by Melinda Minx
“You’re really going to fight two children?” Emily asked me.
She was panting from throwing me so many times.
“I’m not going to fight them back. I’m just going to see if they can take me down.”
When Naomi stopped whispering, both her and Elijah looked up at me with defiant expressions on their faces. I planted myself in a wide stance and shot Emily a confident grin.
The two kids approached me slowly, Elijah looking toward Naomi and letting her take the lead.
Naomi paused just short of me. Elijah waited behind her. “Aren’t you going to fight back, Uncle Silas?”
“I won’t let you take me down for free, but it wouldn’t be fair if I fought back.”
“Fine,” she said, “this will be easy then. Right, little cousin Elijah?”
He nodded furiously. “Can we do it now? Can we?”
“Remember the plan,” she said.
She came up behind me and crouched down. I looked back and saw Naomi on her hands and knees, her back parallel with the floor. She pressed tight up behind my calves. She smiled at Elijah. “Okay, Elijah, I’m ready.”
Emily shot me a nervous look. Maybe she was remembering how she took me down with her heel behind my leg, and now she saw Naomi behind my leg.
Elijah came up behind me. He approached Naomi, who was still crouched down behind my legs, and put a foot onto her back. He stepped up onto her as if she were the first step on a staircase. She dug her elbows into the mat to brace herself for his weight. Once Elijah had steadied himself, he leapt up and grabbed hold of my waist.
“Ahhh!” he shouted, “we gonna knock you over, Daddy!”
He pulled on my waist and tugged on my gi, but I braced myself. The louder Elijah yelled, the harder Emily laughed.
I leaned forward against Elijah pulling on me. He was fucking strong for a 4-year-old. He was my son though, and I wasn’t going to let him win. I wanted his victories to be hard fought, not handed to him on a plate.
I resisted, and Elijah pulled harder. His little hand dug into my abs, and he pulled with all of his body weight.
Just as I thought it wasn’t going to work, Naomi shoved her entire body weight into the back of my calves, rolling into me like a bowling ball.
It was the leverage they needed.
Elijah pulled me right over the fulcrum of Naomi’s body, and I started to topple over backward.
I saw the shocked and terrified expression on Emily’s face. She thought I was going to crush our kid as I fell, but I was ready.
I turned as I fell, and Elijah was suddenly on top of me rather than beneath me. I hit the mat with my elbows under me. Naomi rolled out from beneath my legs, and when I finally fell flat, Elijah was on top of me like some kind of tiny little David who had just taken down a Goliath five times his size.
Naomi scuttled forward on her knees and gave Elijah a high-five. Elijah tapped hard on my shoulder and bobbed back and forth. “We got you, Daddy! We Jiu Jitsued you!”
Emily still looked down nervously at me, but she was smiling. Dimples formed in her cheeks, and I grinned up at her with our kid still pinning me to the ground.
I winked at her. “Now you’ve both taken me down.”
13
Emily
We stood in Noah Black’s penthouse. Of course both co-CEO’s had penthouses. In different skyscrapers on Billionaire’s Row. They joked sometimes that they could shout to each other with their windows open. I wasn’t sure they’d ever actually tried it.
Elijah was playing with Naomi and her little sister Ava, and Noah’s wife Lacey offered us glasses of water.
Work hadn’t started for me yet. I’d wanted to move earlier rather than later to get everything settled before I started going into work. I was going to be working long and irregular hours, and I wanted to make sure I could get a nanny and daycare situation sorted before I started working full-time. I also needed to get furniture figured out.
The other thing, of course, was Silas.
This was a tiny little hiccup, or wrinkle, or whatever I wanted to call it which I hadn’t planned for. He was pulling me in. I was starting to fully believe that this was going to work out. In that perfect and too-good-to-be-true way that Nadia had talked to me about. It felt as if all I had to do was fully embrace Silas Winters’ advances, and my life would become some kind of fairytale. Elijah would have two parents who loved him, and I’d have the man that I’d never really been able to forget.
Even if he hadn’t been the father of my child, I’m certain I’d never have been able to forget him entirely. I’d considered myself pretty good at separating Silas the father and Silas the man who had made me come like seven or eight times in one night.
I’d been pretty certain that the second version of Silas would be something I’d happily take back, but the first one—Silas the father—was one I’d always doubted as a real possibility.
Now that he was doing such an amazing job with Elijah, it was getting very difficult to resist the idea of going all-in with him. Even though that still scared me.
“Are you sure about this?” I asked Lacey, taking a sip of my water.
“Lacey was a nanny before she was a wife,” Silas said, grinning.
“I’m pretty sure making me a nanny was just an excuse to make me his wife,” Lacey said.
Silas grinned. “Still, you were a nanny. And you did such a good job that Noah wifed you.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” Lacey said, laughing through her nose.
“It’s three kids,” I said. “Three is a lot. I struggle with just the one.”
“Look at them,” Lacey said, “when you get more kids together, they keep each other occupied.”
Naomi was pretending to run a store. She had a toy cash register, and she was making Ava and Elijah bring little baskets of stuffed vegetables and fruits up to her. She told them the price, and then they had to present their toy credit cards. She swiped the cards, then put the fake food into real paper grocery bags.
“I’ll come get him the minute we’re done,” I said.
Lacey shook her head and smiled at me. It was a mischievous smile, and the same smile spread to Silas, which made me very nervous. “Take your time, you two. You should have some alone time, don’t you think?”
I tried to swallow, but it wouldn’t quite go down. Silas put a hand on my waist and squeezed.
“Let’s go, Doctor Emily.”
Silas’ driver took us to the Ikea in Brooklyn.
“You ever been here?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “I don’t mean to sound like a snob—”
“That means you’re going to say something snobby.”
“Yeah, I won’t say it then.”
“Come on, what were you going to say?”
“I delegate a lot of things in my life. I just paid an interior designer and she fully furnished my penthouse. I’ve never stepped foot in a furniture store. Before I was rich, I used to just pick up old furniture that people put on their curb.”
“Ew.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I got bed bugs.”
“So IKEA is a nice happy medium between bed-bug infested dumpster furniture and an interior designer spending a fortune doing everything for you. Are you hungry?”
“I was thinking we could go to this nice Italian place after we’re done here.”
“No, we eat here.”
“It’s a furniture store.”
“And it’s a Swedish cultural experience. They are known for their food.”
He seemed skeptical, but I dragged him up the escalator into the cafeteria.
“Wow, they really do have food here.”
“Don’t let the cafeteria trays fool you. It’s actually good.”
I made him get the Swedish meatballs with the Lingonberry jam. We got sides of green beans, red cabbage, and potatoes.
“This looks...legit,” he said, sniffing at his tray as we walked to sit down.
He t
ook a bite of his meatball, and his eyes widened in surprise. “So a furniture store can make good food. I’m surprised.”
“You shouldn’t delegate your life away, Silas. You are missing out on all kinds of experiences like that. Not just Swedish ones.”
“Lingonberry...it’s a bit bitter, but it works really well with these meatballs. Damn. I did the math once, Emily, and I make five figures per hour. It’s very hard to justify doing things like shopping for my own furniture when it’s such a bad value proposition.”
“At what point do you have enough money though?”
“We’ve got shareholders. Authors. A lot of people whose well-being relies on me being in the driver’s seat.”
“So you work so hard for others, not for yourself?”
He shrugged. “I guess it’s come to that point. Part of it is just momentum, or inertia I guess. I have fallen into this routine. Working hard and long is what I do, and I don’t have any hobbies aside from Jiu Jitsu, which is kind of like exercise and hobby all rolled into one. If I stop working, I look around at how empty the rest of my life is, and the only way to stop feeling that is to work more.”
Sadness filled his expression, but then his eyes met mine, and he smiled warm and wide. He reached across the table, over my Swedish meatballs, and took hold of my hand.
“I think,” he said, “that things are changing now though. I’ve found something other than work that makes me happy.”
I didn’t pull away. I liked the way my hand felt in his. I was still scared, but I had decided to cautiously give Silas a chance. To give us a chance, and holding hands with him was certainly on the table—quite literally.
“I kind of understand what you mean,” I said. “I worked long hours too. Elijah keeps me balanced though. With a kid, I can never just fully go into my work and forget everything else. Sometimes I worry though that he’s spending too much time with my mom and not enough time with me.”
My mom was still finishing some things up in Alaska, thus the reason that Lacey was watching Elijah now instead of her.
Silas nodded and ran his thumb across the back of my hand. “I don’t want to impose too much. I realize I have a lot of catching up to do, but I can take care of him more now too. If you are working a night shift, he can stay with me.”
“I think he’d really like that. Silas, I can’t believe you thought you didn’t want kids. You’re so good with them.”
He shrugged. “Naomi helped a lot with that. I thought she was the only kid I liked. I also liked the way I just got to do the fun stuff with her, while Noah and Lacey took all the unfun responsibility parts…”
He winced and squeezed me tighter. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have phrased it like that—”
“Trust me, it’s unfun. As long as you know that going in, you’ll make it.”
“So, ready to buy some furniture?”
We went to the show floor, following all the arrows through the pre-setup rooms. Silas held the little pencil and card, and he wrote down all of the numbers for the furniture I picked out.
When we reached the beds, he leaned against a support beam and grinned at me. “Big decision here. How big are you thinking?”
“Well,” I said, “since I usually sleep alone, I think a Queen is probably too big.”
“Hmm,” he said, stroking his chin, “I think you want to plan to get a bit luckier than that. Maybe a King?”
“You think I’m going to get lucky?”
“I like your chances. Check out this one,” he said.
He fell down on the bed and put his arms up behind his head. “This one’s lower to the ground. I like that.”
“Well it’s my bed, not yours.”
“Lie down, Emily.”
I scooted onto the bed and lied down, imitating his pose. Our elbows touched. “I think it might be too big. I have a tiny place in Brooklyn, not a penthouse.”
“Let’s do the sprawl test.”
“The sprawl test?”
“I’m going to lie here, and then you do the thing that women always do where they sprawl out and take up way more space.”
“I thought it was manspreading, now womansprawling.”
“Manspreading is on the train, womansprawling is on the bed. Though if you wanted to spread, we could—”
I rolled over and put my hand over his mouth. His eyes narrowed at me as mine widened. I was all but on top of him now, and we were on a bed together.
I looked up and saw a mom with two kids scowling at us. I laughed and pulled my hand off Silas’ mouth, and I jumped off the bed as my cheeks reddened.
“What about the sprawl test?” he asked.
The woman gave him an even more pissed off look.
“We’re sprawl testing!” he shouted at her. “Or do you and your husband sleep on separate single beds like in some 1950s sitcom?”
I covered his mouth again, but this time standing up from the side of the bed. “We don’t need to sprawl test this one. It’s too big for my apartment anyway.”
The woman mouthed something at us and whisked her kids away from us to protect their innocent little eyes from two adults lying fully clothed on a bed together.
I finally found the bed I wanted, and Silas went to write the number down. “Are you sure about this one?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. What’s wrong?”
“Did you see the name? It’s called a Go Kart. You want to sleep in a Go Kart?”
I looked at the label. It was actually called Gökärt. It’s not Go Kart, it’s “Gökärt” I said, trying my best to imitate the sing-songy Swedish accent.
“I don’t like the sound of it,” he said. “A bed’s name should sound sexy.”
“What is your bed called?”
He smiled and started laughing. “That’s top secret.”
“Come on, you have to tell me! Is it still the same bed that…”
“You think I’d get rid of the bed that Elijah was conceived in? I do have a new mattress though. I’m not an animal.”
“You didn’t know Elijah was conceived in it.”
“I wouldn’t get rid of the bed I slept with you in,” he said, pulling out his phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking up Gökärt.”
“I bet it sounds very sexy once you translate it.”
He laughed through his nose and held his phone up to me.
“What is a Bitter Vetch?” I asked.
“That’s what Gökärt means. Wait, wait, it’s also called a ‘Heath Pea,’ now that is sexy.”
“I’m buying the Go Kart, Silas. Write it down.”
When we got down to the warehouse, Silas helped me put the heavier items onto my cart. I ended up having most of it shipped to my place, but we got some of the stuff—like lamps and dressers—boxed up to bring into the car.
We got back to my place by late afternoon, and Silas and his driver helped move all the stuff we bought into my apartment.
His driver took off, and suddenly I was alone with Silas in my apartment. Well, and Bella.
She ran up to Silas, and she jumped up on his leg.
“What is she doing?” he asked.
“She wants a Corgi hug.”
“A Corgi hug? I’m supposed to hug her?”
“It’s required of all my guests.”
He bent down and put his hands on her back. He patted her a few times, and Bella jumped back down. Satisfied, she ran up to me, and I gave her a Corgi hug.
Bella surveyed the boxes nervously. Whenever she saw boxes she was worried we were going to go on vacation without her and leave her with my Mom, who had a Shi-Tzu that always snapped at her.
“Don’t worry, sweetie,” I said, patting her head. “We’re moving these boxes in, we’re not leaving you with Grandma.”
“Nice place,” he said, looking around.
“I bet you’ve never been in a place this small.”
“I have.”
“Not recently though.”
&nb
sp; “You got me there. Still, it is a nice place. You’ve got laminate floors.”
“Your floors are like marble and polished oak from some famous sawmill that has been lovingly restored.”
“At least you don’t have gnarly carpets.”
“I’m going to be making pretty good money at my new job, but I haven’t started making it yet. My plan was to save up a year or two here, and then when I’m sure I can afford it, move into a nicer place.”
14
Silas
Move in with me. Move in with me. Move in with me.
Don’t say it out loud.
I bit my lip, because my tongue was ready to say it. Why couldn’t she just move in with me? Her and Elijah. Why did we have to go through all these motions of buying furniture for this little place when I had seven empty bedrooms in my penthouse?
She was skittish. This was like Jiu Jitsu. If I pushed right now, she was going to pull.
“Should I give you a tour?” she asked, smiling nervously.
“Sure.”
The dog was looking up at me with big eyes. I got the feeling it wanted me to pet it again, so I bent down and patted it on the head. Its ears pulled back as I petted it.
“It’s a her, right? The dog?”
“Bella. Yeah, it’s a her.”
“Did you name her after…”
“Yes,” she said. “Don’t make fun of me. How do you even know about—”
“I work in publishing. Of course I know about Twilight.”
“Well this is the living room slash kitchen. Let me show you Elijah’s room.”
She opened the door and led me in. He had a low-to-the-ground little bed. There were shelves with colored bins against the wall, which I presumed were full of toys. I spotted some drawings on the wall, and I walked closer. Many of them were just colored scribbles, but some of them looked like blob people with sticks for arms.
“Look at this one,” she said, tilting her head.
I went to see what she was pointing at. It was a picture of three stick figures. One was very small. One had long hair. And the other was very tall.
“Is this…”
