He bent his head and let his lips touch mine softly as I pulled him in for a kiss. I hadn’t shared with him the fact my doctor’s appointment was today because I wasn’t sure how I was going to react if the man told me I wasn’t ready yet. I’d worked so hard, we had worked so hard, I wasn’t sure that I could simply roll with any bad news without it being devastating. Luckily that wasn’t the case and now here we were and I was ready to throw my arms around him and shower him with gratitude and affection.
“What are we celebrating, Dominic?” He sounded amused and a little bit confused.
I should tell him we were celebrating being here together. Things hadn’t looked all that good for a few days after he unceremoniously kicked me out of his bed and ran. For all the talk of not hitting an end or coming to an inevitable finish line, it looked exactly like that’s what we were doing.
My ego had taken a ding and hollered at me to focus on getting better, to concentrate on getting back to work. My heart had tripped and felt like it had been used for a soccer ball, all while my brain calmly explained that things between Lando and I were indeed moving along fairly quickly and there were still a lot of unanswered questions between us about my future and apparently about his past. My common sense told me this was just another bump in the winding and eventually forked road we were currently navigating together. My brain was smart.
After a tense two days of silence and no contact, he called and asked to come over. When he showed up, there was a discernible shift in his demeanor. It was like he had made peace with something, but I wasn’t even sure what the battle was about. We ate pizza, bullshitted about nonsense, pretended to watch a crazy reality show about a naked man and woman trying to survive with nothing in the jungle, and then we fucked, wild and uninhibited, on the couch until we were both exhausted. It felt strangely like make-up sex but as far as I knew we weren’t arguing and neither one of us had anything to apologize for.
Ever since that night though, things had fallen into a fairly easy pattern. He worked, I went to therapy and trained. We spent the night together at either his place or mine and every morning I woke up wrapped around him. It was nice. It was addicting. It was terrifying because I didn’t know how long it would last and I was having a really hard time remembering what life was like before he took up so much room and time inside of it. It used always to be about the law, about my job, now it was about Lando and what was going to happen next.
“Sit down and eat dinner and I’ll tell you what we’re celebrating.” I gave him a little grin as he looked skeptically at the table and the food sitting on it. “My mom came by and helped me cook. I’m not going to poison you.”
He ran a finger over the tablecloth and then turned and ran the same finger down the buttons on the front of my shirt. The light touch made my breath hitch and my pulse skip.
“You dressed up your place and yourself. Must be something pretty special we’re celebrating.” I cleared my throat and actually did the gentlemanly thing and pulled his chair out for him. I don’t think I’d ever pulled a chair out for anyone before.
“Very special.” I walked around the table and sat down across from him. I asked him if he wanted a glass of the red wine Mom had brought to go with dinner and I could see humor dancing in his eyes as he nodded. Luckily my mom was a smart woman because I didn’t have anything close to a wine opener in my place and the bottle she left had a cap that screwed off. After sloshing the deep red liquid into a couple of glasses, I sat back and we stared at each other for a long moment. Eventually, Lando lifted the glass to his lips and took a swig. When he put it back down on the table he leaned forward a little and asked,
“You went to your physician today, didn’t you?”
I balked a little and reached up to tug at the collar of my shirt. “I did. How did you know that?”
He waved a hand over the table and all the trappings. “This is all a pretty big hint. He cleared you to go back to work, didn’t he?” I wanted there to be some kind of excitement, some kind of enthusiasm in his tone but there wasn’t. He sounded resigned and fatalistic instead.
“He did. But it’s not like I just get to walk back in and ask for my gun and my shield and demand to be put back on a beat. I have to get cleared by the department shrink, and then I have to pass the department PT test and get requalified with my weapon. None of that is a cakewalk or a guaranteed pass. But this is a big step in the right direction. It’s what we’ve been working towards from the start.”
He picked up the wine and swirled it around in the glass. I could see him struggling to be as happy with my news as I was and it stabbed at somewhere soft and unguarded in the center of my chest. I put my hands on the table and leaned a little bit forward. “You’re not excited for me.” I held up a hand when he opened his mouth to reply. “That wasn’t a question, Lando, it was an observation. I can see that you’re not.”
He swore under his breath and then leaned forward and copied my pose. “I’m happy for you, Dom. It’s me I’m not happy for.”
I narrowed my eyes at him and fought to keep my irritation in check. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means this is the one time in my career I kind of resent that I’m so good at my job. I knew we would eventually get here, but I guess I thought we would have more time.”
More time? It had been three months. Three months of hard work, uncertainty and endless amounts of doubt. For me, it felt like forever to reach this point.