For the second time tonight, I startle like a newborn deer, and spin around to find a Dubois brother clutching a tiny dog. But it’s the right brother this time—it’sTam—and he has frost flakes in his shaggy dark hair. “You want me to move?”
Tam stares, like he’s drinking me in. “Only if I get to come with you.”
It’s in this moment that I know, for tonight at least,everything is okay. The way he looks at me, the way his voice wraps around those words. The zero hesitance in the single long stride he takes to erase the distance between us. There’s no room for doubt and I’ve run out of the will to search for it.
Tam sets Rudy down and draws me into a hug. “How did I get lucky enough for my dinner to be cookedandyou’re in my house already?”
I return his embrace, fighting with all I have not to sink into his arms and never come out. “Sab caught me outside and dragged me in. He asked me to stay for dinner, but you don’t have to?—”
Tam kisses me. Like,reallykisses me, stealing whatever breath he hasn’t already claimed with his frosty hair and big hug. “Bhodi, you being here to have dinner with me is the stuff of my fucking dreams. I’ve been thinking about you all day.”
I can’t lie and tell him I’ve been thinking about him all day too. But then, maybe things don’t have to be literal to be true. The firefighter who nearly died from smoke inhalation. I wasn’t thinking of Tam when we brought him back from a crash. Or when he opened his eyes and laughed at his stressed friends. But I felt…somethingI might not have done if I’d never met Tam. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be right now.”
Tam grins.
He’s so beautiful.
I kiss him again, he kisses me back, and we sway from the force of it. Of how good it feels to live in this moment and not think of the past or the future. Maybe it’s the answer I’ve been searching for my whole life.
Or maybe I’ve been searching for Tam.
The thought intrudes on the peace I find in his lush mouth. Thekiss stutters and I pull back as Sab clears his throat from somewhere behind us.
“Get a room.”
Tam ignores him till he spots the dark-haired, dark-eyed baby on Sab’s hip and his expression lights to one I’ve never seen. “Ma chérie. Why are you awake?”
Sab gives him a droll look. “All the snogging woke her up.”
“Ta gueule.” Tam takes the baby and glares at his brother.
Sab just grins and slides back to the stove, and it doesn’t take long for Tam’s features to soften again.
He spins the baby in a slow circle. Then he crosses the room to an old chest and opens a drawer, rummaging around until he finds a board book that’s unlike anything I’ve seen on the paeds ward.
Even from where I still stand by the photo of the motorbike, I can see how beautiful this book is, each page etched with the style of writing I am, by now, as familiar with as I am Tam’s lips.
I venture a little closer. “You made this, didn’t you?”
He nods, eyes on the baby. “For Esme. Give her something to do when her dad won’t stop talking.”
I don’t need a translator to understand the growl that emanates from the kitchen. I laugh. The baby—Esme—does too, and Tam’s smile?
My god. I’m in so much trouble.
The book is written in French. Tam settles on the couch and reads it to her while I watch, trying not to feel as though I’m intruding on an intimate family moment. But it’s as easy as it is entrancing to see how much he loves that baby. How much Sab loves the pair of them as he peeps at them from the kitchen.
Esme eventually falls asleep on her uncle.
He takes her back to bed and we eat the meal Sab’s cooked at the kitchen counter.
It’s livelier than the dinners Tam and I have shared before. Sab’s exhausted by the turn his life has taken in recent days, but he’s chatty too, as if the quiet Tam often prefers gets under his skin, and he doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself when the evening draws to a close.
“You should go tobed.” Tam all but pushes him towards the stairs. “I swear you’ve been awake for three days straight.”
Sab slips me a smirk. “Is he trying to get rid of me?”
“Not on my account.” I’m already in the hallway, stepping into my shoes and rescuing the bag I abandoned by the door. “But he’s probably right about you needing some rest.”
