He was waiting on my porch when I got back from the school. I'd bawled my eyes out the entire way home, already a huge, empty hole where my bubbly little girl had been. Even though I looked forward to her trips all year long, the three hundred and thirty odd days of wishing for a break didn't make the few I spent without her any easier.

It was lonely as fuck when Jacy was gone.

Edward didn't leave for four days.

Day One was sex in the bathroom. On the couch. Crushed up against the countertop in the kitchen, him telling me how badly he wanted to do this every time I washed dishes. Hips biting painful against the edge of countertop as he bit my shoulder, finishing hard and fast and then dropping to his knees to finish me. A bite to my ass so hard he left a mark.

I have never come so hard in my life.

Day Two was sleeping, waking up to him sprawled on his back in my bed, curls wild and face gone soft with sleep. Rolling closer and his arms going around me. Slipping him inside, doing something gentle and slow, shuddering through an orgasm while he groaned against my chest. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the pillows. Binging an entire season of a tv show we didn't pay attention to, showering, and then doing it all over again.

Day Three was work, and I thought about him the entire time I was there. Stitches and head wounds and broken legs, but I was planning all the things I wanted to do to him when I finally got home. I wanted to tie him to my bed. Suck his cock. Sit on his face. Getting way ahead of myself, because all I really wanted was that sleepy sex. The domestic fucking. The lazy showers together. The stuff I'd been missing all this time.

Day Four, I came home from work, and he was still there. In the house. In Jacy's room. On her bed. The picture of Jake in his hands.

"I didn't think you'd still be here."

"I didn't want to leave."

I sat beside him on the bed and stared at Jake's face through the glass. I'd taken this photo two months before he died, the day after we'd fought over finding out the gender of the baby that had been beating up my insides.

He'd wanted to know. I didn't.

It still made me feel sick that he had died without that.

"She looks like him. I thought she looked like you, but she looks like him," he said.

"She does. It's getting stronger as she gets older. I can see him in her, more and more."

We both stared at Jake for a while, silent.

"You know what she's going to have a hard time with?" I curled closer to Edward, his arm looping around me as I put my head on his shoulder.

"Me not wanting to take her Monday chore? What is her Monday chore, exactly?"

"Mopping." I rolled my eyes.

"Yuck. No wonder she wants me to move in so bad."

"She's asked you about that?" I lifted my head to look at him, surprise all over me.

"She told me. I'm supposed to come help her clean out the basement next weekend." He winked at me.

Shit.

"It's the not sleeping in my bed anymore that she's gonna hate."

Jacy had always been in my bed. At first, it was my own loneliness, then the ease of having her close, then the comfort her warm little body gave me. The familiarity. She went through a three month phase of wanting to sleep alone when she was seven, but even now, she still found her way to my bed a few nights a week.

"Sounds to me like you're thinking about it."

"What?"

"Us."

AN

(Insert heart eye emoji here)

Props to HH - I'm all up in her business, she might as well adopt me and claim the tax exemption.

Thank you for reading.

xo

HB