Page 311 of Wild Card 13

“You’re in my shirt, in my bed, after telling me you love me. I think we passed practical somewhere around midnight.”

She looked at me for another long second, and this time when she smiled, it was not careful.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood, keeping the sheet wrapped around her like a queen who had been mildly inconvenienced by romance.

Her purse sat on the dresser beside the dress. Her overnight bag from the wedding weekend was on the chair, right where she had dropped it last night after we had come in from the lake air and stopped pretending we were not going straight upstairs.

I reached for the sweatpants on the floor and pulled them on before I stood. Lucy’s gaze dipped, then snapped away with a blush that made my morning immediately better.

I walked to the hall bathroom and opened the drawer under the sink. “I have an unopened toothbrush,” I called.

“Why?”

“Because I am a responsible adult.”

She appeared in the doorway wrapped in my sheet, unimpressed. “Try again.”

“Because my mom buys practical things in bulk and puts them in places when she visits.”

“That I believe.”

I handed her the toothbrush. She took it, and for a second we both looked at it.

A toothbrush should not have felt like anything. It was plastic. Blue. Still in the package. Completely ordinary.

But Lucy stared at it like it was a step. Then she looked up at me. “Thank you.”

I kept my voice easy. “Anytime.”

By the time we made it downstairs, the sun had started to come up properly. Pale gold touched the lake through the windows, sliding over the floorboards and the kitchen island. Lucy had changed into black leggings, white sneakers, and a soft green tanktop that made the brown in her eyes look warmer even behind the emerald glasses she had pushed onto her face upstairs.

Her hair was still a disaster. I loved it. I wisely did not say that out loud though.

For a few minutes, we drank coffee in the quiet. No arena. No wedding guests. No loading dock. No past pressing its hands against the windows.

Just her at my kitchen island. Me across from her. The lake waking up beyond the glass.

She opened her purse, shook one pill from a small prescription case into her palm, and took it with her coffee like it was part of any normal morning. No ceremony. No comment. She capped the case and put it away, then wrapped both hands around her mug. “You’re being weirdly quiet.”

I leaned against the counter. “I’m enjoying you in my kitchen.”

Her expression changed. Then she hid it behind a sip of coffee because she was still Lucy and there were rules. “Careful,” she said.

“I am.”

Her fingers tightened around the mug. “I need this to be ours first.” She looked down at her coffee, then back up at me. “While we figure out what this is. Not because I want to pretend it isn’t happening. I just…” She exhaled. “I spent months with people watching me bleed around you, and I do not want the first real thing we get to become everyone else’s entertainment.”

“I know.”

Her eyes held mine. “You do?”

“Yeah.”

I could have told her that I wanted to walk into the arena with her hand in mine and let everyone deal with it. I could have told her that some awful, healed-wrong part of me wanted the whole world to know she had chosen me again. I could have told her that the idea of hiding anything after losing her once made my chest tighten.

But none of those things were more important than Lucy feeling safe.

She looked out at the lake, and the morning settled around us again.