Oh my god.
Oh my god, Luca sent his Nonna to ambush my sister. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“Because I meet all the cool people and you just have this virtual life where you don’t do anything, except you seem so happy with it.”
He sent Nonna.
He sent Nonna to make Elsa not write romance novels.
“Oh, god, Henri, don’t do that. Don’t start crying again. I take it back. You have the coolest life ever because you don’t have to fit into anyone’s mold and you’ve been jilted five freaking times and you still have this unstoppable optimism and I kinda hate you for it, but I also want to be you so badly because you don’t apologize for being who you are even when Mom and Dad shit on your dreams—don’t say shit, Tatiana and Thalius and Tittia—and oh, fuck, I can’t even say your names right.”
“Fuck,” Talia yells.
The door opens, and a large man in a baseball uniform with perfect hair and worried green eyes cautiously pokes his head in.
I gasp.
Elsa sits up straighter, then winces and adjusts her donut.
Luca’s gaze connects with mine, and god, do I ever not look like I’m having a breakdown when he’s around?
Check that.
Am I ever not having a breakdown?
“What are you doing here?” I whisper.
He visibly swallows. “Heard there are some future sluggers in here.”
I blink, spot Francisco out in the hallway with Darren too, and I realize this isn’t Luca coming to find me and forgive me and tell me he loves me and can’t live without me.
It’s horrible, terrible, very bad timing for a public relations visit to the hospital by the home team. He pulls out three baseball stress balls adorned with various mascot contenders from a drawstring bag and goes down on a knee entirely too close to me to hold them out to Titus.
How do I always forget how much room this man takes up? And how good he smells? And how fabulous his ass looks in—and out—of his uniform?
And how much I want to touch him and apologize for running out of the biggest celebration of his life, and how sorry I am that I wasn’t there for him in Seattle last night, and how much I cried when they lost, and how hard it was to hold Elsa’s hand through her contractions and pretend I was crying for her pain, and not my own?
“You wanna pick one, little buddy?” he asks.
Titus points to the one with Glow and screams in terror.
It should be funny, but seeing him react the way I know Luca wants to react to the firefly makes my eyes leak more.
“You have excellent taste, little guy,” he says thickly.
He puts the Glow ball in his back pocket and offers Titus a squeezy baseball with Fiery on it instead.
“I want the dragon!” Tatiana yells.
“Duck! Duck!” Talia chimes in.
Luca smiles at my youngest—no, formerly youngest niece—and hands her a ball with Firequacker, then gives the older two each a Fiery ball.
“That’s so kind of you. Thank you,” Elsa says.
He shakes his head. “I’m a man with ulterior motives.”
Still down on his knee, he turns to me. “Henri—”
My breath catches.
No.
No.
Not again.
“Wait.” He grabs my hand and squeezes. “Please. Wait.”
“Luca—”
“You know him?” Elsa interrupts.
His face twitches, and it’s so familiar, and so Luca, and suddenly I’m laughing through my tears.
Why am I doing this?
Why am I resisting him?
Could he hurt me? Of course. But is it worth hiding from life to never hurt again, when the trade-off is missing out on all the joy in between?
He squeezes my hand again, briefly closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, he gazes at me like I’m the only thing in his life with meaning. “Henrietta Bacon, will you do me the honor of letting me love you for the rest of my life?”
My breath leaves me.
My heart tries to leap out of my chest and into his arms.
And all I can manage is a whispered, “Oh.”
“You taught me how to love, Henri. Let me show you. I don’t care what the world calls us. I don’t care about the formalities. I don’t care about anything but having you by my side. Please, Henri. Please let me love you.”
And there go my eyeballs again as I wrap my arms around his neck and inhale his delicious scent and soak in the warmth of his skin and the strength of his grip while he hugs me back.
“You—you came here for me?”
“Losers don’t usually invade maternity wards, but when I finally got one of your friends to break and tell me where you were—”
“You are not a loser.”
“I lost you.”
Oh, Luca. “I’m so sorry I ran away.”
“I’m sorry I scared you. God, I miss you.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there last night.”
“What’s going on?” Elsa asks. “Henri? What is this? Do you know this man?”
“She said yes!” Francisco hollers in the hallway.
A dozen people shush him, because babies are sleeping, and new moms are trying to get a few minutes of shut-eye too, and suddenly half the Fireballs are crowding into the hospital room while my sister and her kids gape at all of us.
“But I didn’t—” I start.
“You don’t love me?” Luca asks.
“Oh my gosh, I love you so much it hurts, but I’m not marrying you. You said I didn’t have to. You promised. Wait. Oh my gosh, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. If it would make you happy, Luca, I’d plan a thousand weddings to you, even if I said I never wanted—”
Huh.
Look at that.
He does like kissing me to make me be quiet.
I should talk more.
I should definitely talk more.
“You don’t have to talk to encourage me to kiss you,” he says against my lips, because he knows me.
He knows me, the good parts and the bad parts, and he still wants all of me.
I pull back enough to bring his beautiful face into focus, and there’s so much hope in the wrinkles in his forehead and the tilt of his mouth and the intensity in his eyes, my heart couldn’t swell bigger if it were blessed with all the magic that I’ve been struggling once again to write about.
“I love you, Luca. I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my life. Anyone. Ever. And you don’t have to say it back, because you show me. You show me every day.”
“Then let me show you by telling you too. Henrietta Bacon, I—”
Titus shoves between us. “An ’Enni, I eat da baw.”
He holds up the squishy baseball with a bite taken out of Fiery.
Darren lifts Titus. “I got this.”
Elsa’s still gaping. “Are these men actual baseball players, Henri?”
“No. They’re some friends I paid to entertain the kids,” I reply. “Dance, gentlemen. Just like you rehearsed.”
Francisco, Robinson, and Emilio share a glance, then look at Brooks and Max, who are standing like deer facing down alien spaceships coming from all directions.
“Hey, Macarena!” Robinson yells, and all five of them start doing different dance moves.