I knew he would eventually grow more complacent, but the fact that he worried so much was endearing. He let me lounge in bed in the morning while he got Trix fed, but he was in, slapping my ass to wake me up to get her dressed. He liked metal music and anything to do with an engine that he could work on with his hands.

Spare parts soon came to rest on my kitchen table or by the front door, and I eventually got him a crate to put things in, so they didn’t clutter up my house. He used orange-smelling cleaner to scrub his hands and a little nailbrush to make sure he never came to bed and put his hands in me while they were covered in grease.

We lay out on a blanket in the grass, his hand holding mine or wrapped around my waist for hours, while we watched Trix run through the sprinkler in her underwear. He always made sure both Trix and I were slathered in sunblock every time we left the house.

He was concerned about things that I had never imagined would matter to him. The way he took care of us relieved every concern I had about him in the past. He cared about everything. He tried to protect us without stifling us, and Trix and I blossomed.

One night, when Trix was playing on the floor and Dragon sat polishing some sort of engine something or other, I started flipping through the music on my iPod. He was grunting with every selection, like I was turning it on just to torture him. He never raised his head, but after a while, I started to pick music just to annoy him. Maroon 5, Janet Jackson, anything pop-related that I could find, I played, and every time, he made a noise of disapproval. Finally, I chose one of my favorites, a song I used to sing to Trix as a baby. It wasn’t pop, but it definitely wasn’t heavy metal. When I didn’t hear a noise from him, I raised my head and watched him polishing the engine part.

“Seriously? Nothing to say?” I asked him, my eyebrows rose in surprise.

He never looked up from what he was doing, but he answered me anyway, “Babe. The man’s a poet.”

“You like James Taylor?”

“Just said I did, didn’t I?”

I felt the smile forming on my face as I found the greatest hits on my iPod and set them on shuffle. I’d found our musical common ground. To other people, it may have seemed insignificant, silly even. But we were building a life, starting from the ground up. I loved learning new things about him, finding how we fit. When he looked up and winked at me, my smile widened until I felt my cheeks cramp.

We made our first forays into the outside world, and it didn’t seem as daunting with Dragon by my side. I knew he wouldn’t let anything happen to us. We grocery shopped and went to dinner, and we even went shopping for summer clothes for Trix. Nothing too short or with any thin shoulder straps made it into our basket. He was very particular about what she wore. It seemed a little over the top to me, but if it was important to him, we could wait until Trix was old enough to complain before we discussed it.

Normal things felt like trips to an amusement park. They were all new and exciting. Even settling into a routine was something that I found myself daydreaming about. This was a life I’d never wanted, and now, suddenly, it felt completely right.

If Dragon would have treated me like spun glass those first few weeks, I thought things would have been much harder to move on from. I would have been aware of our fight every moment of every day, like an albatross hanging around my neck. But after that first day, he didn’t bring it up again other than the small kisses he dropped on my cheek daily, even after the bruises had faded. It was a reminder that he hadn’t forgotten; it was a promise. He went back to being the man I’d dreamed about, gruff and blunt and completely enamored with me. He undressed me with his eyes at the dinner table and grabbed my ass as I left a room, and I loved it. I loved him. I wasn’t sure when it started—long before the day he found out about Draco—but it felt so much more real once he knew everything. All our secrets were out in the open, and I reveled in it.

For once in five years, I wasn’t in control, and I loved it. I hadn’t had a panic attack since I got the papers from Tony, and I felt stronger by the day. I knew Dragon and Pop wouldn’t let anything happen to Trix, and it was a heady feeling to not have to worry about every single little thing. I was just living, playing with my girl during the day and playing with my man at night. It was bliss.

Eventually, life changed into a more normal pattern with Dragon leaving in the mornings and sometimes not getting home until Trix and I were in bed. I didn’t like it. Of course, I didn’t. Most nights, I lay awake, waiting for him to get home, my insecurities screaming at me. But he never gave me any reason not to trust him. He’d come home smelling like the clubhouse—smoke and a mix of whiskey and beer. It didn’t matter if he’d left only hours before, the minute he got home, I wanted him. I simmered all day, my body sore, but with an underlying arousal that never went away. We wanted each other with an urgency that never wavered.

The club had a barbeque every few months, and about three weeks after the fight, they had another. It was mid-summer. Everyone was outside in the sunshine, and a band was playing on a platform built every year once the sun came out. It was a tradition to have one of the local bands play, and it’d been the same one since I was a kid. The guys in the band were honorary members of the club although none of them had ever been patched in. They were old and grizzly, and I loved every single one of them. It was like seeing a bunch of uncles for the first time in years, and I proudly showed Trix off while she stood shyly, trying to hide behind my legs.