Page 36 of A Very Bumpy Christmas
For three days, life feels like the soft-focus montage in the middle of a romcom. Lucas’s toothbrush next to mine. His socks mysteriously migrating under the couch. The tree timer clicking on at dusk like the apartment remembers we’re a team now. He pours my water before bed without asking. The wedge is still at the door—ugly, effective—and I’ve made peace with it the way you make peace with a smoke alarm: annoying, reassuring, essential.
We move around each other like we’ve been practicing forever. Breakfast is a dance—he scrambles eggs, I burn toast, he pretends not to notice. He knows exactly when to put a hand on my lower back so I can stand up without my spine writing a Yelp review. I know exactly when to slide a muffin across the counter because his eyes went pinched in that way that means he hasn’t had sugar in hours. The baby has decided we are a percussion section and keeps time with our routines.
I let myself live there, in that gentle, ridiculous fantasy, right up until reality taps on the glass.
He’s got his jacket on and the radio clipped to his belt. It’s late morning, and the winter light is clear and thin. He’s due to check in with Duke and Gunner, swap notes on Mercer, change a couple of routes. He’s been pushing off the longer stints, hovering close, inventing errands that begin and end at my building. I know he can’t do that forever.
“I’ll be a few hours,” he says, like he’s telling me about the weather. “Back by dinner.”
“Copy,” I say, because I know that’s his language. It still scrapes on the way out.
He reads my face—of course he does—and cups my cheek, thumb tracing the edge of a worry I thought I had hidden. “Amelia’s coming?”
“In an hour,” I nod. “She promised to bring me grapes and the gossip.”
“Good,” he says, shoulders easing a fraction. “Gingerbread if anything feels off. I’ll keep the phone up.”
My fingers hook in his lapel before I think better of it. “Be careful,” I say, because it’s the only thing that fits through my throat.
“Always,” he promises. He kisses my forehead, then the knuckles of the hand I forgot I was holding up like a tiny, defiant flag. “Back soon.”
The door clicks, the wedge slides back into place with a small, stubborn thunk, and the apartment exhales into a quiet that’s too big.
Amelia arrives with grapes, the gossip, and a tote full of things she claims I need (“nipple cream,” she whispers like it’scontraband, and I die, twice). She clocks the missing-Lucas-ness immediately.
“Where’s Captain Safety?” she asks, dropping onto the couch and tucking her feet under her like she owns the place, because she sort of does.
“Check-in,” I say, gesturing vaguely at the world. “Work.”
She nods, then side-eyes me with the accuracy of a heat-seeking missile. “Spill it.”
“I’m falling for him,” I blurt, because there’s no reason to hold out with Amelia. “Like… falling-falling. Like, ‘let’s monogram towels’ falling.”
Her grin is instant and mean in the loving way. “Did we not already know?”
“I knew attraction,” I say, clutching a grape for dear life. “I knew… warm. This feels like… furniture. Like the inside of my life is rearranging itself to fit him. And I don’t know if that’s stupid because—” I point in the vague direction of Colorado “—he lives there.”
“Don’t assume geography decides everything,” Amelia says, stealing my grape. “Maybe he moves. Maybe you move.”
“I don’t want to leave,” I admit, small. “You. Mom. My clients. The bakery that knows my Friday order and calls me Baby Lady are all here. This is my home.”
“So don’t,” she says. “We’re not centaurs tied to our home forest. People do long-distance and then they don’t. People relocate and thrive. People do hybrid. There are options that don’t involve you packing your heart into a checked bag.”
“Yeah, but… he’s got that job,” I argue, hearing the wobble I hate. “The one with radios and routes and sandbags. Helikeshis work. He’s good at it. And I—” My hand flies to my belly, to the soft press from the inside like a question mark. “What if this is just borrowed Tuesdays? What if after the New Year he goes back to Denver and I’m the cautionary tale who fell for the holiday boyfriend?”
Amelia leans forward, elbows on knees, straight into therapist mode without the degree. “Then you’ll be okay. Because you’ve got you. And also maybe… talk to him before you write the epilogue?”
“I hate being reasonable,” I mutter.
“I know,” she says sweetly. “It’s so off-brand. But maybe try it. Ask him what he wants. Tell him what you want. Don’t let fear write the script.”
“I could alsonotask,” I counter, flopping back onto the couch. “I could enjoy the time I have, and postpone the possible heartbreak until it’s seasonally appropriate. Like January. When everything is already gray.”
Amelia chuckles, then softens. “Do what keeps you breathing. Just… don’t confuse waiting with not wanting.”
We decorate the bottom third of the tree, which is the only portion of the tree I can reach without a step stool and an OSHA waiver. We talk about baby names we’ll never use. She tells me a story about a woman at the bakery who tried to pay with a gift card to a hardware store and then made it everyone else’s problem. We laugh until I hiccup and my hiccup makes the baby hiccup and then we both cry a little, because biology is a comedy.
When she leaves, the apartment goes quiet again in that way that highlights every ice maker thunk like a plot twist. I try to answer emails and get distracted by the ornament we bought—theBaby’s First Christmasone with the lopsided peanut doodle. I picture it on our tree next year with a date under the date, and my throat gets tight.
