“I’m sorry, baby. Sorry I haven’t been there for you lately, sorry I was such a fucking ass there for a while, but you gotta know I won’t do that again,” Rip told me, sounding so grave. “I couldn’t even if I tried, you know that?”
I didn’t let myself tense up, and even though I didn’t really want to ask, didn’t want to be the kind of person who needed reassurances… I was that person. I might always be that person, but I hoped I wouldn’t. But I still asked, “Why?”
And handsome, amazing Rip didn’t hesitate for a single second as he said, “’Cause I love you, Luna. Because I love the shit out of you, girl, and those two weeks when you were acting like you were done with me were some of the worst days of my life.”
That had me sitting up so I could look at him. Look at him I did. At that serious face. At those intense eyes. At the earnestness coming straight out of him like a beam. I could be honest, I could admit I whispered, “You love me?”
Not yeah. Not uh-huh. Nothing watered down or broken up. He gave me the four greatest words I would ever hear. “I love you, girl.” A confirmation. A promise. A Band-Aid that shouldn’t have been a Band-Aid but was.
Because I knew Rip wouldn’t say those words if he didn’t mean them. Maybe he’d said some things weeks ago he hadn’t meant, but I understood why they had come out the way they had. I definitely knew he wouldn’t take them back for no reason.
In that moment, I knew he meant those three words from the bottom of that rough, complicated heart.
“I love you too,” I told him, freaking going for it because why not? People smarter than me would say that the world wasn’t for chickenshits, and I didn’t want to be a chickenshit.
The corners of that mouth tipped up and his smile was gentle but bright and sweet. “I know you do, baby.” One of those hands went up my spine again as he leaned forward a little, not breaking eye contact for even a second. “I know you do. And I know you’ve had a lot of people not do right by you, and I know things with your sister aren’t that great—”
“She sent me a letter,” I cut him off. “I’ve been wanting to tell you.”
He didn’t say anything, but I could tell he wanted me to tell him the rest by the way his eyebrows went flat.
“She said that she was sorry. That she didn’t know how to tell me about talking to my dad—”
His snort wasn’t even close to being a surprise. I couldn’t say I blamed him.
“Supposedly an ex-boyfriend was the one who broke into her apartment, and she’s been acting weird because she didn’t want to tell me she was a stripper. That’s how she’s been paying for her apartment,” I finished with a blink. “I think I was worried there for a moment she was selling drugs, so…”
Rip’s face was carefully blank as he asked, “How you feeling about it?”
I leaned forward and kissed his cheek, earning an expression that was somewhere between a smile and a smirk that went straight into my soul. Was this how easy it was going to be? Was that how it was supposed to be? Rip just letting me kiss him whenever I wanted? I was all for it. I really was. “It makes me sad she didn’t feel like she could tell me. I’m not going to lie. It hurts me a lot that she’s talking to my dad of all people and has been for years. I don’t get it, Rip, you know? I mean, I guess I kind of do but not really at the same time. He wasn’t anywhere near as mean to them, just to me, but even then, I don’t get how she could even bother wanting to try. Her and Kyra. He was horrible. He didn’t give a single crap about her or any of them when they lived with him, and I’m not exaggerating that. If it was her he’d been mean to, I would never be able to forgive him. Not ever.”
That big, warm hand went to my throat. “You don’t get it because you’re not them.” His thumb swept over my cheek. “I’m talking about your sisters. You wouldn’t do that, Luna. I don’t get why they would either.”
“She also said my dad didn’t send my cousin over to the house, that he did it on his own,” I told him. “I haven’t tried calling her again since then. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I love her, but I’m mad.”
“You’ll do the right thing.”
“I hope so.”
His smile was soft. “You will, baby. You always do. I don’t know anybody with a heart half as good as yours.”
“Aww, there’s plenty of people—“
“No, there’s not.” Rip kissed the side of my mouth, then the opposite side, the short bristles on his cheeks kissing mine. “There really isn’t. You got that little fox on you, but you’re a wolf, baby. A fucking miracle. I don’t know how you came out the way you did, but you teach me something about forgiveness and love every single day. And here I thought for most of my life, until I met you, that I stopped learning things a long time ago.”
Me?
That laugh was soft. “Yeah, you. Only you.”
I swallowed, I gulped, and I raised my eyebrows at him because I didn’t know what to say. Had no idea what to think. He must have known that because he kept on going.
“I don’t know what the fuck to tell you to do about your sisters, but I know you’ll figure it out. I sure as hell don’t know what to tell you about your dad, but if you wanna know what I think, I say let’s go burn down that house you lived in with him. If you just wanna move on with your life though, I’d get behind that.
“What I know is that I’ll tell you right now I’ll never let anybody treat you like fucking shit or make you feel like they don’t want you around. Not me, not even your family. I wasn’t fucking around when I said I love you, and I know there’s a lot of shit I need to tell you, but we’ll figure it out.” His thumb rubbed over my cheek again, and those blue-green eyes that sucked me up and wouldn’t spit me back out were locked on my face as he said, “If you want.”
If I wanted.
Oh, man.
I bit the inside of my cheek. “And if I don’t?” I asked him even though we both knew that wasn’t going to be the case.
“Then I got more work to do to talk you into it,” he replied softly.
The funny thing about life is that there’s a lot you don’t get to choose. You don’t get to choose whom you’re related to. You don’t get to choose your hair color, your height, or what natural talents you are given. You don’t get to choose where you are born, or who or what the world will see when they look at you.
But the best part of life is that in the end, none of that matters. You get to choose who you become. Who you love. You can change your hair color and, to an extent, you can even change your eye color and height. You can learn to be great at something.
There’s a whole lot you don’t get a choice in, but there’s a whole lot more you do.
And I knew right then what I would choose. What I would always choose.
The best decisions of my life had been those I’d jumped into terrified even though some part of me knew they were necessary.
In that moment, and for the rest of my life, I knew that nothing would ever be as necessary as this man in front of me, who would sabotage my dates and make me food because he knew I couldn’t cook and mostly because he saw me for who I wanted to be. For who I tried to be even when I did things that weren’t very nice. This man, Lucas Ripley, who was just as much of a taped together puzzle as I was.
Or as we all freaking were, I guess.
So I told him the only answer I would ever let myself live with.
I looked into those blue-green eyes and told him the truth. “I want to. I really want to.”
Epilogue
It was the dream that woke me.
That dream that had me waking up with a gasp.
It wasn’t real, I told myself as I blinked up at the darkened ceiling. It had been at least two or three months since the last time I’d dreamt about my dad and that house and the stupid-ass and the idiot that had my subconscious jerking awake to get out of it. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.
I was fine, I was safe, and I was loved.
I wasn�
��t seventeen years old, and I was fine.
But I didn’t have to roll over to know that it was after midnight now, so technically I was thirty-one now. Thirty-freaking-one. And it was that knowledge that had me smiling in my bedroom, that had my heart rate slowing back down, and that had the goose bumps I’d woken up with, retreating.
Of course I’d had a dream about my dad after one of the best nights of my life. That was how this stuff worked. Those dumb memories were spread out more and more as time went on, but they were still there in the those dark, little corners I didn’t go visit that often.
Reaching over to the other side of the bed, I found it empty but still warm, the covers thrown over partially on top of me. I glanced toward the bathroom to find the door closed and the light off, and I knew exactly where Rip was. I knew exactly what he was doing.
And that, even more than the reminder of my night before, calmed me down that last little bit.
Swinging my legs over the side of the bed, I rolled up to sit on the edge, grabbing my half-full glass of water and chugging the rest of it down before standing up. The house was quiet, which honestly surprised me because according to my cell phone screen it was three in the morning. Rip and I had made it to midnight before we’d gone to our room to shower—together—and then gone to bed, leaving everyone else up and farting around the house.
Everyone else. That had me smiling even more and getting to my feet, still holding my empty glass.
Opening the door as quietly as I could, I listened down the hall but still couldn’t hear a peep.
And I already knew well enough not to screw up a bad thing, so I headed toward the living room as quietly as possible. It was then that I heard the noises. The freaking snores coming from it. Before we’d gone to bed, I’d told everyone that hadn’t gone home where the air mattresses were in case they wanted to stay over. Apparently, someone had.
I came up to the living room to find the seventy-five-inch television that Rip had insisted on buying two years ago on but muted, I had to stop there and look at the two air mattresses that had been blown up. On one was Lily and her boyfriend of the last two years, this really nice guy named Abner. On the other mattress was Kyra and her boyfriend, a guy I didn’t like anywhere near as much. They were fully clothed without a single blanket or pillow anywhere around, but totally passed out, one of the guys and Kyra snoring like chainsaws.
On the couch was the greatest surprise of my day, Thea.
To be fair, Thea and Kyra, both, coming to my birthday party in the first place had surprised the hell out of me.
Lily wasn’t surprising at all. In the year since she had finished her undergrad, she had gotten a job back in Houston but moved into her own place, even though she spent the night at our house more often than at her condo. Rip and I had assured her she could move back, but she had insisted she was fine on her own.
But Thea and Kyra? Some days I wanted to think that things between us were the same as they had been before, but they weren’t. I could accept that now. I could get through my life knowing that I loved the hell out of my sisters and that they loved me back, but that everything that had happened almost five years ago had changed those little ties between us.
It didn’t help that I could see it in their faces every time we talked. The hesitation. The worry that I would ask them something they didn’t want to answer. The worry that they would say something I didn’t want to hear.
Even though there was only one topic I didn’t want to hear and it started and ended with a “D.”
But I wasn’t going to think about that person tonight or tomorrow or any other night. The dream I’d just had had been enough. Plus, it was my freaking birthday now, and I’d had a great night, and nothing was going to get to me at this point. No, siree.
So I kept on creeping through the house, heading into the kitchen that we had never gotten around to opening because the wall there was structurally important, and I didn’t want to spend money redoing especially when I bought all my appliances and gotten granite countertops for the price it would have cost to put in a supporting beam. All thanks to the money Grandma Genie had left me in her will.
The door closed behind me quietly as I flicked on the lights and headed for the cake I’d put in the fridge hours ago.
The pretty, two-layer white frosting cake with blue glitter on it that Rip had made me that was halfway gone now.
Pulling it out, I sliced off a nice, big slice and set it on a plate, pulling out a fork before setting the cake back into the fridge.
I had barely sat down at one of the stools under the brand-new island we’d gotten installed two years ago when the door swung open again and a big, familiar body was there.
I smiled.
“Whatcha doing, baby?” the giant hunk of a man I could look at every minute for the rest of my life, asked, as he stood there in a tight, white undershirt that clung to every inch of that solid upper body. The cut-off navy blue sleeping pants he was wearing right then hadn’t been on his body before we’d gone to bed.
“Getting a piece of this awesome cake,” I answered him, sliding the plate toward him an inch and raising my eyebrows. “Come split it with me.”
Rip smiled that freaking smile that went straight to my heart before he came over, pulling out the stool beside mine with one hand while the other one slid through my hair to cup the back of my neck. I’d been letting it grow out lately, and the cotton candy pink and blue strands just barely grazed my shoulders now. I wasn’t even a little surprised when he leaned over and kissed my neck before scooting the stool even closer to me, one thigh straddling the back of mine while the other one grazed the knee closest to him.
“I wake you up?”
I slid the fork through the tip of the cake as I answered him. “Not even a little bit. I had a bad dream and figured I might as well come down here and get a slice while you finished up.” We both knew I still struggled going back to sleep on nights like these, but usually I woke him up when I did or stretched out on the bed until I could press up against him to relax so that I could fall asleep again. He never minded, and honestly, our best conversations were always in moments like those, when we could tell each other things that weren’t so easy or pretty.
His answer was a grumble as I held the fork up to his mouth and he took a bite.
“Thank you for everything,” I told him as I slipped the fork out of his mouth, looking at those pink lips for a second longer than I needed to, before dipping the tines back through the cake and scooping more into my own mouth.
Man, it was delicious.
A big, warm hand landed on the middle of my back and gave it a circle. “You have a good time tonight?” he asked quietly.
I nodded at him and smiled before swallowing.
All of our coworkers and their girlfriends or wives had come, some of their kids, had too. Mr. Cooper and Lydia. My sisters and their boyfriends. Lenny and her gang. And even two of Rip’s friends and their ladies.
Rip and Lydia had made all the food. He’d made the cake. Lily had bought the snacks. Lenny and Mr. Cooper the drinks.
All to celebrate my birthday. In the house that I had bought, and that over the years, Rip and I had fixed up even more. A house that was under both of our names now. A house that we had made even more of a home together. A place where our little baby daughter woke up in the middle of the night and her daddy got up to feed her or change her diaper or just snuggle her like it was the greatest honor.
He never woke me up to help, but half the time, the monitor told me what was going on anyway. Most of those nights, especially if he left the little device in the room, I just lay in bed and listened to him talk to her, patiently, with so much love it felt like I’d burst. It wasn’t hard at all for me to accept he was such a great dad.
I mean, before things had gone to hell, Mr. C had been a great father to him. Rip had told me stories here and there of the things they had done while his mom had still been alive. He’d had a great role model
.
Things between him and Mr. Cooper weren’t great, but they weren’t bad either. It might have helped that after Mr. C’s heart attack, he had taken to working half the hours he had before, only doing scheduling. They had even hired another mechanic too, to help out Rip since he had to take over more of what Mr. Cooper did.
They hardly argued anymore. They didn’t agree half the time, but they didn’t fight. I doubted I would ever see them hug or talk about anything that wasn’t work or family-related, but it was something. I’d even seen Rip pat Lydia on the back twice.
If that wasn’t something I didn’t know what was.
So right then, I leaned over and kissed him right on the mouth. “Every year is the best birthday ever.”
Rip didn’t smile as I pulled away from him, but he watched me with those eyes, and I wondered what he was thinking. But when his hand slipped underneath the back of my black tank top, those fingers I knew like the back of my hand, giving my bare skin another rub, I stopped thinking about everything else. The cloud of bad birthdays before hovering in the dark corner of my head, the dream, my sisters in the other room, how lucky I was, just… everything.
At least, I stopped thinking about everything for the ten seconds he waited to say in that quiet, quiet voice, “I’m gonna give you your birthday present now.”
That had me raising my eyebrows again. “Right here where anyone can walk in?”
He had a grin on his face as he rolled his eyes and shoved the stool back, getting to his bare feet and circling around the island toward the cabinets above the refrigerator. He opened them easily, pulling out a shoebox-sized thing wrapped in white paper with blue ribbon.
I didn’t need to ask to know he’d wrapped it himself. He always did and he never half-assed it. Not ever.
He closed it and turned around to head back toward me, a funny expression on that handsome face. “What? You’d never look up there. It’s only pots and pans.”
Years and countless cooking lessons with Rip later, and I still hadn’t gotten much better at it.
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