He laughed and leaned in, and I gave him a smooch.
“We can discuss possibly saving up for a down payment,” he decided.
I hummed, well aware we had the money already. But we were supposed to save it for the day we sold our house and found a better and bigger one. At some point, Lily was going to need more than a nook upstairs, and Dylan would want his own room in a couple of years. He didn’t mind sharing with Mikey for now—and Mikey sure loved it—but the big brother of the house had reached the preteen stage.
Before I could plant the seed of us taking out a loan for the entire RV—which Nate would reject because he was responsible—my phone buzzed with a message.
I inched back and pulled it out of my jeans, seeing it was a message from Colt.
I did the dumb thing. I signed up to join you in that 5K run for the LGBTQ shelter. Once Greer did it, I couldn’t stand there looking bad.
I laughed out loud and responded.
“Who was that?” Nate wondered.
“Colt,” I chuckled.
That’s a good Texan! Greer and I will drag you along if you fall too far behind. Btw, please tell Reese you joined and, last but not least, it’s 10K, not 5.
“He actually signed up to do the charity run,” I said, briefly looking over at the kids. All good. “Reese owes me twenty bucks.” When I glanced at Nate again, he was smiling. “What?”
“Nothing. I’m just happy you’ve grown close with them. You seem to have fun with a few of them, at least.”
Well yeah, Reese, Greer, and Colt were a riot. I liked Lucian and River too, but they were more reserved. Penny, though. She might be my favorite. Her sense of humor was even darker than mine.
Macklin was… Eh, he and I didn’t always get along, but I suspected it was circumstantial. We were both fairly straightforward, at the same time as we had some issues in the kink world. I had shit to get over and work past, and he was trying and failing miserably at recovering from a breakup with Walker, so we could be touchy and butt heads. Most recently, I’d accidentally pissed off Macklin when he found out I was the one who’d recommended a kink community in Boston to Walker.
Colt responded to my text, and it cracked me up again.
10 fucking K? I might as well be back on base. This is some bullshit.
“Daddy?”
Mikey ran over to me and held up his arms, so I pocketed my phone and picked him up.
“There’s my cuddlebug.” I smooched his cheek. “What’s up?”
He smiled goofily and fidgeted with the neckline of my Henley. “When are you and Dylan running tomorrow?”
“Oh, we head out early—when you’re busy watching cartoons in your jammies.”
He nodded slowly. “I wanna run also sometime.”
“Well, how about you and I do that after lunch tomorrow?” I bumped my forehead to his, and he beamed and nodded. “It’s settled. You and me—we’ll race.”
“Yeah!”
He was still a bit too young to understand that we wanted alone time with each of our kids, so it was best to come up with separate plans for a while longer. Rather than explaining to him. Mikey was a sensitive li’l boy too, and we didn’t want him to feel rejected.
Those moments when Nate and I spent time with the children one-on-one, we learned so much more about them. It was easy to get lost in the everyday hustle and bustle, not to mention we loved our dynamic. Everyone got along, aside fromregular sibling shit. They could fight and scream at each other, but that was normal. Even so, it was important we got those extra moments with them when they weren’t distracted by the rest of the family.
Mikey wanted down again, so he returned to Dylan.
The latter one was going through a lot. Hormones, advancing in school, making friends, losing friends, picking sports, figuring out who he was, and, lately, discovering girls.
It was horrible.
Nate and I had chaperoned the last school dance, and it was like watching him grow up overnight before our eyes.
