Page 86 of Wedge

“I made my peace with my tragic lack of options weeks ago. She’s a Gunny. She’ll understand.” He grins, thumb hovering over the confirm button. “Kaidan deserves better than Ashley’s baggage, anyway. Even if I can’t do him.”

Stephen’s phone rings on the couch next to us. It’s Ben, and he answers it on speaker. Ben’s voice is doing something high and cracked that I’ve never heard from him before. “They’re here,” he says, no preamble at all. “Six-eleven and six-fifteen, six pounds each, screaming their little heads off, and I have never been happier in my entire life.”

“Congratulations,” I say, grinning so hard my face hurts. “Names?”

“Owen and Elliot. Geoff’s crying. I’m crying. Jasmine bit a nurse.”

“Go Jasmine.”

We drive over that weekend to meet them. Two impossibly small humans that we carefully pass between us in the hospital-quiet living room. Jasmine perches on the arm of the couch, clearly unimpressed by the whole production.

“They don’t do anything,” she informs me, arms crossed, four years old going on forty. “They just cry and eat and stink.”

“Give them time,” I tell her. “You did that too, once.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Ben looks wrecked in the best possible way, dark circles under his eyes and an expression of pure, unfiltered joy that doesn’t budge the whole visit, and Geoff moves around the house on autopilot, feeding schedules and diaper counts recited like scripture.

“You two look like you haven’t slept in a week,” Stephen says.

“We haven’t,” Geoff says, cheerful about it in the specific, unhinged way of a new, permanently exhausted parent. “Would you two, by any chance, be willing to take Jasmine somewhere for a few hours? Anywhere? I will pay you in whatever currency you want. Gourmet food. Golf balls for life.”

Stephen and I trade a look.

“Casa Bonita,” I say. “She’ll lose her mind over the divers.”

Jasmine hears that and abandons her studied indifference toward the twins immediately in favor of shrieking with excitement.

Casa Bonita is exactly as unhinged as I remember from the one time my foster dad took me, a pink stucco palace with a tower rising out of the strip malls on Colfax. Inside it is dim and cavernous, a whole fake village of adobe walls and neon and palm trees, mariachis drifting between the tables, a waterfall roaring somewhere in the middle of it. Every table has a little flag on a stick to raise when you want sopapillas, and Jasmine has claimed ours before we even sit down. She’s glued to the railing the moment we’re seated, tracking every diver like she’s personally responsible for their safety. She had a birthday two weeks ago, and being four brought out a new intensity.

“That one did a flip,” she reports back to us, gravely serious. “The other one didn’t do a flip. He’s not as good.”

“Very fair assessment,” Stephen says.

We’re most of the way through lunch, Jasmine narrating the show like a tiny, opinionated sports commentator, when one diver climbs out of the lagoon during a break, dripping and shirtless, and makes a beeline for our table with a grin that’s clearly practiced.

“Hey,” he says, leaning a hip against the edge of our booth like he owns it, looking directly at Stephen. “You caught the show?”

“Every jump,” Stephen says, polite and oblivious.

“I’m Marco. I do the triple.” He says it like it should mean something, flexing muscles slightly, water still running down his chest. “You want a picture? I do pictures with, uh, appreciative fans.” His eyes drag, slow and obvious, down Stephen’s arms, and there’s absolutely nothing subtle about the up-and-down happening. I am trying very hard not to laugh. Pretty sure I fail.

“I’m good,” Stephen says, still not quite reading it. God, I love this man.

“You sure? I could sign a menu for you. Personal touch.”

Jasmine, watching all of this with the shameless directness only a four-year-old can manage, pipes up loudly. “Why is he looking at you like that?”

Marco falters. I don’t.

“Because he’s flirting with my husband,” I say, sweet as anything, sliding my left hand deliberately over Stephen’s on the table.

Stephen chokes on his water. Marco’s grin drops fast, mutters an apology, and retreats toward the lagoon with admirable speed.

“Husband,” Stephen repeats, once he’s recovered, staring at me. “That’s premature, technically.”

“Fiancé, husband, same difference at this point.” I’m still laughing, mostly, but something’s caught in my throat too, low and sharp. Watching some stranger look at Stephen like that, even for ten harmless seconds. Like he was available. “Actually? No. Not the same difference.”