She slips flip-flops into a tote and then we return to my brother’s house.
This time, Zoe is in the kitchen, making a highbrow version of nachos, and she’s wearing wedge heels with red ribbons. Natalia glances pointedly at her shoes and then gives me a look.
I nod to acknowledge she was right, which makes her smile and wink at me. She’s so fucking cute sometimes, I could eat her for lunch and dinner.
Natalia takes out the silver serving tray she brought over earlier, toasts small rounds of bread and then assemblies her appetizers, which have dill cream cheese, a folded slice of salmon, and a small mountain of caviar. My stomach growls.
She carries the tray outside and sets it on a bed of ice on the table.
Sasha and Trick have just arrived and are still wearing suits. Trick stops by his wife’s chair, and my brother is on his way to us when a child’s bloodcurdling scream makes us all turn. Sasha moves so fast he reaches Irina before any of the adults that are closer.
She continues to scream and cry as he scoops her up.
“What’s she saying?” Trick asks, his eyes fixed on them.
“Eyes,” Natalia says. “Her eyes hurt.”
“‘Vil,” Trick says.
My brother’s expression is one of grim anguish as he drags his gaze from his screaming child to his partner.
“Maybe sunscreen.” Trick points at a tube of baby suntan lotion on a nearby chair. “Stings if it gets in their eyes.”
Sasha stalks over to the outdoor shower, swivels the handle and steps in with Irina. There’s a moment of shocked silence as the water sprays in her face, then more screeching and wailing for a few seconds. A couple of moments later, the screams die down again as he moves her head out from under the water and wipes her face with a rag.
His voice can’t be heard over the water or even when he turns it off, but I can see that he’s talking to her.
He grabs a clean towel from a stack near them, wipes her face again and then wraps it around her. He kisses the top of Irina’s head as he carries to Rachel and hands her over to his wife.
“It was supposed to be ouch-less,” Rachel says softly. “For babies.”
“Ouch, ouch, ouch,” the baby says.
“I know,” Rachel says, cuddling the little girl and giving her a kiss. “I’m sorry that stung your eyes.”
On his way toward the sliding glass door, Sasha picks up the bottle of lotion and drops it in the trash.
As he passes his C Crue partners, Trick says, “Good thing we called it a day early, huh, ‘Vil? Otherwise you’d have been in your suit when you took that shower.”
“Good thing,” Sasha mutters under his breath, loosening his soaked tie. He stops at the table to shake my hand.
Natalia kisses him on each cheek, and he pauses over the food as water drips from his drenched suit onto the hot concrete. Undeterred, he takes one of the salmon toasts and eats it. “You made this?”
She nods.
“It’s good.” He eats two more before going in the house.
Trick goes inside with McCann. A couple of minutes later, Trick emerges with a Guinness and a fake fizzing cocktail that McCann obviously made. He sets the nonalcoholic cocktail next to his wife who has their infant son sleeping on her chest.
“Man, not even a peep during the drama? He sleeps like the dead,” Trick says with a wink, taking a swig of beer and smiling as he pulls a chair over. “Can I get a kiss?”
Laurelyn cradles the baby so as not to jostle him and then kisses Trick, whose hand comes to rest on her stomach.
“I would like a baby,” Natalia says as she watches them.
“You are a baby,” I say, my fingers stroking her back.
She glances up and smiles knowingly. In Russian she says, “You’d like me to be your baby cat a little longer?”
