She crosses the kitchen and puts her arms around me, careful of my ribs the way she always is, and I hold her there for a long minute while Harper babbles below us about something only she understands.
"You're good," Nora mumbles into my chest. "You know that, right?"
"I'm working on knowing it."
"Work harder."
I laugh and press a kiss to the top of her head.
The team is going to spend a week being uncomfortable. The story is going to run. Reaper is still going to be the captain, and I'm going to be the player whose girlfriend slapped him, and that's a thing I'm going to carry for a while.
But she's in my kitchen, and Harper is in the bouncer. Reaper knows where I stand, and Coach knows where he stands, and the GM knows where I stand, and the man I used to be is—slowly, slowly—getting smaller in the rearview.
Yesterday, something cracked open.
And the strangest part is, today, I think I might actually know how to walk through it.
31
NORA
It's been two weeks since I slapped Reaper, and Tyler's a completely different person when he comes home from practice.
It's Friday evening, almost 6 p.m., and I hear his car in the driveway. Harper's on the floor, attempting to army crawl toward the coffee table—her new favorite activity that gives me constant heart attacks—and I scoop her up before she can knock her head on the corner.
"Daddy's home," I tell her, and she squeals.
The door opens, and Tyler walks in with actual energy instead of that defeated exhaustion he used to carry. His face lights up when he sees us, and there's no bruising, no split lip, no careful movements to hide injuries.
"There's my girls," he says, dropping his bag and coming straight for us.
He kisses Harper's head, then kisses me on the mouth—properly, now that we don't have to be careful about it inside the house—and I can feel the difference in him. The lightness.
"Good practice?" I ask.
"Great practice. Danny set me up for two goals during thescrimmage. Rodriguez asked me for advice on his backhand." He's grinning. "It's like I'm actually part of the team now."
"You always were part of the team. They just finally pulled their heads out of their asses."
Harper chooses now to lunge out of my arms toward the floor, determined to continue her crawling mission. Tyler catches her, laughing.
"She's fast now," he says, setting her down carefully and watching as she immediately takes off toward the kitchen. "When did she get so fast?"
"This week. I can't turn my back for two seconds without her getting into something."
We spend the next twenty minutes taking turns chasing Harper around the house. She's discovered she can pull herself up on furniture, which means everything at her level is suddenly fair game. The coffee table, the couch, the TV stand—she's grabbing at all of it with delighted determination.
"We need to baby-proof better," Tyler says, catching her before she can pull down a lamp.
"We need to wrap her in bubble wrap."
"That too."
By six-thirty, we give up on cooking and order Chinese takeout. When it arrives, we spread it across the coffee table, with Harper between us in her little seat, and eat straight from the containers like college students.
Tyler offers Harper a tiny piece of steamed rice, and she examines it seriously before shoving it in her mouth. The face she makes—surprised, contemplative, then pleased—has us both laughing.
"She likes it," Tyler says, offering her another piece.