I didn't think he was even paying all that close of attention to the fact that Riya was getting close, let alone planning a baby gift.
I found myself somehow comforted by the fact that Brock had okayed whatever it was. Not that he knew any more about babies than Barrett did, but he was at least a bit more schooled in social graces.
"That's his surprise," Brock said, uncharacteristically tight-lipped about the whole thing which made me nervous.
When I picked up Riya three hours later, I realized that she had been walking around for months with a weight on her shoulders. Because as she walked up to me and gave me a kiss, some obnoxious fucking hat on her head, I realized it was gone. Her shoulders were lax. Her smile was easier.
"How was it?"
"Disgusting. And horrifying. And wonderful," she said, smiling big at me.
I loaded up the truck and we made our way home, leaving all the shit to be dealt with later so she could go sit down and put her feet up.
When we walked into the apartment, though, Barrett was already waiting. He had a pink and white wrapped box in his hands and was shuffling his feet uncomfortably.
"The day that keeps on giving," she said, shooting him a warm smile and doing "gimme" hands at him.
He handed it to her and she put it on the kitchen counter to open it, me and Barrett on the other side.
It looked like a clothing box.
But when she pulled open the tissue paper (also pink and I couldn't help but smile at the idea of Barrett hitting a store and buying any-fucking-thing that pink), what was inside was most definitely not clothes.
It was a file folder.
Riya looked up at him, brows drawn together, but didn't say anything.
Me, yeah, I was tense as fuck.
Because I knew how unpredictable my brother was and I had no goddamn idea what he was up to.
"Oh my God," she gasped as soon as she opened it. "How did you..." she said, looking up, her eyes bigger than I had ever seen them. "These were sealed!"
I looked at Barrett.
And it clicked.
He had spent weeks or possibly even months preparing her baby gift.
What he gave her was the missing pieces in her ancestry.
He got the adoption files and the records about Riya's birth mother.
"I look just like her," Riya said, pulling a picture out of a paperclip at the top of the page.
"Yeah, you do," Barrett agreed.
"What is all of this?" she asked, flipping through the huge mountain of paperwork.
"Everything you never knew about your mother and her family from their work visas to medical records, old pictures, the connections I could find via social media and genealogy sites. It's, ah, comprehensive," he said, looking almost a little embarrassed, rocking back on his heels with his hands tucked into his front pockets. He was being modest. If I knew my brother, and I fucking did, that pile of paperwork would give her more of an insight into all her biological relatives than most people who actually spoke to their own relatives every day for twenty some-odd years would ever know.
"Barrett..." she said, looking up, shaking her head, at a loss for what to say.
Barrett, being bad at interpreting such things, was quick to try to explain. "I know you loved your adoptive family and they were all you needed, but with the baby on the way, I thought you might want to know all the medical things at least so..."
He lost the rest of his sentence because Riya, big belly and all, plowed right into him, hormones and appreciation a heady cocktail that had her sobbing loudly into his neck. His arms went around her instinctively, but his head swiveled and his gaze turned to me and what I saw there was pure, undiluted, masculine terror at the sight of feminine tears.
I let her cry on him for a long minute, just because his discomfort was funny as fuck, before I moved in and pulled her against me instead.
The crying was nothing new.
I had come home from work one day to her sitting on the living room floor crying into Slim's back. Because, apparently, she had needed to remove a tick from his belly and he made a whining noise.
Literally... that was it.
A whining noise caused an afternoon of crying.
Then she would cry some more while trying to explain to me that she really wasn't a big cryer, that the baby was messing with her, that I just had to put up with it a couple more months and I'd probably not see her cry again for a year.
Hardly a day went by over the past month where she wasn't soaking through my shirt.
"Don't worry," I told Barrett over her shoulder as I ran my fingers through her silky hair. "This is happy, believe it or not."
That seemed to snap Riya out of her happy cry, sniffling hard and pulling against me. I let her turn, but wrapped my hands around her belly, holding her to me.
"Definitely happy," she told him, reaching up to swipe at her eyes. "Thank you so much. I... I didn't even know her name..."
"Ari," Barrett supplied with a small smile.
"I think we have a name," I whispered down by her ear.
She nodded.
And then she was crying again.
--
"Sawyer, calm down," Barrett said, only deceptively calm himself.
Calm wasn't even a word in my vocabulary right then.
It was two hours after Riya had a somewhat seamless birth to our daughter, named Ari after Riya's birth mother who, as it turned out, gave her up because she got pregnant at fifteen and was kicked out of her parents' house.
Riya had been a trooper and Marg had been there with us to help.
All was great.
Ari was six pounds and eight ounces, long-legged, with big, dark green eyes and a whole lot of whispy black hair like her mother. Healthy. She was perfect.
But Riya wouldn't stop bleeding.
They massaged her uterus.
They did a D&C.
But she still wouldn't stop.
Five minutes before, they had wheeled a scary-pale Riya down the hall for surgery and a transfusion.
"It's a bit twisted to say this, but thank fuck that ex of hers kept her for a year and pumped her full of iron."
"Mijo, there's no way she's not coming out and seeing her baby. No way. She just needs a little stitching and some fresh blood and she'll be back in the room nursing the baby in no time."
I'd never been one to give much thought to any kind of divine design to the world. But maybe Riya being born to a teenaged mother then being given up for adoption and being unloved for so long before she found a family, making her decide that she was going to adopt, not conceive, was some higher plan. Because her body wasn't meant to carry babies.
I dropped down in a chair, raking my hands through my hair.
"Hey," Brock said, dropping down beside me.
"Not in a talking mood," I growled.
"You know, I said the exact same thing to you once upon a time. I had three days of whiskey and gin and vodka all over me because I hadn't showered or changed in as many days. My apartment was a sty and I was at the lowest point of my life. But you know what you said?"
I snorted. "'That's fucking fine, but your sorry fucking ass is going to listen then.'"
"Yep," he said, exhaling hard. "So you don't have to talk, but you're going to listen. I know you love that woman in a way you weren't sure your heart was capable of. And I know you are making yourself sick over her right now. But she wouldn't want that. You know her. What she would want from you is for you to go into that nursery and hold your daughter until she can."
"I can't..." I said, shaking my head, feeling like shit about it. But she was healthy. She wasn't laying on a cold operating table getting sliced open.
"Man the fuck up and go hold your kid, Sawyer," he demanded, his voice steel.
I looked over at him on an exhale, nodded, stood, clamped a hand on his shoulder, and went to do just that.
Riya- 284 days
I'd seen Sawyer on a lot of cases.
I
had seen him stressed and pissed and worried and anxious.
But until I was being wheeled out of my hospital room and down to surgery, I had never seen utter terror on his face before.
It was a look I could go an entire lifetime never seeing again.
Really, the delivery had been, as Marg and her friends and family had convinced me, nothing like TV and movies. It hurt and it wasn't pretty, but it wasn't completely traumatizing. And being able to finally hold the little squishy thing that had been mistaking my bladder for a trampoline for the previous three months was totally worth it.
Then the bleeding started and it wouldn't stop.
I wasn't some superhero; I was worried too. When you hear that your body won't stop hemorrhaging, you know there is only so much blood in your body and if they can't find a way to keep it in, you will literally bleed to death. I was scared. I had just brought a child into the world and I owed it to her to be there for her.
But I had also seen Sawyer's face when he saw her for the first time. I saw amazement, awe, wonder, and a fierce determination. And, since I knew him, I knew that determination was to make sure he would keep her safe and happy and well provided for.
If something did happen to me, if they couldn't stop the bleeding, she was in good hands.
She would have the best man I had ever met for a daddy.
That was the best thing I could have given her.
So I wasn't terrified as I was brought in the room, as I watched a bag drip fluids and blood into me, as I slowly got put to sleep, as I knew the would be cutting me open.
She would be okay.
Sawyer-
"Ari, come on, bud," I called, hearing a crash a minute before a little hellion came barreling down the hallway in a black tutu, a neon green tank top over an orange long-sleeve tee, with a silver scarf around her neck and rainbow Chucks on her feet.
She, God-awful fashion sense aside, was the spitting image of her mother. Really, I don't think you could see an ounce of me in her, eyes aside. She had her long black hair, her thick black lashes around her eyes, her unique skin tone, her long legs.
She was five, but I knew in about ten years, she was going to make me be one of those dads- the ones with the shotguns and the threats for any boys looking her way.
"I'm bringing Brocky," she declared, grabbing the teddy bear off the couch. It was the same one I had given Riya for her missing Valentine's Day. When Ari had found it, she decided it was hers and wouldn't hear of any arguments to the contrary.
"Whatever fries your bacon, kid. But we gotta go."
"I like bacon," she declared, tucking the now ratty-looking bear under her arm. "Can we get bacon after?" she asked as we walked to the door.
"Only if you will eat the eggs first," Riya told her, brow raised.
"Bleh," Ari said as she walked out the door.
"You'd never know I choked down kale, spinach, and cucumber smoothies for her," Riya said as we walked into the hall and I set the code.
I put my arm around her as we started down the stairs. "Well, look at it this way, she's never been sick thanks to that leg up."
"Let's go!" Ari yelled from the bottom of the stairs, as if she hadn't been the one holding us up in the first place.
"We sure we want to do this?" I asked as we rounded on her.
"Never more sure of anything in my life," she said with certainty, smiling over at me.
We drove to the courthouse to the sound of Ari singing some absolutely atrocious pop song that she had recently heard and promptly made us all sick of in under two days. It was a new record.
Then we went in and we signed the documents that made Nathan officially ours.
Nathan was born addicted to heroin and had some ADHD as a side effect. But when the case worker came to check out the house that we had recently added onto because I bought the building next door and blew it out, wanting to keep the safety of being right above my work, and she met the little ball of energy that was our daughter, she declared we seemed more than capable of handling him.
He was the same age as Ari, actually having a birthday just one day after her.
Ari had championed the case of being the big sister and would not hear of us adopting someone older than her. She didn't care if it was older by five years or five minutes, she just wanted to be older. And while Riya always wanted to adopt the older, more unwanted kids, we figured that with his learning disabilities, he was likely not the top of most peoples' lists. That and we thought Ari having an age mate might work in everyone's favor.
Nathan was tall and a bruiser size-wise, with shoulder that all but guaranteed the high school coaches would be vying for him one day. While his case file was closed to us, but open to the mother in case she ever wanted to get in touch, something Riya had insisted on like her parents had done with her, we were told that he was from a young Puerto Rican father and a Lebanese mother. He had tan skin, dark brown hair, and almost startling gray-blue eyes.
"Nate," Ari declared as soon as we walked out with a boy we had only gotten to spend a couple stolen hours with here and there over the course of the year, "we are going to get bacon. But Mom says we have to eat our eggs first," she said, scrunching up her face as she reached down and took his hand.
"I like eggs," he said.
"Good," she said, leaning close to his ear, "then you can eat half of mine."
"Heard that," Riya called. "Careful or I am going to make you eat some whole wheat toast too."
"Whole wheat toast has seeds in it," she told Nate with the same disgust as if it had snot in it.
"Gross," he agreed in all their five-year old opinionatedness.
"If we adopt more," I said, looking over at Riya, "we are going to be outnumbered."
She smiled then, big, happy, her entire face lit up by it and took my hand. "I think we can handle it."
We could.
If I could survive her hour in surgery after having Ari, I was pretty sure I could survive anything. And, to be perfectly honest, if adopting more kids kept putting that look on her face, I would be open to opening our doors to goddamn bus fulls of them.
While she was happy most days, that look she had just given me I had seen a handful of times in our lives together. I saw it when she first heard Ari's heartbeat and when she first saw her after delivery. I saw it when I finally got around to giving her a ring and a promise, about a year after we brought Ari home. Then I had seen it again when she said "I do" in a very small civil ceremony with only Barrett, Brock, Tig, and Marg present.
And I saw it when she realized we were giving a kid in the system a life, a future, a family.
Yeah, there was no saying no to something that filled her so completely.
Riya- 4,995 days
"You're not scaring him off," I told Sawyer, shaking my head at his daddy bear protective stance.
"Did you see that dress? I'm fucking scaring his no good ass off."
Ari was fifteen and she had on an incredibly chaste sundress that showed practically no skin and she was going on a group date with all her friends and a boy she had a crush on since the beginning of time. It was all above-board and safe and I knew Ari was in no way the kind of girl to get pushed around or talked into anything. And we had already had the sex and safe sex talk about half a dozen times over the past year, knowing I had become sexually active at around sixteen and that it was unrealistic to expect any different from her.
Though I certainly hoped she held off a little longer than I did.
Sawyer's fears were realized when about a year before, Ari had sprouted up, widened in the hip and butt area and got a rack that put mine to shame, taking her out of an incredibly awkward phase she had been stuck in for about three years.
She was almost obnoxiously gorgeous.
But she was also confident, headstrong, opinionated, and set in her own beliefs and desires.
No boy was going to be able to tell her it was time to take things to the next level unless she had already decided that for
herself.
But Sawyer was Sawyer and overprotective of her and our other adoptive daughter, Benny, who was, thankfully for him, only seven and the biggest tomboy on the planet.
"I'm with Dad," Nathan agreed, moving to stand next to his father, legs spread, arms crossed, full-on military stance.
See, when we brought Nate into the fold, he didn't just get us, he got Barrett and Tig and Brock as well, all good men, all protective, all alpha in their own ways, all of them teaching him and our last adoptive son, Quinn, all the ways of being not only a good man, but a good friend, brother, and protector to any woman who might need it.
"Me too!" Quinn declared, all of nine, but imitating his father and brother perfectly already.
Quinn was a somewhat new addition.
Sawyer and I had decided after Benny that we thought our family was complete. But when we had showed up at the group home a couple towns over to deliver Christmas presents, we had seen Quinn and something inside my chest simply pulled me across the floor and toward him, like there was a chain connecting us.
His was the most tragic of all their stories.
Nate was drug addicted as a baby and, even as a teen, struggled to be able to keep himself focused in school, though he excelled in sports and training with his father and uncles. He had also been with us the longest and had opened up to receive love and gave it just as readily.
Benny had been raised by her grandmother, her mom disappearing off the face of the Earth, for the first four years of her life. Then the grandmother died suddenly and she was put up for adoption. We had found her barely two months later and went through the process of adopting her.
But Quinn, yeah, Quinn had a rough start in life. He grew up in a slum with a crack-addicted mother and her abusive brother. When child services took him away for the first time, it was because they showed up to a roach-infested house to find him in clothes two sizes too small, sitting in his own filthy diaper with a bleeding, blistering, oozing rash from it, crying, malnourished, and sleeping in a dresser drawer.
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