But I didn’t feel lucky.
I felt sick to my stomach.
All the time.
And when I woke up from my nightmares, I wanted to hold something that I knew was beautiful and pure. Sadly, each time I picked Hiro up, I woke him up, and then he was awake for the next couple of hours.
Which made me feel like shit because he would easily sleep through the night if I didn’t wake him up because I was in need of comfort.
I looked at my son and smiled.
“You ready to go see your daddy?” I asked our boy.
He gave me a chubby, gummy smile.
That smile made the tear inside my heart—the one that’d been rendered when Janie had said that Trouper didn’t want me there—again—mend just a little bit.
I didn’t care what Trouper wanted.
I didn’t care what he thought we needed.
I knew what I needed.
I had a pretty good idea what my son would need.
And that was his father.
Which happened to be why I was standing where I was standing an hour and thirty minutes after getting my phone call.
Funny enough, my child was insistent about one thing, and one thing only. Eating.
He ate like a damn horse, which meant I was breastfeeding him when Trouper exited the tunnel.
Tears hit my eyes, and I straightened up and moved away from Trouper’s car.
Trouper’s car that I’d turned into a mom mobile.
He didn’t see me at first.
His head was down, and his long hair was covering his eyes.
He had a duffel bag over one shoulder, and the muscles in his arm was popping and bulging due to the effort he had to extend to hold it there.
He was wearing a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. Ones that were his from the day that he’d gone into prison and didn’t come back out again.
My son smacked his tiny hand against my skin, and I knew what that meant. It was time to burp him and switch sides.
He pulled off with a grunt of frustration, and I couldn’t help the tiny laugh that escaped me.
That tiny laugh was what snapped Trouper’s head up.
His hot gaze landed on me and slowly lowered to my exposed breast that I just had hanging out there for everyone to see.
I’d frozen solid, unable to make a move, and stared at the man now making his way toward me with determined strides.
I finally covered my chest up and propped Hiro onto my shoulder and started to pat his back, eliciting the smallest of burps from him.
That was when Trouper Aoki, my husband, finally caught up to me.
I swallowed hard and tilted my head back, staring at my man.
His body was practically vibrating in front of mine.
“I just saw your nipple,” he growled.
I swallowed hard. “You’re about to see the other one. Your kid’s impatient and likes his food immediately after he realizes he wants it.”
Trouper laughed and pulled back, his eyes going down to my chest.
“Feed him.”
I didn’t waste time switching our son to the other breast.
Trouper watched the whole process, his eyes heated and his face closed down.
We stood like this, just staring at each other, for another ten minutes while our son finished his mid-day snack.
The moment that Hiro was done, he pulled off of my breast with a grunt and started to look around.
Trouper covered me up this time, pulling my top into place almost before I’d even had a chance to react.
“Don’t like you exposed like this,” he grumbled. “Need to find you something to cover up with.”
I snorted. “Your son doesn’t like stuff touching his face. The moment that I do it, he screams like I’m pinching him.”
Troup’s eyes went from me to his son and back.
He swallowed hard.
I slowly handed Hiro over to Trouper, and Trouper didn’t protest.
He took his son and twisted him around so that the baby was on his shoulder.
Then he started to carefully pat his back.
Hiro didn’t take long in burping. He never did.
And that one small act, something that I took for granted because I did it every day, multiple times a day, caused Trouper’s face to fill with emotion.
I’d never, not ever, seen Troup cry before.
Not even when he went into jail because of me.
But the moment I saw his face start to break as he held his baby boy? I broke, too.
I completely crumpled and threw myself at him, burying my face in his neck.
Hiro, not one to be outdone, threw his face into the other side of Trouper’s neck and started babbling.
Since Hiro knew Trouper so well, there was no hesitation there.
Trouper’s sobs shook his chest even harder.
I was uncomfortable.
The hood of Trouper’s car was digging into my rather hefty hips—I still hadn’t lost all the baby weight yet. Having your man in prison was the pits, and really hard to motivate yourself to lose it when the one person you’d care about seeing your overly large hips wasn’t there to see them.
I was fairly sure that I had a sharp something sticking into my leg and cutting open the skin—did I move? No.
Oh, and then there was the way that Trouper was clutching me to him.
He was holding on so hard that I could barely breathe.
Yet, none of that discomfort mattered, because for the first time in eight months, I had Trouper back where he belonged. In my arms.
It wasn’t long in coming that Trouper’s son demanded his desire to be let go. He was now at the point where he didn’t like to be penned in for long, and he liked to explore.
I leaned upward and took Hiro out of Troup’s arms.
Troup tightened his hold on him for a minute, unwilling to let him go, but then finally released him.
I pressed a chaste kiss to Troup’s cheek and then walked around to the back of the car where I put our son into his car seat and buckled him in.
When I was done, I turned back and hugged the man that was holding every single piece of my heart except for the one sitting in the baby seat behind us.
Trouper, not one to ever deny me a hug, no matter how fuckin’ mad he was, hugged me back.
Tight.
• • •
We were at Trouper’s favorite place in the world to eat—Taco Bell.
I had no clue why he liked it so much, but I figured I’d take the gut punch—literally because my stomach hated me when I ate Taco Bell—and take him to his favorite restaurant the moment that he was released from prison.
He’d just finished off his eighth taco when he leaned back and stared at me.
“I can practically hear the wheels turning,” he teased.
I gave him a roll of my eyes.
“It’s been killing me,” I told him. “I have no clue why you’re out. I mean, I’m not complaining in the least. I’m just curious as hell right now, and I have no clue as to how this happened.”
It was a freakin’ miracle is what it was.
Trouper had literally served barely one tenth of his prison sentence for nearly killing a man.
I needed to know why.
Trouper gestured toward the front door with his head, and I stood up, gathering our trash.
Trouper picked Hiro and his car seat up and walked toward the door, waiting for me.
When I got to him, I immediately locked my arm on to his free one and held on tight, scared that if I let him go, he’d disappear.
It felt like a dream, having him here with me.