Mom helped me make dinner and peppered me with questions about what was going on the entire time. I really wanted to tell Lando first since he was the reason for my good news, but I couldn’t leave my mom hanging after how awesome she had been, so I told her that finally, after three months of endless work and hours and hours of training, the doctor had given me a clean bill of health to take back to the department.
I had my physical and training course with the department set up at the end of the week. I was back in fighting form, almost back to work and so excited and proud that I couldn’t contain myself. I deserved a moment and I wanted to have it with the man responsible for getting me there so bad I could taste it.
When Lando came into the apartment, his eyes widened at the spread laid out before him. I asked him to come over for dinner, which usually meant takeout or heading somewhere to eat. The only time we ate in was when we were at his place and he cooked, so I wasn’t shocked by his surprise.
“We’re celebrating.” So much so that I actually had on black slacks and a light green button-up shirt instead of my usual jeans and T-shirt. The last time I was this dressed up I had been at a fellow officer’s funeral. It took a pretty serious occasion for me to put the jeans away.
He bent his head and let his lips touch mine softly as I pulled him in for a kiss. I hadn’t shared with him the fact my doctor’s appointment was today because I wasn’t sure how I was going to react if the man told me I wasn’t ready yet. I’d worked so hard, we had worked so hard, I wasn’t sure that I could simply roll with any bad news without it being devastating. Luckily that wasn’t the case and now here we were and I was ready to throw my arms around him and shower him with gratitude and affection.
“What are we celebrating, Dominic?” He sounded amused and a little bit confused.
I should tell him we were celebrating being here together. Things hadn’t looked all that good for a few days after he unceremoniously kicked me out of his bed and ran. For all the talk of not hitting an end or coming to an inevitable finish line, it looked exactly like that’s what we were doing.
My ego had taken a ding and hollered at me to focus on getting better, to concentrate on getting back to work. My heart had tripped and felt like it had been used for a soccer ball, all while my brain calmly explained that things between Lando and I were indeed moving along fairly quickly and there were still a lot of unanswered questions between us about my future and apparently about his past. My common sense told me this was just another bump in the winding and eventually forked road we were currently navigating together. My brain was smart.
After a tense two days of silence and no contact, he called and asked to come over. When he showed up, there was a discernible shift in his demeanor. It was like he had made peace with something, but I wasn’t even sure what the battle was about. We ate pizza, bullshitted about nonsense, pretended to watch a crazy reality show about a naked man and woman trying to survive with nothing in the jungle, and then we fucked, wild and uninhibited, on the couch until we were both exhausted. It felt strangely like make-up sex but as far as I knew we weren’t arguing and neither one of us had anything to apologize for.
Ever since that night though, things had fallen into a fairly easy pattern. He worked, I went to therapy and trained. We spent the night together at either his place or mine and every morning I woke up wrapped around him. It was nice. It was addicting. It was terrifying because I didn’t know how long it would last and I was having a really hard time remembering what life was like before he took up so much room and time inside of it. It used always to be about the law, about my job, now it was about Lando and what was going to happen next.
“Sit down and eat dinner and I’ll tell you what we’re celebrating.” I gave him a little grin as he looked skeptically at the table and the food sitting on it. “My mom came by and helped me cook. I’m not going to poison you.”