Page 150

The good kind. The kind where there’s nothing left to prove and everything we need is already in the room.

“Hey,” I murmur after a minute, glancing over at her.

She looks up, eyes soft and sleepy and full. “Yeah?”

“We’re really good at this.”

She smiles, slow and real. “Yeah. We are.”

The boys go down easier than we expect.

Maybe it’s the fresh diapers. Maybe it’s the warm bottles. Maybe it’s the exhausted crying session they put on like a two-man Broadway debut, complete with dramatic sighs and perfectly timed wails. Either way, they’re out. For now.

And we don’t dare tempt fate by lingering in the nursery longer than we need to. As soon as both bassinets are still and the white noise hums like a protective forcefield around them, we back out of the room like bomb techs, breathing quiet sighs of relief the second the door clicks shut.

Mya drops her head back against the hallway wall, eyes closed, lips parted.

“You good?” I whisper.

“Give me three seconds and a blanket, and I’ll be excellent.”

I take her hand and pull her toward the living room, lights dimmed, the couch still warm from where we fed the twins. She collapses beside me with a groan that turns into a satisfied hum as I pull the throw blanket off the back and wrap it around her shoulders. She tucks her feet under my thigh, her head finding the crook of my shoulder like it was made for it.

“Is this what heaven feels like?” she murmurs, voice already heavy with impending nap vibes. “Dim lights. No crying. My feet not touching the floor.”

“I think heaven includes snacks,” I say, brushing her hair off her face. “And a house that cleans itself.”

“And boobs that don’t hurt when I lie on my side.”

“And a magic button that makes the twins sleep through the night.”

She snorts against my chest. “Now that’s divine intervention.”

I press a kiss to the top of her head, letting my cheek rest there. Her body is warm, curled into me like she belongs there, like this is our version of rest. And it is.

This is what we do between shifts. Between bottles and diapers and white-noise machines that hum lullabies more than we do.

We breathe.

Together.

I let my palm rest low on her stomach, thumb moving in slow circles. Not in a sexual way. Just in a you’re here, I’m here, we survived another day kind of way. And God, that’s enough. More than.

“How long do we have?” she asks, eyes still closed.

I glance at the baby monitor on the coffee table. “If we’re lucky? An hour. Maybe two.”

She stretches like a cat, sighs into my shirt. “Plenty of time.”

“To sleep?”

“To exist.”

I smile at that. “Should I put on a movie we’ll pretend to watch?”

“Only if it’s something we’ve seen ten times and won’t feel bad falling asleep halfway through.”

“Ocean’s Eleven?”