by Julia Kent
He blinked for what felt like one long minute, and then began to crawl to shore, her laughter twinkling like the stars.
When he reached the snow, he sat and watched her as he took off his skates, her face luminous, her body in rare form. Controlled. Hesitant and cautious until she got it right. But skating with abandon, navigating the new and uncomfortable, the ice as nature intended.
Pausing, he took her in, legs taut as she made a turn, her mind and body in complete harmony.
In that moment, he realized, he had no choice. The universe had made it for him. She carried his heart with her, encased inside, and whatever remained of his natural life was hers, and only hers.
The moon seemed to glow a little brighter, as if agreeing.
Dylan
If men could have PMS, then lately, Mike was the poster child for whatever drug the pharmaceutical companies would debut for it. Fucking hell. His moods had always been erratic, even as he used medication to chill.
That, and running until he destroyed a pair of shoes in six weeks. Too many miles.
Not that Dylan couldn’t keep up. If he wanted to. But why destroy muscle when you could lift and bulk up?
He thought about the gym. Hadn’t been there in forever. Same with the old firehouse. The grapevine told him Murphy’s wife was on the mend, and those volunteer shifts he’d grabbed for a while ended once Jillian was born. You stay up all night with a baby a few nights a week and you’re a complete wastoid when it comes to handling a twenty-four at the station.
Hell, he couldn’t manage a twelve-hour shift any more. Sleep when you can sleep. Jillian’s latest bout of teething meant the handful of weeks where she’d started to sleep through the night felt like a dream.
Mike and Laura came out of the bedroom a hell of a lot happier than they’d been going in, he noticed. Jillian had dropped off to sleep, and he looked on the counter near the coffee maker. Sitting at the tiny kitchen table, sipping a cup of much-needed Joe, gave him a rare moment to just think.
Sometimes thinking was overrated. But not when you felt like you never had the time to do it.
His cell phone and car keys were in their newly designated spot, the phone plugged in to charge. Training himself to put them there would take a few weeks, but it was better than the hack he and Mike had finally devised to get his cell phone out of the heating system.
He was telling that story to Jillian’s prom date some day.
Yesterday had to go down in the history of their entire relationship—his and Mike’s—as one of the weirdest. And that was saying a lot, because after Jill died, Mike turned strange. Then, again, after they thought they had lost Laura. He had this hidden ball of something badass deep down in the dark reaches of himself, and while most guys deal with it by being assholes, competing for who’s the bigger man, or just blowing it out through weightlifting or pickup basketball, Mike used running and meditation.
Dylan thought punching something was so much better.
He’d spent the afternoon in a haze in the Kid’s Korner of the lodge as Jillian found new ways to pull his hair and tug at his heart. Toddlers wobbled on new walking feet around her, and she tilted her head, wide green eyes following the movements of the kids, a drooly grin ever at the ready for whoever looked her way. He’d become accustomed to the other parents cooing at her and then looking at him quizzically.
“She takes after her mother?” they’d say, and something in his throat would tighten. Jillian had dark blond hair and green eyes, and looked like a blend, as if genetics really had somehow taken three sets of DNA, put them in a Vitamix, and poured them out into a live newborn.
But she didn’t look at all like him right now. You could see it in her shoulders and the way she tilted her head. Her expressions, too, especially when she frowned and tipped her eyes up, lips pursed. The looks was so quintessentially a Stanwyck trademark that he’d taken pictures whenever he could and sent them to his mom and dad.
They’d responded with scanned pictures of him at that age with the same exact look. Laura and Mike had gawked, and something about the look they gave him, Jillian, and then each other had made his throat tighten, too.
Home was a sanctuary. He didn’t have to worry about what people thought (not that he did…much). Mike and Laura and he had a pact to raise the baby together as one unit, and they hadn’t given him even a hint that Jillian’s paternity meant one tiny damn. Whether he was her biological father or not, she was his heart child. Embedded forever and holding a piece of him, it was like she was his soul, raw and naked, crawling through the world.
And right now she was sitting up in her toy room, her hand clutching something she munched happily on.
Wait.
He hadn’t fed her a snack.
On well-practiced feet, he moved like a lion across the room, sleek and graceful, not wanting to scare her.
A crumb-filled grin was his reward, five teeth poking out in odd syncopation. Those five teeth had cost him, Mike, and Laura plenty of sleep.
“Whatcha got there, Jelly Belly?” he asked, cooing.
“Aga da!” she pronounced, holding the fist high like a victor’s.
A well-gummed teething biscuit and a long insect’s wing poked out between chubby, dimpled knuckles. Oh, gross.
Eh. Wouldn’t be the worst thing she’d eaten, he surmised. But after peeling her fingers back, he took the day-old (at least) biscuit out of her hand, murmuring condolences as she wailed.
“I know, I know. The teething biscuit is better after a couple of days. It’s aged to a fine tone, isn’t it? Like wine.” He ran to the kitchen and zipped back in seconds with the box of new biscuits, handing her one.
She threw it into the ball pit.
“Wah!” she shouted, like a ninja throwing a star.
“Jillian for the Olympic softball team in 2032!” Laura said, clapping. “That was quite a throw.”
The baby heard Laura and stopped, mouth open, eyes wide and rimmed with the beginnings of tears. She scowled.
“It’s Dylan’s twin!” Mike said, holding two cups of coffee, extending one to Dylan.
Yesterday they’d been in the bedroom or skiing, Dylan on kidwatch, and this morning had been no different. It was not that he didn’t enjoy it, but looking at Laura’s v-neck sweater, so like the one she’d worn for their first date, he began to feel decidedly less Daddy and more Hey, hot mama, come to daddy…
The doorbell rang. Mike startled, spilling some coffee on his hand and yelping in reaction.
The sound made the baby giggle uncontrollably.
“All you have to do is burn yourself to drag her out of a bad mood!” Dylan declared as Laura answered the door. He did a mental check. They’d all showered. Mike had given more control to Shelly (and about time…). Jillian could manage without breast milk for six hours or so.
Time to put himself at the center of this relationship again. To put all three in the same circle, really.
One side of his mouth crooked up in a smile. But he’d happily take all the credit.
He was an Evil Fucking Genius.
“Josie!” Laura cried out from the other room, the door shutting and the thump of rapid footsteps filling the hall. Mike batted at the coffee stains on his jeans and sucked the webbing of his thumb where the coffee had burned.
“Hey!” Mike said, giving Josie a ginger hug as she approached the playroom. “To what do we owe the privilege?”
“Zombies.”
“Huh?”
“It would take a zombie apocalypse for me to do what I’m about to do for you.”
“For…me?”
“All of you.” Josie winked at Dylan and he groaned. She lifted one eyebrow and stared at him.
Mike and Laura turned and imitated her. Six eyes asked a lot of questions.
Dylan fished in his pocket and pulled out a set of keys, dangling them.
Jillian started to bounce on her ass and shouted, “Aga hbbbbb mama da!”
“These are not for you,�
�� he chided, wagging a finger toward her.
She gave him a raspberry.
“Oh, for God’s sake. He’s taking you to your sex cabin. I’m here to make sure your baby doesn’t get taken away by wolves or eat a spider or throw the Hope Diamond in your garbage disposal.”
“She is capable of any and all of those things,” Mike deadpanned.
“Sex cabin?” Laura whipped her head to stare at Dylan. “You planned this?”
Josie bent down and rubbed Jillian’s head. The baby looked up and reached out with a grubby finger to snag the hem of her sweater.
“Six hours! I have to get home to…”
“To what?”
“To help Alex move in.”
They all froze. Great, thought Dylan. Trumped by the damn best friend. Wanting the spotlight for a moment was asking too much, it seemed. Laura’s eager look a second ago faded fast as Josie dropped her bomb.
“Alex is moving in?” Laura squealed.
“Practically! He’s leaving a toothbrush and a spare set of clothes at my place.” Josie took a deep breath, one that seemed never to end, and let it out slowly. Dylan looked at her like she was crazy, which was accurate.
She really was.
“That’s not ‘moving in,’ Josie,” Mike said. Captain Obvious always knew exactly what to say.
“It’s close!”
“Have a child with him and tell me about—”
“Shut your whore mouth, Mike!”
His booming laugh filled the room. “That is the first time I’ve ever been called a whore.”
“You continue to joke about my uterus being used for anything other than blood storage and I’ll call you worse.”
Mike just lifted his eyebrows as he walked away. “Thanks for watching Jelly Belly!”
Laura closed the space between her and Dylan and took his face in her hands. “You arranged this? You went behind my back and called my best friend to come over here to watch the baby for six hours so we could go somewhere and fuck?”
When she put it that way, his plan started to feel tawdry. Cheap. Unseemly.
“Hell yes!” he said with gusto, because hey—he was a guy, after all.
“Thank you!” she whispered, kissing him hard, her tongue parting his lips, the aggression making him submit for a few moments, until he found himself and took over, leading the way and leaving her invaded. Touched. Enraptured.
When they pulled back from each other, breathless, they found a startled Josie with her hand covering the baby’s eyes.
“Ix-nay on the ex-say in unt-fray of the aby-bay.”
“Aba bah!” Jillian said.
“Great. Her first sentence will be Pig Latin. Why don’t you teach her something more useful, like Klingon?” Dylan snapped.
Laura began tugging his hand. “Let’s go. Mike! Load up the Jeep. We’re about to have an adventure!”
But as Dylan passed the big picture window in their living room, he saw Mike already at the Jeep, loading a small gym bag, waving furiously at them to get in the car.
A man after Dylan’s own heart.
The drive to the cabin was exceedingly short, as Mike sped there. Dylan raced inside and turned on the tap to fill the tub. Earlier that day, he had come over with the baby in tow to turn on the heat and stock the fridge. The “eco-cabin” Mike’s resort had developed was really a sex sanctuary for them, and—at times—just a sleep sanctuary when one of the three reached a point of half-psychosis from sleep deprivation.
It was so much more fun to use it for sex, though.
He’d attached the swing to its harness, fingers stroking the leather, remembering the last time they’d used it, his cock growing hard at the image of Laura’s wet lips open with orgasmic pleasure as they’d found new heights of sensation and exploration.
Six hours was just enough time to fuck each other silly and shower. All this deeper meaning of life crap that plagued Mike could wait.
When Dylan found himself at odds with his own sense of self, he found pounding it out—and not through his feet—was a form of salvation.
Laura uncorked a bottle of a nice white Chardonnay and poured three glasses, looking around the bright cabin.
“Why is it so warm in here?”
Dylan’s smile went sly again. “Jillian and I came here earlier to prepare.”
She threw herself at him in a huge embrace, drinking wine over his shoulder. “This is the best surprise I’ve had in ages.”
“This is the first surprise you’ve had since the last time we were here,” Mike added, his voice warm, body relaxed. Good, Dylan thought. So much better than the way he’s been acting lately.
Laura pulled back, her mouth stretched into the kind of vibrant smile he loved to see, and she moved in for a kiss just as her juicy ass began to buzz.
She jumped and laughed. “Shit. My phone.” The look on her face as she read the screen made Dylan’s stomach fall, and his erection soften just a bit. Uh-oh.
“Josie?” This was a call, not a text. “What’s wrong?” Laura’s voice was guarded but resigned, and as he heard the tinny sound of Laura’s friend saying words like “puked,” all their shoulders began to slump.
Mike drank the rest of his wine in one long gulp. Parenthood had changed him that much.
“She puked up a what? An insect?” Laura’s voice went up half an octave and she spun around to give Dylan a death glare. “A giant wing from a what?” Josie continued as Laura pulled the phone away from her ear and hissed at him. “Did you see the baby around any insects?”
Just as he was about to craft the smoothest, best PR-spun answer ever, he heard a baby wail in the background of Laura’s phone. Laura listened for a second. “And she’s warm, too? Insects don’t give babies fevers, do they? Could she have picked up some God-awful disease from eating”—GLARE—“something as disgusting as a bug? How big was the bug? Oh my God, what if she ate a cockroach!”
Laura descended into hysterics as Mike calmly pried her fingers off the phone and said to Josie, “She’ll be there in five minutes.” He ended the call and slowly, deliberately pressed the Jeep’s keys into Laura’s hand.
“Go,” he ordered. Dylan had to admire his chillness. Not cold. Just in control and considerate.
“But…” Laura’s eyes were wild and a bit crazy. She looked at the wine, the swing, which now looked like a limp dick in Dylan’s eyes (joining his own), and the bed, made neatly and begging for action.
“But nothing. You won’t enjoy a single moment if you aren’t with our sick baby. Dylan and I just need to unload the fridge so the food won’t spoil. We have backpacks. It’ll do us good to hike home. It’s not even two miles.”
Internally, Dylan groaned, but he said nothing. He was already in the doghouse for letting the baby eat an insect (or…maybe she only ate that wing…).
“I—” he blurted, guilty conscience kicking in. Apparently, he had one. “She found an old teething biscuit this morning and there was this insect wing…”
Mike rolled his eyes and crossed his arms, now joining Laura’s glare. “And you didn’t say anything?” You would think that years of living with Mike would give him some indication of what the guy thought, but no. He was either royally pissed and ready to rip him apart, or barely keeping it together to not laugh.
Dylan could have flipped a coin.
“I don’t even know what to say!” Laura screeched as she zipped out the door and slammed it behind her. He’d never seen her run as fast as she did to the Jeep, spewing snow-covered gravel as the tires spun over ice patches until they caught and she drove off.
Mike winced at the grinding sound his poor engine made.
“Smooth. Really smooth,” he said, pouring another glass of wine. Dylan watched with growing amusement as Mike downed another half a glass.
“You working on your frat-boy skills? Is beer pong next?” he asked.
Mike smiled wistfully over the top of his wine glass, then downed the rest, carefully swirling the stem
between his thumb and index finger.
“No. Just…relaxing.”
“Let our baby eat a bug and you’re sucking down wine like it’s coffee. What the fuck has happened to us?” Dylan plopped down on the bed and stared at the ceiling, the swing in his peripheral vision, taunting him.
“We’re parents.”
“We’re boring.”
“You tried. Thank you. This was a great idea.” Mike handed Dylan his glass of wine, and Dylan figured when in Rome, do what Thor does.
And drink the fucking wine.
“Cockblocked by an insect.” Dylan sighed.
“That’s a first,” Mike said, nodding. “And your lobster tails are in the fridge now.”
Fuck! He’d forgotten about that. “You seriously want to stuff them in a backpack and hike home?”
“No. Let’s just boil them up and eat them. We can get more some other time. Laura’s not coming back.” Mike’s words stung.
His plan was a failure.
Chugging the rest of his glass, he eyed the final third of the bottle. “We could steam the lobsters in water and wine and have the meat with some butter. Bring the steaks home.”
“Deal.”
And while the rest of the afternoon did not involve sex whatsoever, it turned out to meet one of Dylan’s needs.
Time to just be.
Laura
The day after the Great Insect Ingestion Disaster of 2014, as it would forever be known, Jillian’s fever was long gone, and Laura had let go of her annoyance with Dylan. You couldn’t catch that baby before she did anything—she was so fast! And cunning.
Just like her parents.
Washing dishes with Mike while the baby played with a set of plastic rings, Laura heard something. In the distance. Her ringtone. Josie’s ringtone, actually.
Mike shook his head. “‘Superfreak’? Got that right.” But his tone was playful. A quick shrug and she was running down the hall on tiptoes, trying to anticipate whether Jillian would have a fearful reaction to the ring (a new development in the baby), where the phone was, and how to locate it quickly and quietly.
