This place isn’t just a compound anymore.
It’s a home.
I glance over at Tank and find him smiling back at me.
My heart immediately screams at me to run to him. To let him pull me into his arms and pretend the world hasn’t been complicated and painful and slow.
That thought gets shoved straight out the window when an elbow digs into my side.
“You’re not holding the door open anymore,” Eli whispers. “Remember? Wipe that look off your face.”
“What look?” I glare back at him.
“The one that says you’re about to eat that beast alive,” Cody snorts.
“I hate you both,” I mutter.
They just grin.
I grab the half-eaten s’more out of Eli’s hand right as he’s about to finish it and shove it into my mouth.
“Brat,” he laughs, reaching for another marshmallow.
“If I don’t get food in me soon, I’m going to wither away into nothingness,” Skip announces dramatically. “Where’s the steak?”
“We’re having burgers,” Spike mutters.
“They’ll be done shortly,” Patch calls back.
The fact that he’s even here at all feels like a gift. Patch doesn’t usually come around unless someone’s hurt… or getting married. But Riley has made it her personal mission to drag him into family life.
“Can I have a hot dog, Uncle Patchy?” Bree asks.
“Course you can, little darlin’,” Patch says. “How ’bout you make me a burnt marshmallow while I get it ready for you?”
“Daddy says I can’t be near the fire,” she replies solemnly.
“Come on, princess,” Foster laughs. “I’ll help you.”
“’Cause you’re a fireman?” she asks.
Foster scoops her up onto his shoulders and heads toward the fire.
“Yep,” he says, handing her a skewer and a marshmallow. “Can’t get much safer around a fire than sittin’ on a fireman’s shoulders, right?”
And there we sit.
One big, loud, imperfect family.
My heart feels so full it might burst.
Tank doesn’t hate me.
I’m not alone.
And for the first time in a long time, the future doesn’t feel like something I have to survive.
It feels like something I might actually get to live.
