Blade

 

As I lay in my bed with Lucy next to me, coming down from the heights of our shared ecstasy and intimacy, I thought about how much she had changed. The girl who had come into my office hadn’t been confident enough to do what she’d just done to me. She had been confident in her ability to dance and her ability to overcome obstacles, but she had come across as shy about her body itself. She had been reserved.

 

While so many girls who came through my door lost their spirit on that stage, Lucy had found hers. She owned her body now. Hell, she’d owned mine in bed.

 

“So how does this work?” she asked dreamily as we lay next to each other. She rolled over toward me and curled up against me.

 

“What do you mean?” I asked. We’d had sex before. She certainly knew how that worked.

 

“I mean, do you take me back to the clubhouse? Do I stay here tonight? All of my stuff is over there now. I wasn’t really prepared to spend the night.” Her voice didn’t lose its comfortable, dreamy quality while she talked, despite her questions. She sounded like she wanted me to assure her that she didn’t need to go back to the clubhouse. I didn’t want her to. I wanted her to stay.

 

“I’ll take you back in the morning so you can get ready for work,” I told her.

 

She put her arm across my stomach and squeezed me. “I missed this,” she said, as if she were already drifting off to sleep.

 

“I did, too, even though it was only one night.” I looked down at her and stroked her hair.

 

She chuckled, and I felt her breath on my skin. “How funny is that? We can’t even be apart for one whole day without being all sad and depressed, like a couple of teenagers.”

 

I wanted to remind her that she wasn’t that far removed from her teenage years, but I didn’t need the reminder that I was. At twenty-nine, I had left my teens just before she made it to hers. I tried not to think about the age difference, though. As we got older, the gap would seem to shrink. At twenty-one she was closer to me than she would have been when I was twenty-one, even though the numerical difference would have been the same. We were closer in maturity. Then, I laughed to myself. Even though I hadn’t said anything, I was still reminded of the difference in our ages.

 

“Well, have you given any thought to what I said at dinner, about being my old lady?” I asked her.

 

She looked up at me with her sweet blue eyes. “It’s all I’ve really been thinking about, Blade. I don’t know. I guess I didn’t feel the need to say it out loud, since everyone thinks we already are. I was just letting things go their own way. That kind of seems to be how my life works these days.”

 

“I can see that,” I agreed, still stroking her strawberry blonde hair.

 

“Why is it so important to make that distinction?”

 

I had to choose my words carefully, I knew. Even though she sometimes seemed shy or inexperienced, she was still a very independent woman. If anything, discovering confidence in her body seemed to be making her even more independent. She probably saw my attempt to label our relationship as a way to exert control over her, and, for once, I was thankful that I wasn’t going to have to control the relationship. For once, I knew the relationship was going to be fine on its own. Still, I wanted it to be official. I wanted to be sure of the nature of our relationship.

 

“I want you by my side, Lucy. I want to share more than my bed and my home with you. I want to share my life with you. I want to send you back to school so you can finish your degree and do what you want with your life instead of just following a paycheck,” I stared, stopping short of saying everything that was on my mind. There was more I wanted for her, but I wasn’t sure how she was going to take it when I said it.

 

“I know you do, and I thank you for that, Blade. I thank you for everything you’ve done for me,” she said, stroking my chest, still reluctant for some reason to accept.

 

“I want you to move back in, Lucy. I don’t mind if you spend off time at the clubhouse, but I want you here, with me,” I confessed.

 

She laughed. “It was just one night, and you’re already changing your tune. You really must like me or something,” she teased.

 

“You have no idea.” I grabbed her hand and pulled it up to my mouth, kissing the back of it gently.

 

She blushed, and I caught a glimpse of that same uncertain girl who walked into my office with hopes of auditioning to be on my stage.

 

“If you will have me as your lover – and I don’t mean as an occasional partner, I mean as your lover – I will never turn my back on you like the other men in your life have done.”

 

Her eyes widened as I spoke. She stared at me slack-jawed as if she hadn’t expected me to pledge my devotion to her that way. “I don’t know what to say, Blade.” She pushed herself up from my chest. “I’m flattered, definitely, but that’s heavy stuff to drop on me like that.”

 

“I know, but I mean it. No one should ever walk out on someone they love, not if they truly love them. Your father had no business shutting you out and turning his back on you the way he did. Your mother should have stepped in to stop him. Instead, I’m willing to bet she just sat back and watched, probably with tears in her eyes.” I didn’t care if my words overstepped my bounds. I wanted her to know and understand where I stood and why I stood there with her.

 

“She tried, but, you know,” Lucy started, letting her voice trail off with a touch of disappointment in her mother’s inability to stop what had happened to her.

 

“And any man who wants to be a woman’s lover certainly should open his door to her when things go wrong in her life. Instead, that coward who fathered your child ran off once he realized you were knocked up. He probably took his wife with him, and now she’s probably wondering why her husband is suddenly so devoted to her. He’s scared shitless because his little affair became too real for him,” I told her, realizing for the first time how upset I was that everyone from before had treated her the way they did.

 

She looked down at the bed and put her hands in her lap. She looked like she was about to cry. She had really cared for that married man she’d been seeing. “What would you have done?” she asked quietly.

 

I put a finger under her chin. “I can’t honestly say I would have done any better if I had found myself in the same situation, but I wouldn’t have found myself in that situation,” I told her.

 

“Well, what are you going to do about it now? It already happened. It’s old news,” she said, shrugging off the tears in her eyes and laughing nervously to keep them from spilling over.

 

“I’m going to adopt your child, if you will let me. If you will have me, I want to adopt your child. I want to take you and your child in as my family. I want to spend every day making it right for you.” I had a vague idea of what I was saying, but, for the most part, the words just gushed out from my heart.

 

“You’re not only talking about me being your girlfriend,” Lucy said in surprise.

 

I didn’t say anything. I realized that what I was saying to her, everything I had said to her, sounded like a marriage proposal. I was talking about building a life together, which was exactly what I wanted, but I hadn’t actually made it far enough in my thought process to label what I was thinking as marriage, but that was exactly what I was saying. I wanted her to be my old lady, my permanent old lady.

 

“You’re talking about the future, way down the line, about us staying together forever, that sort of thing,” she continued, breaking it down so it made sense without saying that I was proposing to her or asking her to marry me.

 

I wasn’t proposing, but there was no way I wasn’t putting it out there. I was definitely putting it on the table. It was something for us to think about as we continued to move forward. Together.

 

“I mean, you’re talking about making yourself and the MC my family,” she said. The more she talked, the more animated she became. “You want me to be yours. Not just your lover or your girlfriend, but yours-yours.”

 

I laughed as I watched her wrap her mind around what I was saying. “Right,” I agreed. “I want you to be mine, but not in the sense that you belong to me. You’re not a piece of property, and your independence is one of the things that continues to attract me to you. You’re strong. You’re my equal. You are not beneath me. You will be more than just my girlfriend, my lover, my old lady, or my wife. You will be my partner, and that baby will be our baby. I will take the place as your child’s father,” I said.

 

I didn’t tell her that because she made me nervous, she also made me certain that she was the one for me. I didn’t tell her that talking about the future made me a little scared, but it did. The last time I had talked to anyone about the future, there had been no future for us. We married, made each other miserable, and divorced. And it was ugly. I had vowed never to do it again.

 

But I found someone who made me want to give love another try in Lucy. I felt her affection was genuine. She wasn’t hiding a heinous bitch inside anywhere, waiting to pounce on me as soon as we slid the wedding bands on.

 

“Are you asking me to marry you now? Are you proposing to me right this moment?” she asked.

 

“No, I’m not. I’m asking you to be mine. I want you as my old lady, essentially as my girlfriend. I want us to give this relationship a real try instead of leaving it as just sex. I want more out of this, and I want to offer you more, too,” I told her.

 

She looked at me and opened her mouth as if to speak a couple of times. I could see that she was thinking over what I’d told her. If my divorce still felt new from time to time after a couple of years, surely her breakup with the baby’s father felt like her immediate past. If she was unsure of herself, I understood completely. I was asking her to make a big move, to take a huge leap of faith.

 

We sat in silence and stared at each other, hoping the other would speak first. The longer she went without saying anything, the farther away I felt my chances slipping. I wanted to say something, to urge her to take a chance on me, but I didn’t want to push her farther away than she was already drifting.

 

I grabbed her hand instead. I laced our fingers together and pulled her back down to me, to lie across me. I wanted us to touch, because it was harder for us to ignore the possibility of being together as a couple if I made it feel like we already were.

 

Then, I waited.