my ass. I chose you when you were screaming at me, and I chose you when you wouldn’t talk to me for a week because I grounded you. ”
A laugh catches in my throat and immediately breaks apart.
“You keep talking about everything I gave up, but you never talk about what I got.”
My eyebrows pull together. “What?”
“You.”
The single word hits harder than everything else combined. And suddenly, standing here beside him while the sun sinks lower over the lake, I realize how unfair that is. Not to me, but to him.
“I think…” My voice catches. “I think I stopped telling you things because I was trying to protect you.” Luca’s eyebrows pull together slightly. “I know..it sounds stupid when I say it out loud.”
“No,” he says quietly. “It doesn’t.”
“Yeah, it honestly does.”
I kept thinking that if I could just figure things out on my own, it’d make your life easier. So whenever something was wrong, I stopped talking about it. The words feel heavier than I expected. “I kept thinking that if I could just figure things out on my own, it’d make your life easier.”
Luca lets out a long breath beside me. “You don’t have to earn me.”
I close my eyes immediately. You don’t have to earn me.
A lump rises in my throat so quickly I can’t speak around it. For years, I’ve been acting like Luca’s love is something I have to repay. Something I have to deserve, or something I could lose if I became too difficult.
“I’m sorry I shut you out.” Luca doesn’t say anything. “I don’t want to do that anymore,” I continue. “I don’t want us to be those people who only talk when something explodes.”
A small smile tugs at the corner of Luca’s mouth. “That would eliminate eighty percent of our conversations.”
Despite everything, I laugh. “I mean it.” My eyes meet his. “I can’t promise I’m suddenly going to tell you everything.”
“Good,” Luca says immediately. “That sounds horrible. I personally would love to be spared the cutesy little things your boyfriend does…”
I laugh again. “But I’ll try.”
The smile disappears from his face. Emotion flickers across Luca’s expression so quickly that I almost miss it.
Then he reaches over and wraps an arm around my shoulders.
“I can work with that.” And finally, the realization crosses that eighteen years of misunderstandings are slowly loosening their grip.