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“I understand that.”
“The next day I talked to Coach.” His voice softens slightly. “He told me something about his own life I didn’t know. His wife got pregnant in college, same as you, same as this. He told me it was hard and he told me the truth about it — that it turned into the best thing that ever happened to him, not despite the hard part, just entirely, completely worth it.” He takes a breath. “He asked me if I was looking at this through the lens of my dad. And I was. I’ve spent six years assuming big changes mean somebody’s about to disappear on me, and I put that fear on you instead of actually looking at what you’d handed me.”
“I hurt you,” I say. “That part’s real too. I’m not asking you to skip past that.”
“You did. And I’m not skipping past it — we’re going to have to actually talk about the six weeks at some point, properly, not just tonight. But I understood something standing in Coach’s office that I hadn’t let myself understand yet.” He steps closer. “You didn’t keep it from me because you don’t trust me. You kept it from me because you were terrified of costing me something. That’s not the same wound as my dad’s. It never was. I just needed time to actually see the difference instead of just feeling the shape of it.”
I don’t say anything. I can’t, not yet, my throat too tight to manage words.
“I’m all in,” he says. Simple. Certain, the same two words that broke something open in my chest the second he said them on the porch. “The babies. You. All of it. I don’t want a version of my life that doesn’t have you and them in it. I’ve spent six days figuring that out, and I’m done figuring it out. I know.”
I close the distance between us and kiss him.
He catches me the second our mouths meet. Both arms come around me, lifting me clean off the floor like it's nothing. I wrap my legs around his waist without thinking twice about it, kissing him deep, his tongue meeting mine the second I part my lips for him. He tastes like he always tastes, and the specific hungry way he kisses me back — like six days of missing him is something he needs to pour directly into my mouth too — has us both groaning into it, his hand fisting in my hair to angle me exactly how he wants me, my own hands gripping his shoulders like I might actually fall if I let go. He carries me up the stairs. I don’t know how he manages it without either of us falling, but he does, his mouth never leaving mine. He kicks my bedroom door shut behind us with a sound that’s going to require an apology to Wren and June later. I can’t bring myself to care right now.
He sets me down on the bed gently, despite everything, despite six days of built-up want between us, and for a moment he just looks at me — really looks, the way he does when the wall’s all the way down and there’s nothing left to perform.
“I missed you,” he says. “Every single day.”
“Show me.”
He undresses me slowly, reverently. Like he’s relearning every part of me, even though he already knows my body completely. His mouth follows his hands — my throat, my collarbone, down to my breasts, where he takes his time until I’m arching off the bed and gasping his name.
He keeps going lower.
When he reaches my stomach, he stops.
He presses a kiss there, soft, deliberate, right below my navel where nothing shows yet, where two entire people are quietly, invisibly growing the size of strawberries, and he stays there a moment, his lips against my skin, before he speaks — quiet, just for them, like he needs them to hear it even though they can’t.
“Hey,” he says, into my stomach. “It’s Dad. I know we haven’t officially met yet. I’m sorry it took me a minute to get here — I promise I’m not going anywhere now.” A pause, his voice rough with something that isn’t quite tears but is close. “I love you both already. That’s the truth. I didn’t know I could love something I haven’t even met yet, but I do. I’m going to be here. For all of it.”
I have to press a hand over my mouth to keep from sobbing outright, my whole chest cracking open with a feeling too big to have a name.
He looks up at me, sees my face, and something soft and certain moves across his own. “Okay?” he asks.
“More than okay,” I manage.
He kisses his way lower, settling between my legs, and when his mouth finds my clit I forget how to form words at all. He works me slow and thorough — exactly the way he’s learned undoes me fastest. One hand splayed against my stomach, like he’s keeping some kind of promise with his palm while his mouth keeps its own.
He builds it patient, unhurried, his tongue tracing slow circles that make my hips rock up to meet him without my permission. Every pass sends a fresh wave of heat curling low in my belly, tightening by degrees, my thighs trembling on either side of his head. He slides two fingers inside me and curls them just right, and the combination — his mouth on my clit, his fingers finding that spot deep inside that makes my whole body arch — has me gripping the sheets, my back bowing off the mattress, a sound tearing out of me that isn’t even a word anymore.
“Theo —” His name is the only thing I can manage, broken and desperate. “Don’t stop, don’t you dare stop —”
He doesn’t. The pressure builds and builds, that tight coiling heat winding tighter with every stroke of his tongue, every curl of his fingers, until it crests all at once and breaks over me in waves — my whole body seizing, my thighs clamping around his head, pleasure crashing through me so intensely my vision actually goes white at the edges. I come apart against his tongue, gasping his name into the quiet of my childhood bedroom, wave after wave of it rolling through me, my hips still rocking against his mouth as he works me through every last aftershock, gentler now, coaxing out every bit of it. My whole body is shaking with the release of six days of missing him, compressed into one impossible, overwhelming moment, and by the time it finally ebbs I’m boneless, breathless, tears standing in my eyes from the sheer force of it.
He doesn’t give me long to recover.
He comes up my body, and I reach for him, guiding him to my entrance, and when he pushes inside me — slow, deliberate, both of us groaning at the stretch and the fullness of finally, finally being back where we belong — I feel the specific rightness of it settle through my whole chest.
“Theo.” His name comes out broken. “I love you.”
“I love you too.” He starts to move, unhurried at first, savoring it, his forehead pressed to mine. “I’m not going anywhere. You hear me? Never again.”
“I hear you.”
He doesn’t rush this. That’s the thing I notice first, underneath everything else — after six days of not knowing if we’d ever get back here, he’s in no hurry at all. He moves inside me slow, unhurried, one hand braced beside my head and the other trailing down my side like he’s re-memorizing every inch of me, and I let him, let this be exactly as slow as he needs it to be, because we have nowhere else to be tonight. Nowhere else we’ve ever needed to be less.
“Look at me,” he says, quiet, and I do, and he holds my gaze through every slow drive of his hips, neither of us looking away, the specific intimacy of two people who spent months stealing twenty minutes at a time finally allowed to just stay. To not watch the clock. To not listen for footsteps in the hallway.
