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Lance wakes up to being shot in the chest.
“Get up, Uncle Lance, it’s Christmas!” says Charlie, a shiny new Nerf gun in his hands. It’s the one Lance and Pidge picked out at Wal-Mart three weeks ago, and Lance says so, eyebrow raised. In response, Charlie clutches his gift closer, justifying: “Mom said I could open one gift before everyone else.”
“Charlie!” Sofia catches sight of the open door as she walks by and quickly snags her younger brother by the collar. “What did Mom say about giving people privacy?” The way she hisses the last word makes Lance’s eyebrows jump higher. Sofia and her twin, Manny, are twelve, now—old enough to have started on their education in the birds and bees—and he can only imagine how his older sister, Mariel, has gone about that instruction.
Charlie grumbles but follows his sister out of the bedroom, closing the white-painted door. Chuckling, Lance turns to the body beside him.
“The intruders have been vanquished,” he mumbles against Pidge’s neck, sliding a hand under the T-shirt she’s wearing—one of his. “Tommy’s already cooking the bacon—I can smell it. Are you decent?”
Pidge pinches the skin of his inner arm and turns toward him, rolling her eyes. “You know I am.”
“Just checking.” His hand skims lower, thumb hooking teasingly at the waistband of her shorts, until Pidge shoves him and he tumbles off the bed. Running into the bathroom, Pidge calls over her shoulder: “Wouldn't want to end up on Santa’s naughty list!”
*
Lance loves being at Mariel’s. His sister’s house in Florida always swells when the McClain family convenes. Mom and Dad left Albuquerque a couple years ago, moving to Miami so that Mariel and Anais could keep an eye on them and Gran. Marisa and her husband have flown down from North Carolina, their newborn Julia in tow. Last, but certainly not least, Tommy has arrived from Texas, bringing his trademark blueberry muffin recipe. Lance is busy devouring his fourth one while trying to maintain a handclap game with nine-year-old Paloma, one of Anais’s kids.
In the chair next to him, Pidge plays with Julia while explaining her doctoral research to Steven, Julia’s dad. Lance is used to hearing Pidge mumble it in her sleep, words like minimax combination and down-selection. Not that he could tell you what any of it means.
After everyone’s finished with breakfast, they finally migrate to the living room. The kids tear open their presents with gusto. Lance and Pidge get a pretty good haul, too: a blender, a shiny new coffee machine, a set of stacking mugs, all for their apartment. Soon, the only thing left is a growing mountain of torn wrapping paper, until Lance withdraws a small box from behind his back, sliding it across the carpet to Pidge.
The room goes quiet. Or, as quiet as it can be with five children running around, a baby cooing in their midst. Still, he can feel his parents’ and siblings’ eyes on him as Pidge unwraps the present.
“Lance,” gasps Pidge, holding it up to the light. The key to their apartment winks in her hands, with a new addition: he’s had a metal tag fastened to the chain, their names and the date they signed the lease engraved on it.
“Do you like it?”
He shouldn’t be this nervous. Pidge has been with him through his lowest: addled review sessions, days where he stumbled around red-eyed and haggard from nightmares about failing the MCAT, the meltdown he had when his favorite sandwich shop closed. But sometimes he sees her framed in a window and wonders if it’s all a dream. The frizz in her hair, the freckles on her shoulders, how he still knows how to make her laugh so hard she snorts milk up her nose.
“Of course,” Pidge says, and it’s a real thing. She says it in the same tone she concludes all her proofs— q.e.d., quod erat demonstratum —like it’s plain as day, a fact they’ve been barreling towards all along.
*
Later, Sofia and Manny corner him.
“Uncle Lance,” starts Sofia. Lance is already wary. The spark in her eyes is all too familiar; he remembers it from his younger days, when Mariel teased him about his school crushes. “Do you love Katie?”
“I—of course I do.”
“Then why aren’t you two married?” asks Manny, adjusting his glasses.
*
“I can’t believe you sent your twins to interrogate me,” Lance mutters that evening, elbow-deep in soapsuds.
Mariel sets the scrubbed dishes on the drying rack, nonchalant.
“Everyone was thinking it this morning,” she sniffs. “When you pulled out that box… we all thought it was going to be a ring.”
“Don’t you think I would’ve told you all if I were planning something that… big? ”
“Maybe not. You know Marisa can’t keep a secret to save her life.”
“Fair enough, but still. I wouldn’t… I want it to be special.”
Mariel nudges him with her hip. “So you have been thinking about it.”
“Of course I have!” His ears burn. “I just—” He occupies himself with attacking a grease spot, then changes tack. “Tommy’s not married yet, and none of you are getting on his case.”
“Tommy hasn’t held a relationship for longer than a year,” says Mariel, drying her hands. “You and Katie… you guys are high school sweethearts. What’s holding you back?”
The simple, most straightforward answer should be: nothing. When they were in college, it had been the distance. But then Lance had gotten into medical school at Boston University while Pidge was finishing up at MIT. Their schedules had been all out of whack, though, what with Pidge working full-time for a year before deciding to go back to academia, and Lance busy with his third and fourth year rotations. But now, he’s finally started on his residency—is getting paid, after learning how to subsist on microwavable meals and unhealthy amounts of coffee—and Pidge is on Year 2 of her PhD in Computer Science. He’d formally asked her to live with him in May; they’d settled into the new apartment in September. Although it involved cramming themselves and their boxes into a teeny-tiny elevator (“Good thing you’re so small already,” Lance had teased), and the bathroom smelled weird for a couple weeks, it was theirs and that was what mattered.
So the next step, logically, should be to pop the question. But Lance doesn’t want logical. Over the years, everything between him and Pidge has always unfurled so naturally; he wonders if Pidge feels like she’s had any other choice. He doesn’t want this to be something they do just because everyone else thinks they should. He wants to be sure that she’s sure.
He wants it to be perfect.
*
The basketball hits the rim with a clang. Lance jumps to rebound, palms warm with the familiar friction of synthetic rubber spinning out of his hands. Martin runs by, a slight punch of air escaping him when he takes the pass more in the chest.
“My bad,” winces Lance. “Watch your travel though, okay, buddy?”
Over at the net closer to the bleachers, Pidge leads a group of kids through free throws. She’s surprisingly good at them; when they’d first started volunteering together at the Boys and Girls Club, Lance had asked, with no small amount of betrayal: “How come you never tried playing in high school?”
“Too much conditioning,” said Pidge. “Matt tried to make me run layups with him once. Never again.”
Eventually their two groups convene for a round of knock-out, which Lance cheers from the baseline up until Angie challenges him to a half-court shot.
“So what do you want if you make this, Angie?” Lance asks.
Angie blinks at him. Most of her brown hair has frizzed up around her face. “Will you actually give me something?”
“‘Course. Scout’s honor.” Lance holds up three fingers. “I take bets very seriously. Just ask Miss Katie.” He nods toward Pidge.
“What’s Miss Katie have to do with a bet?” Angie frowns.
“Well… a long time ago, there was this big championship. And to tie, I had to make a shot almost like this one. So I looked at her and said: ‘If I make this shot, will you go out with me.’”
“And you did.”
“And I did,” Lance nods, smiling back at Angie. Pidge is watching the two of them, and the dormant high-school part of himself wants to point at her and proclaim: “If I make this, let’s get married,” but he’s also willing to bet his life savings that his girlfriend won’t exactly appreciate being proposed to in front of a bunch of sweaty, red-faced 11-year-olds.
“All right, I’ve decided,” says Angie. “If I make this, next week I want one of those giant chocolate chip cookies from the Chipyard. The ones you brought in last month.”
“Deal.” Lance extends his hand.
The bet shaken on, the two of them line up. Lance goes first—he gets rim, but no net. Angie is off by a much wider margin, but Lance makes a mental note to bring cookies for the whole crew anyways.
Later, while the kids are on water break guzzling Gatorade, Lance drapes himself over Pidge, resting his chin on her head.
“Get off me, you sweaty lump,” she says, but she leans back against his chest. “No clutch half-court shot this time?”
“I’ve still got it in me somewhere.”
Pidge turns to face him, hands slipping into the back pockets of his jeans. Off-duty Lance would make a joke about how she’s copping a feel, but for the sake of propriety and Being a Good Role Model for Tomorrow’s Future, he just holds her closer.
“Still got it,” Pidge agrees.
*
“If you lean too far over the side you’re going to fall in.”
Pidge’s hand tugs on the back of Lance’s jacket, anchoring him. Wind whips over the bay, and spray from the waves slicks the railings. In the distance, the tip of a whale tail peeks through the water, a teaser of the breach to come.
They’d decided to take a few days of vacation to visit Matt in California. While packing, Pidge had mentioned something about “a special day trip”; she lasted about an hour into their flight before Lance’s relentless wheedling got to her. Whale-watching in Monterey—she really did know the way to his heart.
“I wish it wasn’t so cloudy,” grumbles Pidge, eyeing the overcast sky as if it’s a personal affront. It’s cute, Lance thinks, that she’s so offended on his behalf. Her glower is weakened, though, by the fact that her hair keeps flying around her face like some sort of mad scientist.
“C’mere.” Fishing a hair tie from his pocket, he beckons her to stand in front of him. A few minutes later, he’s managed to wrangle Pidge’s locks into a messy but significantly tamer braid.
Just in time, too, because suddenly a black mass rises from the water, churning up froth. From a distance, the whale heads look like a cluster of mussels, ribbed ovals gaping at the sky.
“Oh my god.” Lance grips Pidge’s shoulders. “Oh my god, Pidge, there’s so many. ”
The whales go back under. A communal held breath from those on the ship, and then one of the whales hurls itself out of the water like a barnacle-covered torpedo, twisting in the air. It lasts no longer than a few seconds before it hits the surface with a loud smack, leaving nothing but white foam in its wake, but it’s beautiful and majestic and Lance is pretty sure he’s about to cry.
“Did you know that a humpback’s lungs are about the size of a small car?” he babbles, as if he didn’t spend the whole drive over rattling off interesting facts from a guidebook, but Pidge indulges him.
So all in all, it’s a good trip, well-deserved on both of their parts. Residency had been wearing away at his edges, and Pidge was getting stir-crazy hammering at her thesis. The morning of their departure, Lance is busy folding away some last-minute items while Pidge is out buying snacks for them to take to the airport when Matt enters.
“Hey, Matt.”
“Hey, Lance.”
Matt is a cool guy. They’ve spent many hours paintballing together or playing video games. It’s an easy rapport, considering they both have a “flair for the dramatic,” as Pidge likes to say, not to mention the two years they spent together on the basketball team in high school. So there’s not a lot to be scared of, here.
But the slow, deliberate way Matt is polishing his glasses suddenly has Lance envisioning Matt polishing a gun instead.
“Lance, you’re familiar with the concept of inertia, right?”
Physics speak has never bode well for Lance.
“Yes.”
“Right, so.” Crossing his arms, Matt leans against the wall. Mirroring him, Lance puts away the shirt he’d been folding and sits down on the bed, trying to seem more at ease than he feels. “Is that what’s going on with you and my sister right now?”
“I—what?”
“Pidge isn’t going anywhere. Neither are you. So what’s holding you guys back? I mean, you’ve been together for practically forever—”
“There’s that word again,” Lance groans. “ Practical. Shouldn’t this be a decision we make with our hearts, not our heads?”
Matt frowns. “There’s nothing saying you can’t make it with both.”
“And forever,” Lance blurts, because he might as well break here if he’s going to break in front of anyone. “That’s a lot to promise to each other. ‘Til death do us part. Do I see myself with anyone else in the future? Of course not, but… I mean, we just moved in together, and I don’t know, it feels like adding marriage to that will change either nothing or… everything.”
Matt scrutinizes him. “Which one are you more afraid of?”
“That’s the problem,” says Lance, swallowing. “I don’t know.”
*
Boston in late March still refuses, stubbornly, to rise above 46 degrees, something neither Pidge nor Lance has grown used to despite how long they’ve lived here.
“I’m freezing,” Pidge complains, burrowing against him, and Lance tugs at the red scarf bundled around her neck, bumps his nose against hers. Pidge’s cheeks are ruddy from the cold, the taste of cake and wine on her lips when he leans in.
“I’ll get you warm in a minute,” he teases, delighting in the warm puff of air that draws from Pidge’s nose when she snorts. Bringing her hands up, he rubs them between his own, pressing a gentle kiss against the pads of her fingers. That wins him an affectionate look.
“Happy ten year anniversary,” says Pidge, pulling from his grip in order to wind her arms around his neck. A lock of hair has escaped from under her beanie, curling gently against her forehead. Lance brushes it aside with his thumb.
“Happy ten year anniversary,” he hums, bending to accommodate her. Normally, he likes to bask in the fact that she has to rise on her tiptoes to kiss him. Make her work for it, and all that. Tonight, though, he’s all too willing to follow.
It’s a slow dance to their bedroom: kicking off their shoes and shrugging out of their coats, laughing breathlessly between kisses. Pidge’s scarf gets unwound and tossed over the back of the couch, Lance’s v-neck sweater discarded on the carpet floor. His knees hit the edge of the bed, springs squeaking as they tumble onto the mattress. Fingers trace down the knobs of his spine, socks sliding against his calves, and Lance shivers, burying his face in Pidge’s neck. Finds the soft curve of her waist to pull her closer, nuzzles at the spot just behind her ear, where the peach notes of her shampoo linger, sweet as the coming spring.
“Lance.” A sigh, an open mouth against his shoulder. “Don’t tease.”
Unbidden, he thinks of his favorite Neruda poem, the low timbre of his father’s voice reading it.
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.
“Can’t help it,” he grins, wicked against the curve of Pidge’s matching smile. And he’s got it, now: want as a way of keeping warm, love as the blanket you wrap around yourself, the poem whispered between sheets.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want to do with you
what spring does with the cherry trees.
He senses, more than sees, Pidge roll her eyes. A pinch at the skin right around his ribs makes him yelp. Pidge snorts, and Lance remembers being nineteen, an awkward bundle of knees and elbows until Pidge had tugged him up and said: We’re figuring this out together, like he wasn’t about to go down on her and they were about to assemble some Ikea furniture instead.
In hindsight, maybe that had been his headlong dive into forever.
“What are you thinking about?” Pidge asks, tracing the shell of his ear, and he turns into her touch, kissing the heartline of her palm as if it’s a sentence written over and over: this. This.
*
Lance wakes up cold.
The blankets have been tugged away from him in the middle of the night, leaving him exposed from waist up. Drowsily, he lolls his head to the right, already knowing what he’ll find: a giant cocoon made from their comforter, a mess of tawny brown hair just barely peeking out. Sighing, Lance rolls over on his side, throwing an arm and leg over Pidge. It’s like hugging the cold side of a pillow, the fabric between them sliding soft against his skin.
Eventually, Pidge stirs.
“Morning,” says Lance, grinning as she wriggles around slowly to face him.
“Morning breath, ” she frowns, but accepts his kiss anyways. Grudgingly, she frees an arm from the blanket she’s bundled around herself, using it to fling the covers over them both. Lance sighs as the pocket of warmth envelops him, reaching out to drag her closer.
“Hey!”
“Your turn to be the heating pack, you blanket hog,” he says, trapping her in his embrace.
“You’re just a giant octopus, I swear,” mutters Pidge, but she rubs her hands up and down his arms.
His blood stirs with her touch; he sends her a lidded look, offers: “Round two?”
Pidge’s eyes narrow.
“It’s Saturday,” Lance sings, unrepentant. He raises his head slightly to look at the clock on their bedside table. “ And it’s only nine. I don’t plan on leaving this bed until at least ten.”
Sheets rustle. A blur of motion. Lance ends up with his arms pinned above his head, Pidge sitting on his stomach. The blanket still hangs over her shoulders, like some sort of cape—avenging angel of their tiny apartment, Lance thinks, armed with a sly streak and a smile stronger than any dose of caffeine.
“You asked for it,” she says, grinning wickedly.
Lance has no regrets.
*
The first year of residency is the hardest. It’s what everybody told him when he started in July. Once he’d made it through December, Lance thought he’d weathered the worst of it, but April sinks its teeth into him and wrings him out to dry. He’s dead on his feet and haunted by the fading sound of an EKG when he stumbles home that night. It takes a while to connect the dots: the book on the floor, the torn page fluttering to the ground by his right foot, the pain in his rear.
From his vantage point on the ground, he can just make out the faint sliver of light from their bedroom door.
“Pidge,” he starts, paper crumpling in his hands. And then, a little louder: “Pidge.”
The door opens and Pidge walks out, rubbing her eyes. She does a double-take when she sees him on the floor.
“Are you okay?”
“I slipped on your book.” Getting to his feet, he hands it to her, along with the ripped page. Their living room is a landmine—the floor is covered in loose-leaf sheets, three-ringed binders.
“What in the world is going on?”
“I had an idea,” Pidge explains. “I needed to cross-reference it with some old journals, but—”
“Pidge, we have shelves. We spent all that time building a bookcase, it’d be nice if, you know, we actually used it?” Lance scoops up one of the binders as he crosses the room, depositing it on the shelf in question. Usually, he’s not this snippy, but it’s late and he’s tired and—
“Okay, I get it.” Pidge’s face gets pinched and she starts snatching up her papers haphazardly, amassing a pile in her arms. Fodder for the coming storm. Fighting with Pidge is always a coin-flip—sometimes she throws it back immediately, gets right in Lance’s face, but other times she’ll clam up, nursing her anger until it goes off like a bottle rocket. Tonight looks like it’s headed for the latter; Lance tries to cut it off.
“Don’t be mad.”
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. You’re doing that thing where you suck in your cheeks to keep from yelling.”
“I’m sorry, did I ask you to diagnose my expression, doctor ?” snipes Pidge, shoving her stack of papers onto the shelf.
Lance bristles. “At least my brand of being a doctor involves caring about other people, and not plugging away at a computer all day.”
It’s unfair and Lance knows it; he feels the recoil of his own words the minute they leave his mouth. Pidge’s back goes ramrod straight, like one of those non-Newtonian fluids that hardens on impact.
Desperately trying to backpedal, Lance reaches for her shoulder. “Wait, I didn’t mean it like—”
“No, it’s fine.” Pidge sidesteps his touch. “It’s just a different take on the same speech. ‘I’m Lance, I’m the hero, and I’m going to save the entire world.’”
“Pidge, listen to me, I do think the work you do is important.”
“It’s just not noble enough,” says Pidge, fighting through the wobble in her voice. “God, Lance, why does everything have to be some giant gesture with you? The apartment, the keys—”
Lance’s stomach drops. “Wait. I thought—you said you liked the keys.”
“I did! But it made me feel… it makes me feel like—us living together, it’s this test, and I’m failing it. I’m not the girlfriend who cooks and cleans for you when you get home.”
“Hey, that’s not fair. I’ve never asked you to be that for me.”
“Because you don’t want it, or because you know I can’t deliver?”
To say Lance hasn’t thought about it would be a lie. But that’s never been the draw of his relationship with Pidge; they both entered knowing they had very different strengths. Easy to take for granted, the first couple of years. Too easy, Lance realizes now, because that’s the curse of the familiar. You spend so much time around a person that you start to assume you know them inside and out, but maybe you’ve just been pigeonholing each other the whole time.
His nose burns; only now does Lance realize he’s been holding back tears. “Is that what living together this whole time has been for you?” he asks, quiet. “A burden?”
“I don’t know.” Pidge is crying, and he hates it, hates that two people who love each other can still make each other miserable. “It was so much easier before, when it wasn’t official. When I would just sleep over at your place or you would sleep over at mine. This isn’t that different, so I don’t understand why it feels that way… so what if it’s something wrong with us ?”
The ground tilts. “You don’t really think that.”
“I don’t know,” Pidge chokes out again. “I need some point of comparison, and I don’t… we don’t have that.”
Part of Lance wants to laugh. If this were a movie, this would be the part where he says: Let’s see other people, then, confident in the belief that they’ll end up back together eventually. But this is real life, and Lance knows: you don’t let a good thing go because it’s bruised. You just learn how to hold it differently.
“I’m going to take a walk,” he tells Pidge. “I’ll be back.”
*
Custody after a fight goes like this: Lance gets Hunk, Pidge gets Allura. Keith can go either way; there have been times when he was on the line with Lance while, over in the next room, Pidge talked to Shiro. It’s never the end of the world, though this one feels more like an axis shift than usual.
When Lance finally returns to the apartment, the air smells like chicken nuggets. Illuminated by the lone bulb in their kitchen, Pidge stands, nose still faintly red.
“I cleaned everything,” she starts. “But that wasn’t enough and then I thought I should do something to make up for it but I can only throw together a few things because you’re better at cooking and—”
Lance doesn’t hear the rest. They fold in on each other like a house of cards: Pidge’s nose buried in his shoulder, both of them sniffling.
“I hate it when we fight.”
Pidge gives a watery laugh. “Me, too.” At his back, her grip tightens; she pulls back enough to say: “I can tell when something’s wrong, you know. I know it’s late, but… I’ll stay up. If you want to talk about your day.”
Lance looks at the clock. 2 AM. There’s ice cream in the freezer, chicken nuggets about to be fresh out of the oven, and they’re still here, together, in the faint kitchen light.
“Yes,” he says. “Please.”
*
In May, Pidge leaves for some fancy tech conference. Lance does a good job of not missing her, for the first few days. He orders takeout from the Ukrainian place that Pidge hates the smell of. Dresses up their Roomba and dances to bachata music in the living room. He resists the urge to watch the latest episodes of Star Cop , then catches Pidge accessing their joint Netflix account from her hotel room, so they end up having a viewing party, though it isn’t quite the same when he can’t rest his head in her lap. On Day 4, a mini fog machine gets delivered to their apartment (“Is this ours?” Lance asks on the phone. “Shit, it was supposed to be a surprise,” Pidge confesses).
Day 5 is when the loneliness officially sets in. Over something totally mundane, too. Lance is in the tiny elevator carrying up the day’s newspaper; he catches sight of his reflection and it feels too big, all of a sudden. That night he goes straight to bed after facetiming Pidge; at 4:30 AM, he wakes to find he’s migrated to her pillow.
if u don’t come back soon I’m going to buy a pet to keep me company, he texts.
I’ve always wanted a chinchilla, Pidge writes back the next morning. And then: I miss you too.
*
After ten years, these are the things Lance has learned:
Love is messy. It gets its hair caught in the drain and spills cereal on your lap during movie nights.
Love is frantic. It wakes up in the middle of the night to chug coffee and knock out another 1000 words on a journal article.
Love is quiet, and loud, and silly, and serious. Love doesn’t make fun of you for crying about small dogs. Love lets you drag it around to all your favorite rollercoasters, brings home warm empanadas when you’ve had a long day, deals with your older siblings. Love steals the blankets from you but keeps you warm in other ways.
Love never, ever lets you win at Mario Kart.
Lance sets the controller down. Post-dinner unwind sessions tend to follow the same routine: one of them picks the videogame, the other picks the movie. Pidge has already changed into her pajamas, the shoulders of her raggedy T-shirt wet from shower-hair. Turning to sit sideways on the couch, Lance asks: “What are we doing?”
Pidge blinks at him. In some other life, she’d be an owl. Slowly, she sets down her own controller, rearranges herself to mirror him. “What do you mean?”
“You know how… there’s that myth, right, that sharks have to constantly keep swimming or they die? I feel like that’s us. We keep doing our thing day to day and—it works, obviously, but I don’t want to keep assuming it will without ever saying it. Like… I want the guarantee. You’re it for me, Pidge. I want to grow old with you and I want to have three kids so we can form our own basketball team and I want to be there for every slightly burned salsa omelette and…” Lance stops to take a much-needed breath. “I’m tired of swimming. I want—I want to settle down.”
There’s time enough to launch a dinky space satellite and have it orbit the moon, in Pidge’s silence. And then she cups his face in her hands, applying just enough pressure that it forces his lips to purse slightly.
“I feel like there are a lot of levels on which this metaphor doesn’t work,” Pidge says, staring deep into his eyes. “But yes. Yes, you big stupid.”
It’s like spending an entire lifetime underwater and then finally, blessedly, breaching the surface. Lance feels like one of the whales they saw in Monterey, all those months ago: bigger than his body, launched toward the sky.
“For the record,” he says, still fish-lipped in Pidge’s hold, “this isn’t my proposal. This was just like… a teaser.”
Pidge rolls her eyes. “Dummy.”
“Your dummy.”
“Mine,” Pidge agrees.
*
A year into marriage, and these are the things Lance has learned:
Bulk coffee orders from Amazon are a man’s best friend. Cooking and cleaning are, as always, best done in each other’s company, even if they inevitably argue about whose music to listen to. You can never have too many blankets, especially when your wife wraps herself in five of them in the dead of January and whines at you to make pancakes. (“Still got it,” Pidge says with a grateful smile, teeth stained with the blueberry and chocolate as she tears into the first one on her plate.)
In return, she lets him put his head in her lap and complain about work. On days when his back hurts, all he needs to do is go to the kitchen and rest his forehead on Pidge’s shoulder; immediately, she’ll close her laptop and make him lie down on the floor, feet nimbly popping all the tired joints. Gran wants to know when they’ll have kids, and Pidge and Lance just shrug. Whenever we’re ready. Sometimes a family can be a boy, a girl, and a reprogrammed Roomba.
They still have their messes and their misfires. It’s not perfect, but then—maybe it never needed to be.