Page 216 of Joker

I set the plate down on the porch rail and take the wilted little thing from her like it’s worth diamonds. “Thank you.”

She beams. Then, because she’s still four and apparently made entirely of impulse, she shoves Bunny at Joker and demands, “Hold him.”

Joker takes the rabbit without comment. That image alone is enough to emotionally ruin me for the rest of my life.

A dangerous biker with cuts and ink and blood on his hands I’ve seen more than once, standing in the middle of the clubhouse yard holding a hotdog in one hand and a stuffedrabbit in the other while my daughter chatters at him like he’s always been hers.

And maybe he has. Maybe not from the beginning. But from somewhere close enough to it that the distinction doesn’t matter anymore.

Lexi squirms to get down, and the second her feet hit the grass, she’s off again, headed for Amy and Casey with the urgent seriousness of a little girl who clearly has important things to do.

Joker watches her go until she’s safely in range of three different adults and two older girls who’d probably maul anyone dumb enough to try something anyway.

Then he finally looks down at me. Up close, he still has that same edge. That same roughness. That same dangerous stillness in the shoulders that says the world should approach carefully if it knows what’s good for it. But there’s a looseness in him too now. A peace I didn’t think men like him got to have for long.

Maybe they don’t. Maybe he took it. Maybe that’s what all of us did.

He reaches out and hooks two fingers in the waistband loop of my shorts, tugging me the last inch into him. “What are you thinking so hard about?”

I look up at him.

At the man I call Joker in the yard and Travis in our room. At the father Lexi chose for herself long before anybody sat down and named what he’d become to her. At the one person on this earth who could pull every rough, violent, impossible part ofhimself together into something that feels like safety when he turns it toward us.

“Nothing,” I lie.

He lifts a brow. “Liar.”

“I was having a nice moment.”

“You can do that without looking like you’re about to cry.”

That one actually gets me. I laugh, and yeah, maybe my eyes sting a little anyway. “Shut up.”

His mouth curves. “Make me.”

Normal. Flirtatious. Easy. Us. The kind of banter I never thought I’d be lucky enough to have, not after everything that came before him.

I tip my head and study him for a second. Then I say what’s actually true. “I was looking at you.”

His hand tightens at my hip. “And?”

I let my gaze drift past him for a second, out over the yard.

At Lexi now sitting in the grass with Jason and Gio, bossing them all through some game she made up and absolutely intends to win. At the women laughing by the tables. At the brothers around the grill and the firepit and the bikes. At the whole messy, loud, stubborn, loyal life of this place.

Then I look back at him. “And I was thinking this isn’t temporary.”

Something in his face shifts. Deepens. He looks over my shoulder once toward Lexi, then back down at me. “No,” he says quietly. “It’s not.”

That simple answer hits me harder than if he’d made a speech.

Because that’s him. No wasted words. No overexplaining. Just truth.

I step into him fully then, close enough that the solid heat of him wraps around me and the noise of the yard fades at the edges.

His hand leaves my hip long enough to take the flower from my fingers and tuck it behind my ear with a gentleness so at odds with the rest of him it makes my heart turn over.

Then he slides his arm around my waist and pulls me flush against him. Not hidden. Not private. Not for anyone else.