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I smiled out the window again before I locked eyes with Lance. “And you’ve made him smile. You, his Captain America. The man who drops him off at school, the man who he’s expecting to pick him up from school and who he’s getting used to waking up in the same house as. The man who’s gonna take him fishing.” I sucked in a breath. “No matter what you say, I know that’s not just you doing your job. That’s something more than that. As much as I want that to continue, as much as I want my son to have someone who isn’t afraid of worms and knows how to use a fishing rod take him on a boat and show him how to reel or hook or whatever, I can’t have that. Not if he’s going to expect you to take him next weekend and the weekend after.”
I swallowed my want for that. My visceral want for my son to go fishing with Lance every weekend for the rest of forever.
“This is going to be over,” I said. “I don’t know when, but I know that somehow, it’s going to be over. The job will be done and you will be gone. And my son won’t have anyone to take him fishing and be there to show him how to replicate a badass glare. And it’ll break his heart. I can’t have anyone breaking my son’s heart.”
I swallowed the tears that were creeping up my throat, choking me. “I won’t let anyone break my son’s heart. I need to protect him. And not just from men who mean him harm, but from men, good men. Like you.”
I let the words hang there in the air, heavy, horrible. I felt empty now I’d uttered them. No matter how necessary they were, I wanted to take them all back, swallow them all just so we could have more time with Lance.
But I had to be brave.
“There’s another thing,” I whispered. This time I wasn’t strong enough to maintain eye contact, so I looked at my awesome new shoes that Rosie had bought me. “I’ve been getting used to you being here. To having another adult in the house, even if conversations are limited to a series of grunts and withering looks.” I paused as my lame attempt at humor failed horribly. “I’m forgetting what you’re here for. No, I’m not forgetting, I’m pretending, which is worse. I’m pretending you’re here because this is more than your job, protecting Nathan and I. I’m pretending that we mean more to you than a mission, a paycheck, whatever. I’m pretending that you… care about us.”
There it was. All of it. Spewed out onto the unfamiliar carpet in a foreign house. I wanted to empty my stomach onto this carpet, that’s how sick I felt saying all of this.
I still didn’t have the courage to look up at Lance, to see his face shutting down, body closing off in disgust at my delusions, at my obvious attachment to him.
So I kept staring at my feet, waiting for him to dismiss me, break my heart, or just walk right out of the house, never to be seen again.
The low thump of his boots against the carpet told me he was walking. I braced for the sound of the door, the emptiness of his exit.
But boots toed my shoes. A hand grasped my chin tightly. Almost painfully. It jerked upward, forcing my face to move, forcing my eyes to focus on Lance’s face.
My stomach dropped at the intensity in his eyes. At his closeness. His touch. He hadn’t been this close to me since the night I cried in his arms. Neither of us mentioned this. Or the two kisses we’d had before the fire.
Even then after those kisses, he hadn’t looked at me the way he was gazing at me right now.
This was not an invisible reaction, the twitching of a finger, tightening of a jaw, the jerk of an eyebrow.
No, this was everything. This was Lance taking off his mask. Or at the very least, lifting it enough for me to see the man underneath.
“This is not pretend,” he rasped, voice a razor, cutting at my emotional skin. “We are not pretend. I fuckin’ wish it was pretend. Way I feel about you. That kid. The fact I want to rip my own skin off thinking of you hurt. Of you in danger. The fact that I can’t go a fuckin’ second without thinking about you when I’m not with you. The fact I can’t be without either of you for more than is absolutely necessary.” The hand tightened. Expression deepened. “I wish to fuck, for your sake, that it’s pretend. But it’s not.”
The words, the admission hit every bone in my body with the force of a bus crashing into me. There was an ugliness to it all that punctured me. Hurt me. Worse than Robert ever did. And it made me feel warm and wanted in a way that Robert never had, even in his most charming of episodes.
