Happily Ever After (BXB): Best Friends Series

Five

Chapter Five: Baby Steps

Luke held Delilah in his arms. His baby. His daughter. Four months old. Who breathed loudly, a kind of long sound something like..."Haaaaaahhhhhhh." Followed by a hiccup. Then a favorite, finger sandwich. Sucking on her fist, looking up at him with her dark blue eyes.

Dark blue eyes.

The pediatrician told them her eyes would most likely change color. He and Taylor had no idea what the birth parent's looked like. Delilah's mother requested no contact. She'd given them a limited medical history, but it didn't include physical descriptions of the parents. Delilah looked like a baby. She had a baby's round face, squishy body, and all the parts necessary to complete a human being. She had the tiniest fuzz of hair, maybe blackish brown. She was a baby. A cute adorable, poopy, good natured baby.

His baby.

Luke sat with her in his arms, on the couch, as she waved her fists a bit, boxing with ghosts. He smiled down at her, trying to not let the stress and anxiety that seeped into his bones, to show on his face. She might be a baby, but body language and facial expression was a thing, probably, and he didn't want his daughter to get upset.

That her daddy was now a single daddy.

A single fucking daddy.

Because her other daddy went off to happiness with someone else. Who must have just batted their eyes at Taylor for half a second at the funeral, giving his husband blue balls and a broken heart. Jude gave Taylor something that Luke couldn't. Something that Taylor couldn't live without, once it was offered again.

Luke wasn't enough for his husband. He'd thought they were in love. Taylor never said anything, not a single fucking word about being unhappy. He actually kind of thought they were practically the perfect couple. Childhood sweethearts, sort of, who found each other again as young adults, completing something, solving a problem, or completing a project that had been left unfinished. Finding true love together. But...guess not.

Luke rocked their daughter, wondering how Taylor felt right at this moment. Was Jude really so vital to his life that he could abandon their daughter? The daughter they'd worked so hard to adopt. The daughter they'd both wanted so desperately. Not Luke, okay, yeah, it was horrific and a slap in his face, a door slam on everything he'd thought they meant to each other. But his daughter? Who Taylor loved?

Or so he'd thought.

There's no way he could do it. No way.

If ... if ....if something changed, somehow, someway, between him and Noah and Jamie, there's NO way he'd give up on Delilah.

Even if he gained Noah.

But that wasn't something he was going to think about. Because it was stupid and pointless, and he already had a hole in his heart the size of Mount Shasta itself. He didn't need to think about Noah. Or remember how Noah looked, holding Delilah in his arms. His dark brown hair long enough now to be pulled back into a short ponytail. Long hair compared to Jamie, who'd shorn his curls to almost bare scalp, leaving his face naked in a way that gave him a new kind of maturity. Noah had ink that ran up and down his arms. That Luke had only seen when his former boyfriend rolled up his trademark green button up.

Nope. He'd already cried enough today, when Rachel, Del's nanny, took her in the stroller for a walk. So he could fill out his divorce papers. The custody papers. Organizing everything before he finalized it with a lawyer, and sent them to Jude's parents. Ending his eight year marriage. His marriage to the husband he'd loved and planned on spending the rest of his life with. The boy he'd befriended in middle school, the boy he'd crushed with his callous actions during high school, the boy who kept him at arm's length during most of lockdown, the boy who'd finally agreed to let Luke into his heart, into his life, finally trusting that Luke wouldn't desert him. Or hurt him again. Opening up his fragile heart, Luke vowing that he chose Taylor and let go of the starry shadows of his past.