Putting ourselves to bed, making slow, desperate love to each other.
Complicated crept in sometime after midnight.
We weren’t sleeping.
I didn’t want to. I needed to soak up Lance, this reality more than I needed any kind of dream.
He was idly tracing patterns on my back, my cheek on his chest.
“I abandoned normal a long time ago,” he said, breaking the silence we’d adopted.
“It was the only fuckin’ way I could survive. Normal had to die so I could live. The history of normal and the possibility of a future with it. Every choice I’ve made in the past ten years has been to make sure I’m not even close to normal. Normal is death to me.”
He moved me so he could grasp my face with a roughness that was his version of soft. “Now, I’ve never wanted normal more in my fuckin’ life. Normal with you. Wakin’ up on a Saturday morning with you, eatin’ your pussy for breakfast, getting up and makin’ pancakes with Nathan while you sleep in ‘cause you deserve it and ‘cause you won’t physically be able after what I do with you.”
My stomach dipped. Like all the way down. Knees quivered. Pretty much all the clichés you could think of in regards to what a hot man’s words could do to a woman.
And he wasn’t done.
“Fuckin’ grocery shoppin’ with you, arguing with you about thirty buck bottles of wine, buyin’ them for you because it’s actually for me, since I’m the one that gets to fuck you tipsy after you’ve had two glasses. Then either going to church with you and Nathan on Sunday, or takin’ you fishing because I believe he needs to see two versions of worship to become a man.” He paused, laid his head against mine. “Fuck, I want to teach him to be a man. Show him how to treat a woman.”
Another pause. “Or another man, if that’s his choice. I want to watch him grow. I want him to understand and adore his mother. I want to be a part in makin’ him into the remarkable fuckin’ human I know he’s gonna be. I wanna be his father. In every way I can be, ‘cept blood. And if you’re up for it, I wanna put my baby in your belly, not because I don’t think of Nathan as mine, but because I wanna watch it all from the start. I wanna be there every step of the way. I want to grow our family. I want fuckin’ dirty diapers, getting up in the middle of the night. And if you don’t want that, I’m more than okay with what I’ve got right now.”
I sucked in a strangled breath as I hadn’t breathed in the whole time he’d been talking. I’d been treating his words like oxygen because that’s surely what they felt like.
“I do have you,” he said it like a statement, like he said everything, with a force, with a power that turned me on all the time, even when it pissed me off. But there was a question there, a question in his eyes, a tiny bit of vulnerability that was just mine too.
I moved so I was fully on top of him, our naked bodies brushing.
“You have me,” I told him. “You have us,” I whispered. “And I want everything you just said.”
He laid his lips against mine, positioned me so I could feel the hardness of him pressing against the softness of me.
“Then I’ll give it to you.”
I put a restraining hand on his shoulder, right before he surged into me. “How about we give it to each other?” I murmured.
He paused. “Yeah, cupcake. That sounds perfect.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Lance dropped me and Nathan off the next day.
Well, he didn’t drop me off.
He came into the diner with.
And Bobby was the first to declare, “Oh fuck no.” When he spotted Lance, holding a cleaver, of all things.
Lance, to his credit, didn’t even flinch at the angry muscled man directing fury his way while holding a cleaver.
He stopped right in front of him. Then looked to Logan, who had rounded the corner to see this. Logan was not a violent man, but he’d seen me the past two months. They all had.
He totally looked like he could brandish a cleaver too.
“A word?” Lance said, voice even, calm.
Bobby gripped the cleaver for a second longer, Lance kept eye contact. Bobby put down the cleaver. “Better be some good fucking words,” he muttered as he, Lance, and Logan disappeared into the office.
I didn’t know what the words were, but they definitely must’ve been good, considering no one was bleeding or maimed when they walked out five minutes later.
Logan was grinning.
Bobby was not.
But he looked less like he was going to hack up the man I loved with a cleaver, so that rocked.