“Hi,” he murmurs, ridiculous and perfect, to my skin. “It’s your very large, very emotional father. You don’t know me yet, but I swear I’m learning on the job.”
I bark out a laugh that turns into something watery. “He’s going to think the world is just bass-baritone motivational speeches.”
“He,” Jason echoes, eyes flicking up, amused. “Statistically that’s a coin flip, Lane.”
“Fine, they,” I concede, and then the flutter answers like it wants a vote. We both laugh—the good kind, the kind that doesn’t have to push against anything to exist.
He keeps his hand there long after the taps soften to ghost. He’s not looking at me like I’m fragile. He’s looking at me like I’m a constellation he just learned the name of.
“Does it…hurt?” he asks finally, still quiet.
“No,” I say. “It feels like—” I search for a word that isn’t cliché. “Like being nudged from the inside to pay attention.”
“Message received,” he says, and kisses that spot like a promise. His eyelashes brush my skin. My throat goes messy again.
“Jason,” I say, because there’s a thing I haven’t let myself say out loud in a room without witnesses. “I’m scared and I’m happy and I think those can be teammates.”
He looks up. “They can be a line,” he says. “We can run three forwards: scared, happy, stubborn. I’ll center.”
“Absolutely not,” I say, sniffling and laughing. “I’m centering. You can be the bruiser who clears the crease.”
“Deal,” he says, grinning, and the smile is so unguarded I want to frame it and hang it above the doorway so we see it every time we leave.
We stand like that, his hand warm on my belly, the fridge humming, rain ticking half-heartedly at the window. For a full minute, the future is just this: a quiet apartment, two idiots, anda signal from a person the size of my palm who already knows how to land a hit when it counts.
The moment stretches until the fridge cycles off and the apartment goes cathedral-quiet. I’m about to make a very smug joke about our child’s excellent sense of timing when my phone pings from the junk bowl by the door—one neat, insistent chime that doesn’t sound like texts or doom or Sophie’s memes. Calendar.
A cold thread pulls through the warm.
I cross to the bowl and fish the phone out. The screen glows with tidy cruelty:Tomorrow — 9:00 a.m. — Compliance Review: Follow-up.
I forgot to cancel it. Of course I did. The alert sits there like a reminder that paperwork moves slower than vows.
Jason reads my face before he reads the screen. His hand lands at the small of my back, steadying instinct firing before language. “What is it?”
I tilt the phone so he can see. The air in the kitchen changes temperature by a degree. Not colder, exactly—just thinner. “Right,” he says, and his voice slips into game-plan calm. “We knew it was coming.”
“We did,” I say, hating that my mouth suddenly tastes like copper anyway. The ring is a weight I want to hold and the alert is a lever trying to pry my fingers open. “We got the policies in ink. We got the segment. We?—”
“—still have to walk into a room at nine in the morning and let people decide things about our lives,” he finishes, not unkind. He slides the phone from my hand and sets it face-down like he’s tucking a child into a crib. “Okay. Then we do what we said. We go together. We bring counsel. We keep it facts and process. We don’t give them our fear.”
I nod. My heart doesn’t. It’s sprinting small laps in my chest like a rookie who hasn’t learned how to manage adrenaline yet.I rest my palm low on my belly, where the tap came from, and breathe until the rookie listens.
“Hey,” Jason says, leaning his hip against the counter so we’re eye level and the island is a line we’re on the same side of. “Tonight is ours. The morning can have what it’s owed. No more.”
He’s right. It still feels like a glass I can’t put down without chipping. “If they try to—” I start.
“Then we stop them,” he says, simple. “Julia’s already got the language. The non-retaliation clause has teeth. The device scope is in writing. They can’t move the goal line without us dragging it back in front of a camera.” His mouth softens. “And if they do, I sit.”
“I know,” I say, and the knowledge settles in the spot just left of panic. It doesn’t erase anything. It makes it survivable.
He reaches for my left hand and lifts it, thumb brushing the ring like he’s resetting a switch. “We take the win we have,” he says. “We protect it in the morning.”
I let the words land. They don’t bounce. They stick.
The phone pings again, cheerful as a metronome.9:00 a.m. — Conference Room C.Location helpfully included, as if I could get lost on the way to a room I know better than my dreams.
Jason and I trade a look over the glow—an agreement, a promise, a dare to whatever waits behind the badge reader.
