“Mooom,” Dimitri whined.
She set down the spatula, grabbing a wooden spoon before turning and poking him sharply in the ribs. “Go sit down right now or I will not let you open gifts after breakfast.”
“Ugh,fine,” Dimitri huffed, trudging to the table and flouncing into his seat.
Beside her, Lola hit a button on the remote and Christmas music began to float softly through the speakers, low and warm. Arms wrapped around Calliope from behind, lips pressing gently to her neck,
“Better?” Lola murmured.
“Much better,” Calliope said, leaning back into her without thinking.
Now it felt like Christmas Eve.
“Maybe we should just wait and call the handyman we saw on the back of that truck yesterday,” Zane said carefully.
He sat curled on the overpriced chair that was—essentially—a giant bean bag in a fur coat, huddled beneath a thick blanket, while the storm raged outside. The chair swallowed him whole, all soft curves and faux luxury, his bare feet barely peeking out from beneath the blanket as he shifted.
Zane had never been so cozy. The fireplace crackled, the white lights in the garland and on the Christmas tree twinkled, Felix’s cinnamon roll candle burned somewhere nearby making Zane’s stomach growl with its realism. It smelled aggressively like sugar and butter and nostalgia for a childhood he’d never have. It was soft, unusually peaceful.
Quiet.
Too quiet.
Zane missed his babies. He missed the weight of them, the constant noise, the way silence never lasted more than thirty seconds in a house with toddlers. He missedlistening to Asa & Avi rough-house with them, missed them refusing to eat the same foods they loved the day before. Everything really.
But from what Dad said, they were not missing him…or any of them. Apparently, Grandpas’ house was more fun. They’d instituted something called “dessert before dinner,” which felt illegal but unsurprising. But what could he do? Zane was grateful they still had one normal set of grandparents now that his former father was MIA and his mother had been slow-roasted. Especially since he still hadn’t decided whether to reach out to his own father.
His real father.
But that was a worry for the new year, not now, not here, not when he could be cozy and content with the people he loved. All of them. He tugged the blanket tighter, Felix’s knee warm against his thigh, grounding him.
“He’s right, this is starting to look pretty dire,” Felix said, sipping his mulled wine, curled up beside Zane under the blanket in the chair they’d taken to affectionately calling ‘the poof’. Felix smelled like fall and tasted faintly like cloves and oranges, his curls still slightly damp from their rushed shower earlier.
They were in the kids’ new playroom, staring down at a thousand screws, an Allen wrench and several slats of what Zane could only assume was particle board. The pieces were laid out with good intentions and zero follow-through, instructions discarded somewhere under a pile of bubble wrap and optimism. A short-term solution to a minor timing issue.
The insanely overpriced custom bookshelves they’d ordered for the playroom were coming from a carpenterin Italy. They’d emailed to say there was a ‘supply chain breakdown’ and he wouldn’t be able to finish and ship the product for at least another three months. The email had included several apologies, three photos of unfinished wood, and one very artistic shot of the Italian countryside, as if that helped.
The solution had been the world’s most inefficient trip to IKEA Zane had ever experienced. While Zane and Felix had spent most of their lives like normal people—people who bought affordable furniture—Asa and Avi had spent their lives assuming that whatever they needed just appeared before them like magic. Possibly because, historically, it had. They’d seemed quite put out to know that sometimes, they didn’t get what they wanted.
Felix and Zane had wanted to go alone. They’d envisioned a peaceful, child-free trip where they could shop at their leisure and maybe have lunch at a cafe somewhere, hold hands and browse to their hearts content. Instead, their husbands had demanded to see this IKEA place they’d heard so much about, like it was a local attraction and not a store visited by thousands of people a day.
To them, it might as well have been Narnia.
Asa spent the whole time commenting on everything from the parking lot design to the flow of traffic within the store.
Why is the exit nowhere near the entrance?
Who puts a cafe in a furniture store?
Why Swedish meatballs?
What even is a Swedish meatball?
Meanwhile, Avi darted around picking up and examiningeverything from plushies to forks, studying them like ancient artifacts until Felix would pry them from his hands. Instead of two whiny toddlers, they had Avi, who was the equivalent of six hyper-active toddlers hopped up on sugar, begging to buy every gadget he saw, throwing a fit when he was told no, and pouting until he got Swedish meatballs.
Which, to be fair, were delicious.
A trip for one bookshelf had turned into a near thousand dollar expense and a house full of cheap—but convenient—household goods that Avi had huddled over in the cart like a dragon with a hard-on for home goods. Oh, God. HomeGoods. Zane could only imagine the damage Avi would do in a store like that. They’d need a second home and maybe an intervention.
