A startled laugh slips out. “Night feed log?”
“I intend to be extremely annoying about how much I participate,” he says, deadpan. Then, gentler: “Hired help only if you want it, when you want it. Not because of optics or my calendar. We trial people. We say no without apologizing if it doesn’t feel right. Sophie is on speed dial for emergency handoffs and lovingly judgmental feedback.”
“She’ll make an agenda,” I say, half-teasing, half-grateful. “With color-coding.”
“She already sent me a link to a shared doc called ‘Operation Keep Riley Sane,’” he admits, sheepish and proud. “I’m not allowed to edit it without permission.”
I press my lips together because tears are ridiculous and also stubborn. “Timeline?” I ask. “For…all of it. Body. Work. Us.”
“Your timeline,” he says immediately. “Your doctor’s timeline. No bounce-back fantasies, no ‘when are you back on the bench?’ pressure. If you want the bench, we problem-solve how. If you want a season in the clinic or a semester teaching or a month where the biggest thing you do is nap, we fight for that to be valid and paid.” He meets my eyes. “I don’t want to love you only when you look like the version of you the league recognizes. I want to love every version.”
Something unknots behind my breastbone. It isn’t that I didn’t believe he’d say the right things. It’s that he keeps saying them like a man who understands the cost of wrong ones.
“And when the world gets loud again?” I ask, because it will.
“We mute it,” he says. “Phones off after eight. No doomscrolling in bed. Julia runs interference. We make rituals—walks, pancakes, reading in the chair that faces the window you like because the light hits the pages in a way that makes you hum.”
“I hum?”
“You do,” he says, soft like he’s handing me a robin’s egg. “It’s my favorite accidentally-Riley thing.”
The laugh that bubbles up is lighter than anything I’ve made all week. He rounds the island and leans his hips against the counter beside me, shoulder to shoulder, warmth staking a claim.
“Say it again,” I ask before I can stop myself.
“That I’ll cook pancakes badly?”
“That you want all my versions,” I say. My voice comes out a little raw.
He doesn’t hesitate. “All your versions.” His mouth curves, then settles. “And I still want to marry you in a way that lets you keep every name you’ve earned.”
I turn the ring with my thumb. The fear is still in the room. It’s smaller. It has a label.
“Okay,” I say. “Scaffolding. Shared doc. Boundaries. Pancakes. My versions.” I blow out a breath I’ve been holding since the badge reader went red. The quiet after tastes like lemon and something sweeter I’m not ready to name
The kitchen settles around us, all lemon and hum and the soft tinnitus of a long day finally unclenching. I take one more breath, the kind that reaches my back ribs, and when I exhalesomething taps low in my belly—light as a fingertip from the inside.
I still. “Wait.”
Jason goes statue in that athlete way, every muscle listening. “What is it?” His voice drops, reverent and a little scared to scare whatever just happened.
I press my palm beneath my navel and close my eyes. There—again. A flutter, not the roll of nausea or the tug I’ve felt before, but a definite tap like someone knocking politely on the inside of a door they expect me to open.
“Here,” I whisper, catching his wrist. His pulse jumps under my fingers as I guide his hand to the spot. “Hold. Don’t press.”
He doesn’t. He places his palm the way he would on a fresh injury he’s terrified of making worse—wide, steady, heat without weight. We wait together in a silence that turns the whole apartment into a listening device.
Nothing. For three long breaths, nothing.
“I think maybe—” I start, and then the tap comes again, insistent as a tiny skate blade carving a first line. Once. Pause. Twice. Jason inhales so sharply it pulls a laugh out of me.
“Did you—” he says.
“I did,” I say, and my eyes blur stupidly. “There. Do you feel it?”
His mouth opens, then closes. Wonder rearranges his face into something wide-open I’ve only seen when he’s watching a kid in the stands copy his warmup routine. “That’s—” He can’t seem to find a word that isn’t profanity or prayer. He settles on both, softly. “Holy—okay. Okay.”
The tap comes again, like punctuation. He presses his lips together, jaw working as he wrestles his every impulse to stillness, like he’s afraid excitement alone could scare the moment away.
