Page 22 of The Firefighter’s Forever

The early morning air is cool when I step outside. The sky is a little brighter now, the sun slowly climbing, and town is still quiet enough that every sound feels magnified. My car door. The engine turning over. The soft crunch of tires on the driveway.

There’s almost no one on the road. A delivery truck idles outside the grocery store. A man in running shorts crosses at the stop sign near the park. Other than that, the town feels suspended, not fully awake, giving me the strange sense that I’ve slipped into a private version of morning meant only for people making life-altering decisions before breakfast.

By the time I turn onto Lucas’s street, my pulse is pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat.

His truck is in the driveway. I pull up behind it just as the front door opens. Lucas steps out in uniform pants and a department T-shirt, duffel bag in one hand, keys in the other. He stops dead when he sees my car. For one suspended second, neither of us moves.

Then his expression changes. Concern hits his face so fast it nearly undoes me.

He drops the duffel bag on the porch and comes down the steps toward me before I even get my car door open. “Harmony?”

I step out, one hand braced on the car door.

“What’s wrong?” he asks. His eyes move over me quickly, checking my face, my body, my stomach. “Is it the baby?”

“No.” I shake my head too fast. “No, the baby’s fine.”

His shoulders loosen a fraction, but not all the way. “Are you okay?”

I look at him standing there in the early morning light, broad and solid and ready to handle whatever crisis brought me to his driveway at sunrise. His jaw is rough with a day’s worth of beard. His eyes are locked on me with that familiar, steady focus that has made me feel safe from the moment everything started falling apart.

“Lucas, I’m so sorry.”

His brow furrows. “For what?”

I take a deep breath. “For pushing you away.”

Lucas goes completely still.

“I thought I was doing the right thing. When I said we should be friends, I really thought that was the safest choice. Everything happened so fast, and then I got pregnant, and suddenly every feeling was tangled up with fear and responsibility and the baby and my whole life changing.”

His gaze stays on mine.

I keep going. “I didn’t want to mess it up. I didn’t want us to try this and have it go badly, because then what? We’d still have to raise a child together, and I was terrified of making everything harder than it already was.”

“Harmony.”

I shake my head. “I know why I did it. But I can’t keep doing the safe thing anymore when it doesn’t even feel safe. It just feels lonely. And stupid. And unfair to both of us.”

His face changes, something raw slipping through the control he always keeps so carefully in place.

My throat tightens.

“I love you,” I say.

For half a second, I can’t believe I said the words. Then I realize I’m not scared of them anymore. I’m scared of all the time I wasted refusing to say them sooner.

“I love you,” I say again. “I don’t know when it happened. Maybe when you brought me ginger chews and pretended it was casual. Maybe during the first appointment you came to. Maybe when I watched you read crib instructions. Maybe it’s been happening this whole time, and I was just too scared to call it what it was.”

Lucas stares at me, swallowing hard.

“I want to be with you,” I say. “Not because of the baby. Not because it’s convenient. Not because it looks better or makes things easier. I want you. I want us. I’m sorry it took me so long to admit it.”

For one torturous second, he doesn’t speak.

Then he closes the space between us. There’s no carefulness in his face now. No holding back. No disciplined distance. His hand comes to the side of my neck and his mouth comes down on mine.

The kiss steals the rest of my apology.