“What is it?” Jericho asked, the tiny hairs at the back ofhis neck standing at attention.
Atticus nodded towards it, a look of grim anticipation on his handsome face. “Go ahead, look for yourself. You should be proud, our sons have some…natural artistic talent it seems.”
Atticus’s expression did nothing to quell his fear. With a final deep, calming breath, Jericho popped the top on the tin and froze, staring down at the cookies in horror. “What…and I cannot stress this enough…the fuck is that?”
“That would be the boys’ contribution to the gingerbread baking and decorating contest.”
“Baking and decorating contest?” Jericho echoed. “They are four and five years old. We just got them to stop eating paste. Now they’re teaching them to cook?”
“Bake,” Atticus corrected, crankily.
Jericho opened his mouth and then closed it again several times, trying to decide exactly what to say about the situation. He finally settled on, “Thatisa gun in that gingerbread cookie’s hand…right?”
“Oh, you mean gingerbread Adam? Sure is,” Atticus said. “Note the attention to detail. It’s so well decorated, in fact, that there was no mistaking what it could possibly be. But even if I had been able to come up with some kind of plausible explanation for a gingerbread version of my brother holding a tiny gun, there were six other people whose likeness your sons thought to immortalize as cookies.”
“Why are they always my sons when they’re misbehaving?” Jericho asked, tilting his head. “You were there, too.”
“They get their hooligan side from you,” Atticus said,primly. “They get their brains from me.”
“So what did you say to her?” Jericho asked softly, closing the gap to press a kiss to his husband’s tightly shut lips.
“I said we’d been watching a lot of superhero movies and even a few of the villain ones and that they must have been trying to emulate those.”
Jericho was actually impressed. That was actually a pretty plausible explanation. “Did she buy it?”
“Enough to lecture me on the effects of cinematic violence on the malleable minds of children,” he muttered.
“Oh, that’s why you’re so cranky.You got lectured. You hate being talked down to.”
Atticus took each cookie from the tin and set it before Jericho with an almost reverent delicacy. One or both of their children had created what Jericho could only assume was their uncles, each holding their ‘favorite’ weapon of choice.
“Of course I got lectured. Look at them,” he said, sweeping a hand across the counter.
“Someone needs to wipe my butt,” Jett shouted from deep within the recesses of his bathroom.
Atticus scrubbed both hands across his face. Jericho made to head towards their child, but Atticus shook his head. “No. I’ll handle the butt wiping. You sit here and try to find a more plausible explanation for why our entire family is sporting gingerbread weaponry. Just in case we get a visit from CPS.”
Jericho stared at the figures. He was…oddly impressed. Atticus was right. There was an exceptional level of detail. He glanced up when he heard the scraping of the stool, then he was looking at Jett’s solemn face.
“Hi, daddy,” he said.
Jericho smiled at him, leaning his forearms on the counter. “Hey, kid. Rough day at school?”
He nodded. “We made other daddy sigh again…a lot.”
“Yeah? Do you knowwhyother daddy was sighing a lot?” Jericho asked.
“Because the mean lady in her cheap hooker heels said that we showed dis-dis—I don’t remember the word but it meant we’d grow up to be bad people and might have to leave school.”
Jericho bit his lip, partially to keep from laughing, but also partially because he wanted to find this woman and beat her ass for putting that look on his baby’s face. “Cheap hooker heels?” he finally echoed.
Jett nodded, looking very serious. “Daddy said he refused to take parenting advice from a lady in cheap hooker heels and last season’s Prada.”
Jericho snorted out a laugh, that he turned into a cough so his child didn’t think he condoned that type of behavior. If Atticus had resorted to quotingLegally Blonde, that woman had been real close to turning her case files into Jesus Christ himself.
His husband was, in most ways, one of the most patient, docile men that had ever lived. It’s what Jericho loved about his prickly mate. But when it came to their children, Atticus had no problems taking the low road, even if it meant backpacking through hell.
“Are we bad, daddy?” Jett asked, his tiny brow furrowed.
