bad decisions

You induce a push in your hands so they hit the water, anticipating the usual splash, only to be met by silence which swallows whole the sound before it can reach you – just the motion without consequence, like you are mimicking swimming.

You venture once more, slower this time, slicing your hand through the pool and awaiting the tiny mayhem that should ensue…nothing, it’s like you are grazing air. You opt for another approach and exert yourself to bring your hands in front of you to clap (just to force a sound into existence, to verify that the world hasn’t been stripped down to this suffocating house you have abhorred at first sight) but your fingers don’t quite connect, hovering apart like opposing magnets repelling each other.

Turning your head toward the other side of the pool in despair, you notice them: Craig, his mouth open in what you know must be laughter as he grapples with Deran, limbs tangled in their careless violent version of playing, but the image is wrong too, slowed down, delayed, like watching them via a pane of thick glass that distorts every motion and steals every sound – existence permutated into a silent film that you are forced to be a spectator of – their voices lost beyond your reach no matter how you strain.

Andrew is there as well, closer to you than his brothers, face in your direction and lips shaping around your name, yet it doesn’t reach you, none of it does: not the action, nor the intention. Like an invisible rampart dropped between you and the rest of the world, thick and impenetrable, making you question for a second if you’ve somehow descended beneath the surface of life without realizing it.

Your throat moves, your mouth too, but you can’t utter a word. There’s only the sense of trying and failing, panic creeping slowly and coiling around your ribs as the smell catches you.

An acrid metallic sting that coats the back of your tongue as if you’ve bitten down on rust, combined with the stomach-turning reek of flesh burning that you identify easily for knowing it all too well, and it doesn’t belong here, in the clean blue stretch of the Cody’s pool underneath a Californian sky that, with a bit more heed, feels uncanny: clouds frozen in time, reminding you of a painting by Constable, the sun gradually turning murkier.

You inhale out of the fear without meaning to and the putrid odor fills your lungs, heavy and asphyxiating, eyes peering down before freezing.

The water is no longer crystalline. It’s dark, viscous, dragging along your arms and torso, feeling wrong, wrong, wrong, and when you lift your hand, it comes up coated in red, sliding down in thick strands that don’t drip so much as stretch.

The red is everywhere but it isn’t the bright, playful reflection of Nick’s inflatable crab you bought him on his last birthday dancing on the surface, nor the chimera of late afternoon sunlight breaking into shards, no, it’s a red that is dense, absorbing light rather than mirroring it. For a second, your brain refuses to name it before the recognition hits like a physical blow, knocking the air out of you as your lungs strain to deny what they have already taken in.

Blood. Their blood.

You jerk your head up but the space where they were is empty, the pool suddenly vast and endless as the house looms silent beyond like it never held joy, never held life – nothing but a hollow shell observing you from a distance that keeps on growing no matter how hard you try to orient yourself to the ladder, your body declining to respond.

There’s a pull at your limbs, a constraint you hadn’t noted until this moment, attempting to lift your arms that refuses to rise and straining uselessly against the pressure at your back, wrists bound tight enough that the skin aches under the unseen grip and ankles locked in the same manner, forcing your legs into a helpless alignment that keeps you afloat only because the liquid is sufficiently thick to hold.

(fuck, no. it’s like in…in the- no. it’s not the warehouse. none of that is real…right?)

Your mouth opens wide, the panic breaking through your chest in a violent surge, but instead of a yelp or scream, it’s a thick liquid that spills past your lips, the taste of gasoline flooding your tongue, throat convulsing as you choke on it, trying to force it out, but more follows, pouring from you while the fumes make you teary-eyed.

“…hey, sweetheart…”

Andrew’s voice cuts through the silence in fragments, distorted and stretched thin as if it has been dragged from within the pool. Pool that subtly, like removed piece by piece, gives way under your feet with its tiles slipping and dissolving into oblivion, only for your body to sink lower, the blood ingesting you more with every inch that rises to your shoulders, licks at your jaw and creeps at your lips – parted in a futile attempt to breathe.

You contemplate, distantly, that this is how it ends. Slowly.

So unbearably slow that your body has time to comprehend what is happening, to catalog each second of it, recognizing the inevitability that unfolds without mercy: you are going to die in the place where you first met Andrew, drowning in the blood of the people you love, body bound and useless.

The liquid climbs over your nose and you perceive once more his voice, nearer this time. (or…maybe you are only hallucinating it because you can’t fathom let the last thing you listen to be silence?)

“…come on…you’re okay…just breathe…”

You wish you could tell him how much you try. How your chest expands for your lungs to fight for air, drawing in instead the coagulated weight that forces its way in, your body convulsing violently as you try to expel it, only to feel a pressure that encloses around your neck. Pulse hammering against it, frantic, your body reacts even as the rest collapses, every nerve in you screaming at once.

The lights of the pool snaps off, nothingness engulfing that one suspended second: no pool, no body, no breath. Only the certainty that, right now, you are not alone in the dark, a form occupying the same space as you and close enough that you can feel the displacement of it in the glide that sends a ripple along your spine, close enough to…

You wake with a broken sound tearing out of your larynx and hands flying to your neck, searching for the source of the pressure that still lingers but instead of it, you find the cool, familiar heart-shaped pendant beneath your fingertips. The obscurity is different here, edged with the outline of furniture that don’t match the house in Oceanside – wooden and warm with life, the defiance of a man born and raised in coldness.

(home. you’re home. back in Ojai. back with the bab-)

A hand touches you, provoking a recoil in your muscles, the ghost of the dream still near, present, and for a brief second, you don’t know who it is, no, not until you hear him.

“Shh…count with me. One. Two. Three. Four.”

Turning toward it instinctively, body slower to follow than your mind due to the weight of your pregnancy making each movement heavier, you seek him out, catching on each number as you force yourself to follow him. “One. Two. Three. Four.”

The words come out broken at first, uneven, but they exist outside of your head, and that alone feels like progress – the proof that you are still there, real. Without closing the distance or overwhelming you, Andrew’s presence stabilizes, granting you to come instead of pulling you in with his hands hovering near your arms. You end up half climbing, half collapsing into him, the movement awkward due to your center of gravity altered by the pregnancy, to which he responds immediately, one arm sliding around your back to guide and support you, while the other finds yours and draws them down to your belly where they belong, grounding you both.

“It’s okay, you’re okay. You’re not there anymore.” His chin rests above your head as you settle against him, face tucked into the space beneath it and breath still jagged but beginning to shadow his, your arm wrapping around his waist so that his warmth seeps into you to replace the cold and the panic in the pit of your stomach.

“I-I know. It’s so…stupid.” The term feels wrong as it leaves your mouth, shaped out of the frustration and the lingering embarrassment that always goes with the nightmares.

“It’s not stupid. You shouldn’t say that,” he replies, his brows – that even if you can’t see, you know – knitted together, body tensed while the pad of his thumb traces slowly all around your navel.

You exhale a long breath. “I just don’t understand why I still think about this even after all this time.”

“Four months is not a lot of time,” he answers with a slight edge in his voice that you know is not directed at you but rather at the manner you have of diminishing your kidnapping, expecting yourself to be past it already.

“Still. I wish they could stop.”

“It’s okay. They will pass,” he murmurs, words belonging to him and his nightmares, who still keeps him awake every night, as much as they do to you.

Shifting, your hand travels from his waist up along his bare chest, fingertips tracing the lines you know by heart, the gesture playful despite the lingering tremor in your muscles. “Were you still not sleeping?” you ask, trying to pull the moment somewhere else.

“No.”

“Talking again?” you continue, a smile finding its way back as you tilt your head, pressing a kiss to his collarbone, the contact brief but enough to make his breath hitch in a noise that still delights you, even after a year together.

“We were agreeing that you should sleep and rest more,” he breathes, words coming out rough under your touch.

You roll your eyes, a quiet chuckle escaping past your teeth as they catch gently at his jaw. “Not even born and already conspiring with you, hm?”

“Yes,” he answers with a tiny shift in his voice, lips curving up and hand continuing its slow path along each curve and striae.

A yawn catches you off guard, stretching a body that finally begins to let go while tucking your face in the crook of his neck, voice dropping as sleep starts to pull at you again. “Fine. But if…” You stop mid-sentence. No, both of you stop breathing at the gentle, repetitive movement beneath your palms. Lifting up your head with a light laugh, you reassure him and his frown, “Hiccups,” before echoing his previous words, “It’s okay. They will pass, Andy.”

He nods, the tension in his face easing as he leans down, pressing a kiss to your lips, then lower to the hollow between your breasts, then further still, his mouth brushing your belly before he settles there, his head resting as if listening for an answer.

You grin, fingers threading into his curls, knowing what will follow – the usual murmurs directed at what’s growing beneath his hand, words you are not meant to hear, discussions that belong to them. “Don’t stay up too late, ‘kay? Don’t want any crude jokes from Craig tomorrow ‘bout me keeping you up all night,” you whisper, voice thickening with sleep.

“He won’t,” he replies with certainty, his hand moving in time with each small movement under your skin, an incandescent smile shaping his mouth as he meets what feels like a head or a foot pressing back. “Go back to sleep, I’m handling it.”

“Fine,” you yawn, eyes closing and body sinking fully into the mattress and the safety he builds around you without effort. “But no more conspiring.”

“No more conspiring.” ────────── “I think I’m being invaded by an alien. A greedy one,” you sighed, tiptoeing into the kitchen, one hand low on your stomach as if you could reason or bargain with the little marvel that had taken root inside you and now dictated the rhythm of your days with an unpredictable, sovereign appetite.

Andrew had been sitting at the table when you entered, a book open beneath his hand whose spine broke from how he had been reading the same page over and over in the past hour while you were napping without truly going forward, eyes fixed on the lines while his mind circled elsewhere, trapped in a loop of interrogations that had no responses yet – not until the first ultrasound tomorrow at least –  and no mercy in the way they returned.

(What if something was wrong? With the baby? With you? With him. Bad thought. One. Two. Three. Four. He counted the cracks on the table.)

He turned the page despite the grip he had onto it, though he couldn’t recall the last sentence he had skimmed. A book among the dozen he purchased yesterday at the library where he had felt so ill-adapted, encircled by families, fathers who were indisputably better men, who knew what they were doing, who hadn’t spent most of their lives breaking instead of building, who were not petrified of ruining a small being with a wrong move. But still, he had obtained those books. Because he had vowed himself to become worthy of his miracle.

(Craig had told two words. Easy. Natural. That it had felt like breathing for Nick. But it didn’t feel easy. It felt comparable to standing at the edge of a cliff. Like being permitted into a place he had no right to enter. Akin to waiting for a higher power to notice the mistake and revoke this joy. One. Two. Three. Four.)

He breathed through it, struggling to cease his inner spiraling.

(For he had almost lost you. The light he learned to follow. His reason to breathe. And he had nearly lost himself before being more than what made him. Before he could merit you. Just a few inches north and the world would have closed without him knowing how to stay.)

Instead, he got to sat at a kitchen table in a home far from Oceanside, with a book about parenting in front of him, awaiting a child that had no reason to exist except that somehow, impossibly, grace had found him – a sinner being handed a blessing. His gaze lifted up when you reached the fridge, tugging it open and inclining your forehead alongside the cool edge. The content had not changed since this morning: the same containers aligned, same milk, same vegetables and yet…you appeared less upset by them.

“I think the little bean is less picky today, honey,” you informed him, quiet but with a conspiratorial grin. A habit that you had initiated recently: narrating the invisible, shaping what he couldn’t yet discern or touch, telling him hourly how you and the baby felt, what it seemed to desire or refuse, the translator of a language he felt no right to master but hopelessly craved to acquire. Because devoid of it…he was sightless, circling back his thoughts toward how he would manage to turn his promised land to ashes.

Andrew rose from the chair without a blink, leaving the book behind him, forgotten mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-fear, because none of it held more significance than you and the baby standing there. He crossed the space between you in a few steps and slid his arms around your waist, cautious not to press too firmly while his palms settled on the soft curve of your belly. Chin dipped to your shoulder, his lips brushed behind your ear.

“How bad?” he murmured.

You hummed, considering. “Not bad-bad like yesterday,” you replied, tilting your head to the side just enough for him to pursue his kisses along your neck and inhaling the remnant smell of this morning’s sex, “Just…the baby seems craving a sandwich and sweet words.” A small teasing grin broke past your lips. “Like its father.”

(Father. He was going to be a father. To a child. A being that would grow. One that he couldn’t fail. Couldn’t hurt. The word resided in his chest like a psalm. A canticle. Father. The doxology at the end of his book would chant it. Father. Now and forevermore, Andrew Cody would be a father.)

The corner of his mouth curled up, sufficiently for you to sense in on your skin. “The baby has good taste then.”

“The best,” you whispered, head turned to peer at him over your shoulder, eyes tender. “Now…let’s try to feed this foodie alien.”

He nodded once before letting you slip free to scan the shelves again, surveying every small shift in your expression, each flicker of interest or rejection to catalog them for later. You ended up grasping the container of turkey, his stomach twisting.

(Not that. Not after yesterday. Holding your hair while your body spew it out. Hearing the contrite noise you made like you were the one that failed. Apologized as if it had been your blame instead of his. He should have done better. Asked. Learned faster. Anything. But no. You had trusted him with something as simple as food and he had gotten even that wrong. And you had been sick all night. Maybe harming the baby too in his ineptitude?)

“Maybe that’s not the bes-” he started.

“That’s what the baby wants, honey,” you cut in gently, opening it.

He watched as you set it down, reaching for the bread, then the peanut butter. His head tilted slightly. “You’re mixing them?”

You smiled. “Yep.”

“That doesn’t-”

“Make sense?” you finished for him, laughing. “No, it definitely doesn’t.” You glanced back, eyes bright. “But it feels right.”

You assembled the sandwich unhurriedly, scrupulously, all too aware of him observing, like the act itself mattered. Because to his eyes, it did. And he committed it to memory: the way you held the knife, the angle of your wrist, the arrangement, how you spread the peanut butter on one slice but not the other, how you placed four pieces of turkey. Just so he could make it later if you were not able to.

Taking a bite of your sandwich, it took less than four in his mind for him to see your face crumpling, tears welling up rapidly and spilling over before you could halt them.

“What’s wrong?” His hands were already on you, one cupping your cheek and the other steadying your arm, body angled closer in a feeble attempt to shield you from what was occurring inwardly.

(One. Two. Three. Four. He counted your wet lashes.)

“I…” you voice wavered, frustration breaking through. “I wanted that, and now I don’t.” Another tear slipped free, shoulders trembling enough to hit him unforgivingly. “And I can’t stop crying for a fucking ridiculous sandwich.”

“Hey, it’s okay sweetheart,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s not ridiculous.” His thumb brushed the tear away, then another, handling the utmost sacred soul that he was terrified of shattering. “I can make something else,” he continued, already shifting in problem-solving mode, planning. “Or I can go out.”

“It’s late,” you replied weakly.

“I don’t care.”

(He meant it on his life. There was no scale where your distress didn’t outweigh the rest. Time. Money. Distance. Rule. He would dismantle all of it. Tell you that it was not foolish. Never with him. That you were carrying a miracle. The plan for the future was straightforward. Learn every version of your hunger like scripture. Every change. Every need.)

He leaned in, pressing a soft kiss to your cheek, then the other, lips lingering there as if he could replace each tear with his adoration. “What do you want?”

You sniffed, embarrassed. “I don’t know.”

“That’s fine. We’re gonna figure it out.”

Your fingers curled into his shirt, holding him there tightly. “I feel bad, Andy.”

“Don’t.”

“But I do!”

“Don’t,” he breathed, forehead brushing yours. “You’re growing our baby.” His hand flattened once more against your stomach, on the verge of getting back on his knees to worship the altar of your skin and hips. “You don’t have to feel bad about needing something, okay?”

You slowly nodded as he tilted his head to be able to keep the eye-contact with you.

“What about that cake?” he asked after a moment, continuing to search your face. “The red one you had last week with the frosting.”

Your whole face flickered up. “The red velvet?”

“Yes.”

You hesitated, then nodded. “Okay.”

Relief moved through him. “Good.” He kissed your lips before adding against them, “I’m back in seven.”

Retrieving back his car keys, he heard your laugh, the one that still got him through a sensation close to television static or crackling embers, tingling all throughout his body. “It’s at least fifteen!”

Opening the door, he repeated, certain. “I’m back in seven.”

When he returned – four hundred seconds later – you were curled up on the couch, blanket pulled over your legs and television on, airing a documentary about seagulls in the background. He set the box down, beside your plate and fork, opening it with the same meticulousness he applied to everything else: corner by corner, watchful not to rip it before settling by your side, who instantly rested your head on his shoulder, one hand intertwined loosely with his over your stomach while the other picked at the cake in small bites.

“Better?” he murmured, pressing a kiss to your hairline to cover for the relief that flooded him at the view of food finally settling in.

You nodded with a yawn in your tone. “Much.” His hand moved along your arm in slow passes, a cadence meant to ground him as much as to soothe you, who added a soft, “Thank you, Andy.”

The television kept going, something about the water or the eggs, but he barely perceived the sound of it. All he heard was your breathing, all he felt was your weight against him and all he saw, when he allowed himself to look down, was your lashes resting on your cheeks, mouth parted.

Adjusting the blanket over you carefully, Andrew bowed his head once, thanking a celestial being for this.

(For his angel and his wonder. For the grace he didn’t earn. The penance. Paradise placed into his hands. One that he refused to turn into ash. Not this time. He would guard his blessings like relics. Let hell come later. He will meet it knowing he had held heaven in his arms.)

“You’re okay,” he promised quietly to your form and to the life under his hand. “Everything will be okay.” ────────── And just like you had prophesied the night prior, Craig shouts, “Kept him up all night, huh?” the second he gets at the entrance of the house, grin wide, stepping forward to wrap you in an unrestrained bear hug. “Look at you! I can’t even put my arms around anymore!”

You snort, breath catching. (only a little. because well…that’s what six months pregnant does to you. and due to Craig Cody, who embraces the same as everything else he carries out: wholly, boisterously and short of moderation.) “Careful, Craigo,” you scold him, though there’s no real protest in it.

He turns a deaf ear to your words, pulling back only to pivot toward Andrew, clapping a hand against his shoulder and drawing him into a rough grip. “Hey man!”

Andrew receives it with his usual stiffness, unblinking, arms hovering gawkily at his sides before landing on his brother’s dorsum, appearing hesitant to what the appropriate comeback is meant to be. “We-” he mumbles after a beat. “We’re glad to see you.”

Deran rolls his eyes – sufficient to peer at his own skull – behind Craig, walking onward himself, quieter but no less affectionate as he drags you into a hug of his own. “Don’t listen to Craig,” he whispers, voice low near your ear. “You look terrific.”

You beam on his shoulder, leaning further into it. “Thanks Deran. It’s good to see you.”

Craig is already halfway across the house by the time you step back, his voice echoing from the garden. “Bro!” A beat. Then louder, impressed, “You built a ramp out there!” You perceive the sharp clap of his palms, the sound bouncing on the walls. “It’s so sick! When did you do that? I didn’t see it the last time I came!”

Andrew exhales, slipping back into the older brother mode, striding after him and shaking his head. “Yes. But don’t go th...” His voice fades as he disappears outside and to whatever chaos Craig is about to engender near your carefully maintained backyard.

You turn back to Deran, who is already observing you with that similar prudent gaze he continuously appears to have, subsequent to discovering in the same hour that you had been abducted, harmed and pregnant. (it’s in those moments that you perceive their resemblance. this matching spark in the Cody’s eyes. this manner of verifying a situation silently.) “Everything okay with Craig?” you ask, one hand lying under your belly to support the weight.

Deran nods, his arm wrapping around yours as he guides you back inside the house, adjusting his pace to match without comment. “Yeah, Yeah. You know Craig.” You smile faintly. “He woke up at five this morning,” he adds, still baffled. “All because we were coming to see you both.”

“That’s adorable,” you giggle, nudging his shoulder. “And you? How are you doing?”

He shrugs, even though there’s something there, a thing he’s attempting not to display and failing lamentably. “An ex of mine reached out,” he tells, struggling at a casual tone. “Adrian. He was away for a while. I mean…out of the country. Told me he was coming back soon.”

You lift your brows, interest sparking. “Oh…so?” you tease, already smirking. “Are we finally gonna see mister single and brooding Deran Cody settling down for good?”

He looks away, the tips of his ears turning crimson practically instantly. “Don’t know,” he grumbles. “We’ll see where it leads.”

By the time you both reach the nursery, Andrew has fruitfully retrieved Craig from whatever hazardous idea he had for the ramp. This nursery…still comes across as unreal each day you step inside it. It’s beautiful, yes, no doubt regarding it: with its walls painted by Andrew on one of his restless nights in celadon green (not laurel green. not pastel green. celadon. he had been very serious about the distinction.) paired with animals you had added yourself despite his protestation concerning the chemicals, and the glow in the dark stars you had guided him to stick on the ceiling shaped in your constellations, the bedroom can’t possibly be any warmer or softer. But still. It feels unreal to know that in less than three months, in this exact room, there will be cries and late-night bottles.

Andrew stands in the middle of it, encircled by the boxes – crib, wardrobe, changing table, rocking chair, Andrew had purchased every single item in the store that day – in line to be assembled, shoulders tense like awaiting for one thing: their approval.

And, for his brothers read him as much as you do, Deran whistles, nodding his head. “It’s great,” quickly followed by Craig, “Yeah. Like really good.”

Andrew dips his head just a little in relief before starting to unpack the packages, fingers twitching and gaze flicking at the crews Craig has scattered around, desirous of fixing and lining them up. But he doesn’t, breathing in and out leisurely.

You linger only a moment longer, letting them settle into the task and each other. Because that’s the whole point of this day: you didn’t suggest Andrew to call them on the account of needing assistance to put together the nursery, you did because he needed his brothers – their presence, their closeness, their bond, all the things he had been missing despite their regular visits. Just being a big brother.

-

You come back less than an hour later, partly to observe their progression, partly to ask if they desire anything to drink. That is up until you are outside the nursery door, hand resting against the frame, Andrew’s tone freezing you to your spot.

“…no, it’s just…I’m scared.” Your breath halts, heart hammering in your ribcage. “What if I’m not a good father? Or…what if I pass it on?”

Craig’s voice, gentler than you’ve ever heard him, strains to respond. “Hey, man-”

“No, I’m serious,” Andrew cuts in. “All the…the quiet and the thinking and the fucking darkness.” You hear screws falling on the hardwood floor and a sob. “I don’t want anyone to be like me.”

You move closer, just enough to witness through the small gap of the door the three brothers hugging, both on each side of Andrew, comforting.

“Well,” Deran declares, “I’d be proud if my nephew or niece was anything like you. You’re the one who took care of us. Not Smurf. You. Made sure we ate. Took hits for us.”

Craig chuckles, pulling out of the embrace. “Gave hits for us too.”

Deran smacks him behind the head without even looking, too busy trying to maintain Andrew’s eye contact. “This kid is not gonna get the worst of you, ‘kay?” he continues. “And you’re gonna be a good dad. The best kind.”

In a flash, Andrew turns his head in an endeavor to contain the sentiment too enormous for his chest. “I’ll try,” he replies quietly with a hoarse voice. “I swear.”

“And that’s more than what we ever had,” Deran smiles, patting his arm.

You noiselessly walk back to the living room, struggling to ignore your eyes stinging and wet while the weight of everything (your body, the heartbeats in it, the love) suddenly feels heavier than earlier.

-

The third time you return, the room has metamorphosed, hand flying to your mouth before you can pause it: the crib stands assembled near the window, wardrobe up and doors aligned, the changing table in place…even the rocking chair sits ready in the corner.

“Oh, boys,” you breathe, stepping inside. “It’s perfect.” You cross the room, wrapping your arms around Andrew first, pressing a kiss to his lips, then turning and drawing Craig into a hug, quickly ensued by Deran. “How about we eat now?” you ask, beaming with emotion. “We can finish the rest after. Andrew and I made crab cakes this morning.”

Craig lights up instantly. “That’s what I want to hear!”

You chuckle, turning to the threshold, thinking about plates and drinks and if it’s sunny enough to eat outside.

“Hey! Wait,” Craig calls out, pointing toward the last box – unlabeled and untouched. “What’s that?”

You glance at Andrew then back at them. “Oh…Right,” your hand drifts unconsciously to your stomach. “About that…” Andrew wraps his arm around your waist as you add happily, “there’s something we need to tell you.” ────────── He let out a startled breath matching yours as the gel touched your skin, possibly even colder than anticipated despite the forewarning, spreading beneath the probe in a measured motion that made your body tense for a brief second before easing once more at the contact of his hand, which had tautened unconsciously as if the sensation had been inflicted on him instead of you, head bowed to catch your eyes, searching for a sign of unease.

(You’re okay. It’s common. The book said it would be cold. Said it would be stressful. One. Two. Three. Four. He counted the sounds emitted by the ultrasound machine.)

You beamed at him, a soft curve at your mouth that utterly undid the knot in his ribcage, fingers squeezing back in silent reassurance, anchoring him back in the room like you continuously did when he didn’t recognize how to ask but still got a reply from you.

Andrew refused for his eyes to blink since you laid there, surrounded by a scent of antiseptic mixed with chlorine (which in any other occurrence, would have relieved him as it meant cleanness therefore a germ-free space), white walls and lighting designed to soothe or suggest safety. But he had discovered long ago that environments lied and that the most devastating moments often unfolded in places that looked precisely like this.

(What if there’s nothing there? Or it’s too small? Maybe his curse spread to the baby. To you. Bad thought. One. Two. Three. Four. He counted your lashes.)

The thoughts resumed, obstinate, circling back like it had all morning, or all week, or perhaps ever since the word ‘baby’ had entered his life. He shifted closer to you on the narrow examination table, vigilant of your position before placing a kiss on your shoulder, free hand hovering for a second up until settling on your thigh, thumb caressing once, twice…just enough to remind himself that today was supposed to be one of the most memorable of his life.

The sonographer spoke with a serene voice, practiced, explaining what she would be looking for or asking how far along you were (eleven weeks. Which meant seventy-seven days. Which meant more than six and a half million seconds.) and Andrew listened…or strived to at least, seizing fragments and holding securely onto the ones that felt important to let the rest slip past, attention solely absorbed on you – the rise and fall of your chest, the warmth of your hand in his, the curve of your body that began to show…

The probe pressed deeper onto your belly as the screen of the echograph flickered to life beside you, shapes forming and dissolving in shades of grey and white. He leaned forward regardless of grasping them, eyes fixed on it and attempting to view what he was supposed to.

(His child. Not abstract. Not theoretical. Real. His child. Inside you. Dependent on you. Dependent on him. His child. Child. Child. He needed to breathe. In. Out. In. Out.)

The sonographer halted. “Do you have any history of multiple pregnancies in your family?” she queried, her tone unchanged, neutral, as if the question held no substance beyond routine.

Andrew’s head turned, eyes snapping from the monitor to her and, body going motionless, latched onto the implication without fully understanding.

(Multiple. Why would that matter? Does it make it harder? Put you at risk? Should he have expressed it sooner? Does it-)

“Yes,” he replied, the word coming out hushed, mechanical, his fingers trembling around yours. “I’m a twin.”

She nodded, like suspecting this response or corroborating what she had witnessed and identified. Andrew’s gaze remained on her, waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the confirmation that he had somehow destroyed something good again. Rotating the screen more toward you both, the doctor’s hand lifted to point at it.

“Okay,” she started, gentle. “So. Here, you can see an amniotic sac…”

Andrew followed the movement of her finger, eyes focusing to distinct shape from shadow, his mind working through it with a desperate attention.

“…and here is the second one.”

His breath stalled momentarily, unable to perceive your relieved laugh, unable to hear you asking for the doctor to clarify because he was attempting, with everything he had, to process what the word signified, what the word entailed. How on the monitor were two individual round shapes, side by side.

The woman pointed once more, finger precisely set on a small, pulsing form. “So here is baby number one.” His eyes locked onto it, unblinking, memorizing the shape, the existence of such a tiny- “And here,” she added, moving to the other form, “is baby number two.”

The axis of his entire world shifted under his feet, everything else – the room, the sound, the air – falling away for a moment as his mind tried and failed to recalibrate around what he had just been told. Your fingers squeezed around his, a gentle pressure that met his with certainty, thumb brushing over his knuckles once, twice, four times as if you were counting for him without saying it out loud. Your gaze remained fixed on the screen, tears gathering at the edge of your lashes, yet your hand never faltered in his. And though you didn’t peer at him, he sensed it in the language you had constructed together in the quiet of nights and in the spaces where words had missed him: the way you stabilized him without breaking from the moment, like you were holding both this miracle and him at once.

(Two. His angel and his grace, multiplied. Or…mayhap twice the chance to fail. To break them. Twice the chance for them to be like him. Because what’s in his blood will pass on. And he won’t be able to shield them both. He couldn’t even protect you. The warehouse. Your tears. Your nightmares. His failure. Bad thought.)

His chest constricted, the tension running through him like a current he couldn’t shut off nor contain.

“Two?” you echoed, a small, breathless laugh threading through the word in awe as you rotated toward him, not forcing him to mirror your amazement but letting him linger in his head. “As in…two babies.”

Andrew didn’t answer. No, worse: couldn’t. His gaze was still transfixed on the screen and the two forms, his mind splitting itself in half to carry both at once – all the joy and the terror like tides with no shore to break against. He swallowed, hard, head spinning and turning away from the screen because it was starting to feel too much, too fast, too-

“It’s okay, honey,” you murmured, words meant only for him as you pressed a kiss on his knuckles. “Everything’s okay.”

He exhaled a shaky, uneven breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding with the panic, attempting a nod.

(One. Two. Three. Four. He counted the number of letters in love. One for each of you.)

You pivoted back to the doctor, voice steadier now, a touch of curiosity and wonder threading through it despite his own lack of reaction. “Can we…hear them?” you asked.

“Of course,” the woman smiled, adjusting the settings while the room fell into a suspended hum, Andrew leaning forward, unable to stop himself, too drawn toward the source and the confirmation and whatever came next.

The sound instantly became his second favorite in the universe – right after the memory of you speaking his name for the first time in the backyard of the Oceanside’s house as you were standing near the pool. It filled the room, louder than it had any right to be, louder than anything that small should produce: a rapid tandem of heartbeats that belonged neither to you nor him.

Andrew’s head dropped before he could cease it, forehead coming to rest against your shoulder, body folding in surrender, and his hand shaking around yours as the sound lasted, sealing every empty space inside him. The other one, who was still laying on your thigh, ran up gradually to caress the side of your stomach where there was no gel like he could reach them both if he tried hard enough.

“You…” he started, his voice rough and quiet as not to disturb them, swallowed, then tried once more. “You gave me…” The words faltered, insufficient for what he was straining to say, what he was feeling and for the enormity of it pressing against his ribs. His thumb brushed against your belly.

(You. Them. Him. One. Two. Three. Four. Even number. Good number.)

“You gave me everything.” ────────── “Okay, how about…Apple and August?” you ask with enthusiasm, chin tilted to witness the precise moment Andrew’s whole body stills alongside you, one hand contracting around the handlebar of the cart while the other lingers mid-air upon a rack of small cotton onesies, gaze fixed forward like he’s bracing for impact rather than processing your words.

(three seconds to panic. new record. nice. next time you’ll come up with even worse just to see him fighting for his life.)

He doesn’t blink, not once. You can discern the calculation behind his eyes, the scrupulous determination to respond adequately, to not dismiss you, to not wound your sentiments, to not – under any circumstances – utter the incorrect thing about the names of children that don’t yet exist outside of you.

“A-Apple,” he repeats slowly, testing the structure of it, as if perchance it will rearrange itself if he gives it a sufficient amount of time, his thumb brushing distractedly against the cart as he resumes walking, guiding you down the aisle with the same silent watchfulness he has applied since the first day you met: slightly ahead of you, constantly angled in a manner that shields you without making it obvious.

You hum, pleased, one hand resting beneath your tummy to support its weight as he matches your pace, the other trailing along the shelves, grazing fabrics you don’t even register since your attention is entirely on him and the tautness in his shoulders, the way his jaw clenches, the fact that he hasn’t yet shut his eyes – all is priceless.

“It’s…original,” he finally answers, voice measured and gentle, as if he’s navigating a minefield you laid out just to find how he’d cross it.

You bite back a smirk. “Frodo?” you offer next, tilting your head and surveying him from the corner of your eye.

That one nearly wrecks him. His lips part, then press together again, breath catching enough for you to perceive and his fingers knocking four times on the handlebar before he exhales gradually through his nose, composure stumbling for just a millisecond prior to reining it back in.

“Frodo?” he echoes, quieter this time, like perhaps if he speaks sufficiently low, the name will be wiped out into thin air to never be voiced anymore.

You can’t hold it more than thirty seconds, a giggle escaping you, whole-hearted and unrestrained as you step closer to him, pressing a kiss to his cheek, lips remaining there longer than necessary just to feel his skin warming under the contact as the blood rushes to his face.

“I’m joking, honey,” you murmur, amusement threading through your voice. “You should see your face.”

He respires, the tension draining from him in a noticeable wave: shoulders dropping, jaw slackening, his head tilting in your direction – recalibrating his whole brain now that the hazard has passed and that he can properly breathe once again. “Good,” he responds almost to himself.

Chuckling, you slide your arm through his free one up until the pads of your fingers caresses along the inside of his wrist to sit where his pulse thrums steady and strong. And for a minute – just a tiny one – you forget about the names, the shopping, about anything that isn’t the way his thick veins stand out underneath his skin paired with the constellation of freckles disseminated on his forearm and the flex of his muscles as he pushes the cart forward.

(those arms should be illegal. you can quote your brain and hormones on that. honestly, asking him to skip the store to go home wouldn’t be that excessive, right? not that it would change much from your daily life nowadays. being pregnant has made you crave less for food than for him.)

You spend the next aisle feigning to examine small jackets while very noticeably not, ogling back at him again and again, from his sleeves that are pushed up sufficiently to display his entire biceps to his pants, who can barely conceal his co-

Andrew throws a glance over, catching you mid-inspection, eyes dropping first to where your palm lingers on his arm and your digits tracing his veins, before lifting back to your face, a darker expression settling there, mirroring your own. Still, he exhales through his nose, forcing himself to recede into reason. “No. We’re supposed to get clothes and we’re getting them.”

“But come on,” you pout, not even pretending to move away, your grip increasing an ounce, nails grazing all along his skin in a slow, absent drag, lashes lowering purposely as you peer at him through them. “We can still do this next week.”

“Remember what the doctor said,” he replies, although it sounds more like he’s attempting to persuade himself.

You scrunch your nose, pretending annoyance. “Yes, yes. ‘Twins birth often happens at the 36th week.’”

“So, let’s finish this,” he states after a beat, voice raspy but stable now that he’s dragging himself into his own mind structure that practically never fails him. “And then we can go home after, okay?”

Examining him for a second and how the word ‘home’ shaped his mouth, you nod, the teasing ebbing away. “Okay.”

He doesn’t budge instantaneously, gaze lingering on you, scanning and assessing with the same methods he has been applying ever since your body began to change faster than he had anticipated, his hand still hovering close to your arm. “You shouldn’t have come,” he adds cautiously, placing each word down with purpose. “It’s getting harder for you to walk.”

You roll your eyes, amused, leaning in to smooth another quick kiss to his cheek. “I’m okay, Andy,” you whisper, drawing away just enough to encounter his unwavering stare. “And if I’m not, I’ll tell you. Promise.”

Studying you for half a second longer, Andrew ultimately nods, the promise being ample for him. You slip your palm onto his arm and guide him forward once more, returning into the rhythm of the aisles, the textiles under your fingertips as you move, attentive to the racks in front of you filled with babies outfits – impossibly soft and small and each more absurdly adorable than the last.

You halt in front of a display, air gone from your lungs as you raise a miniature coat with fox ears sewn into the hood, the cloth all warm and plush under your fingers. “Andrew,” you call, dragging the last syllable of his name to make him perk up from his thoughts.

He doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t question. His eyes flick over it once, at your face lighting up, mumbles a “Looks soft,” and into the cart the two coats goes.

Moving like that through the store, drifting from one shelf to another, hands constantly reaching, touching, lifting, and comparing, every action is deliberate, done with the awareness that Andrew – despite his longing – would have to combat his own brain to be able to do this, continuously pondering about the germs and how many people have touched these exact same spots. Picking two outfits with similar cuts but different colors, not desiring for your twins to be Tweedledee and Tweedledum, you can’t help but picture your boy and girl in each and every little thing. Which, slowly, leads you to discovering more: animal onesies, socks, hats, swaddles, Andrew keeping up with you without missing a beat, nodding, adding to the cart and never once checking the price tags that hang from each piece.

(you’re positive that he would empty the store and his bank account if you asked. isn’t it what he promises every night, panting and undone above you as if there is nothing in this universe he wouldn’t place at your feet?)

Halfway down the 6 to 12 months aisle, he stops. Frozen. Rotating toward him just as his gaze fixes on something at eye level, face caught between hesitation and adulation, you track his line of sight to catch on simple green onesies with words printed across the front. Best Dad Ever.

“Do you want to take two?” you ask gently.

He huffs a breath, almost a snort – an awful attempt to dismiss the idea before it can land. “It’s ridiculous,” he mutters, already shifting his weight like he’s about to move on.

You don’t let him. You can’t, not when it has soften his eyes like that. Hand coming up to catch his wrist, you reply with certainty, “I don’t think it is.” He stills, peering back at you. “They should each have one,” you continue, thumb brushing four times over his, speaking that silent language you always fall into with him. “Because their dad really is the best ever.”

His expression flickers – small, but unmistakable for someone who knew him through and through. He doesn’t argue, doesn’t deflect and just…reaches out to take two. And into the cart they go.

By the time you both reach the fitting rooms, your legs are starting to protest, the length of your belly growing in ways you won’t ever adjust to, hand pressing into the curve of your lower back as you breathe out, desire nothing more than Andrew’s arms to wrap from behind to aid you raise your belly up – the ritual he has established on the first day you complained about the pain.

You disappear behind the curtain with an armful of dresses, Andrew waiting outside for a minute, two, until he isn’t, stepping in noiselessly so the space between you doesn’t exist anymore, staring. You try on the first dress: too tight. The second: way too much cleavage out. Huffing and adjusting the fabric, your patience thins as you glance at yourself from different angles. “This is ridiculous,” you grumble under your breath. “I don’t want to flash people!”

The next one (of course the one Andrew picked, why are you even surprised anymore?) slides on effortlessly. Pastel yellow and flowy, it falls over your body instead of fighting it, landing around you in a manner that finally feels right. You pause, turning to look at him, who hasn’t yet moved, but his gaze is…heavier now, hazel all gone to be replaced by the darkness of his pupils.

You step closer deliberately, fingers brushing his shirt as you tilt your head. “You like this one?”

“Yeah,” he breathes, nodding once for good measure.

Smiling and closing the distance fully this time, your lips find his without hesitation, the kiss soft for barely an instant before it deepens, warmth spreading through you as your hands slide up to his shoulders. “I’ll take this dress then,” you murmur against his mouth.

“What about the others?” he asks, eyes closed and mouth agape, restraint slowly giving in.

You smirk into the kiss, grazing your lips against his again. “I can always be naked. Not like you’d complain.”

He doesn’t argue. Doesn’t even pretend to. He simply hums against your mouth, hand gliding behind your back so you don’t bump against the fitting room wall, the only sounds echoing now being breaths and your husband’s belt as you unbuckle it with a knowing grin, ring on your finger. ────────── The velvet box was smaller than it should have been for such heaviness. Andrew kept his hand in the pocket of his jacket nonetheless, thumb smoothing alongside the edges of it, then the hinge, followed by the curve where it would open, repeating the motion to anchor himself, hoping that the outline might become sufficiently familiar that he would cease feeling so repentant of grasping a sacrosanct object comparable to a bead on a rosary whose one prayer and oath would be echoed over and over until it became part of him.

(One. Two. Three. Four. He breathed in on one. Held it on two. Let it out on three. Blocked on four. Again. One. Two. Three. Four.)

The garden stretched in front of him, bathed in the remaining light of the day and that golden hour which softened all it touched, even his own soul. Just beyond the stone path, you were there, barefoot. You constantly ended up barefoot somehow – you once told him that you necessitated that tether to recognize for certain that this was tangible, that you were not in the limbo or back at the warehouse.

Laid out on the lounge chair like you were conscious that the glow of the setting sun had been arranged purposely to fall over you, draping the curve of your body to highlight the swell of your stomach that was just beginning to show. To him, right now, you resembled less like his angel and more like a deity who, somehow, had arrived into his life to absolve what he could never atone on his own. His throat constricted, realizing that he should have called out for you or announced himself – done something regular for once. Instead, he lingered where he was, committing to memory the sunlit tracing the line of your profile, the slow rise and fall of your chest, how your fingers enveloped your stomach in communion with what he could not yet reach.

You turned your head when you perceived him, unhurriedly, gaze finding his instantly. “Hey,” you spoke, pushing yourself up on your elbows, brow knitted together like you continuously did whenever you sensed something stirring beneath the surface. “Are you okay? You’ve been…distant today.”

He stepped closer with a barely noticeable nod, reaching the edge of the lounge chair and sitting down prudently, mindful of the space, of you, of the way every particle gravitated around you. “I’m okay,” he replied lowly, steady enough to hopefully pass. His hand found your calf, fingers wrapping around it so his thumb brushed once, twice, attuning to your skin’s language.

Head tilting and eyes narrowing to indicate that you didn’t quite believe him, you still chose not to push, hand instead shifting to caress his thigh as if to say ‘I’m here’ without requiring the words. “What were you thinking about?” you whispered.

The question reverberated in his ribcage, forcing him to look down, thumb still drawing absent patterns he didn’t register anymore, his mind struggling to organize itself into something that could be spoken aloud. “I don’t…” he started, then halted, searching for terms he had never been taught how to use, too fragile in his mouth, like porcelain that might shatter at any given moment before they extended to you. “I don’t know how to do this right. And I don’t think I ever will,” he continued, his gaze catching yours once more, forcing himself to stay there, to not retreat. “I just…have no idea.”

(He knew how to fight. To bleed. To endure. But this? This was a territory with no map, no instruction, no version of himself built to cross what lay uncharted. He could only hope that you, who had turned ruin into grace, would prevent him from burning it to ashes.)

“But I know I want you,” he breathed, and this time the words came without delay, as if awaiting fully formed for him to let them exist. “Every single day. However it comes and however it looks, for the rest of my life.” A pause reigned, in which he sensed both your breaths stopping. “And the next one,” he added, “if I’m lucky.”

His hand left reluctantly your leg then, withdrawing from your warmth to move back toward his pocket where the small box had been, fingers enclosing around it reverently, like touching a relic, and when he pulled it out, the gesture remained watchful and timid, for this was about to alter the course of his life purely by being revealed.

Your gaze followed his palm, widening as comprehension began to take shape and, in response, his own hand trembled. Sure that you could remark it, he constrained himself to tighten his grip around the package so that he could drown in the texture of the velvet, of the hinge, of all the mechanisms that composed it. The click was barely audible, and yet it gave the impression to resonate in the garden, uncovering the ring, which captured the last of the sunlight – the jewel he had bought so long along, prior to your abduction and Ojai and the children.

“Will you…” he began, but the words faltered as soon as they shaped, too scarce for the magnitude of what he was attempting to offer, what you symbolized to him, and he felt it: the inadequacy of language, how it shrank under pressure. He swallowed, forcing himself to resume. “Will you marry me?” The question sank between you, frail and naked. “Please.”

The reaction was prompt. Sitting up so hastily that the chair screeched, your hand came to his face without hesitation, cupping his cheek and eyes wet from tears that gathered without you repressing them, too busy grinning. “Yes,” you whispered, the word breaking under the force of it. “Yes, Andy. Of course, yes.”

Your lips found his before he could process it, warm and certain and real, sealing the one thing he had not known he was allowed to have. (His absolution. His grace.) He kissed you back, frightened of crushing the moment or you, he didn’t know – perhaps just petrified of proving himself correct in every doubt he had ever carried. When you pulled back, you were beaming through tears. “I love it,” you said as you extended your hand toward him. “And I love you.”

The ringing sound deafening his ears only amplified at each of your sentences. He was only able to nod, his fingers closing around yours with delicacy, yet trembled enough that, when he tried to guide the ring onto your finger, he missed, the metal brushing in between your digits instead of around it, his jaw clenching as a flash of frustration passed through him before he could contain it.

(He had to do it right. Just this once, to do it right. To approach this as one approaches a sacrament: clean hands, intent, with nothing in him that could profane it.)

His hand shifted to correct its position, the tremor even more visible as his focus narrowed to the point of contact, which he missed once more, met by your soft giggle. “It’s okay, honey,” you whispered, guiding his hand so that the ring was properly aligned before he managed to slide it into place. “There.” You looked down at it, at those three diamonds reflecting the light. “I…I really adore it.”

He exhaled, the tension leaving him in a disbelieving release as he leaned forward to press his forehead against yours, speaking for the first time since he asked the question, tone hoarse. “I love you.” Slowly, he moved behind you on the lounge chair, adjusting his position so you could lean back against him, frame fitting his like two pieces of a puzzle.

Arms extending around you instinctively, one sliding beneath your chest and the other relaxing over your stomach, finding your own to interlace your fingers over the curve that held his whole world. His chin dipped to rest against your shoulder, breath evening out against your skin as the last of the sunlight faded.

(One. You. Two. Three. His children. Four. Him. Even number. Good number.)

He closed his eyes then, because in that moment, with you in his arms, his angel, his grace, his fiancée, Andrew allowed himself to believe he had been absolved. ────────── The church is empty when he sets foot in, the door of the narthex closing behind him with a muted thud that pushes the outside away as if it had never existed, leaving only the dense, stagnant air, thick with the residue of incense from the last service threaded with the scent of old wood that has witnessed countless seasons and generations. Andrew halts just past the threshold out of habit, his breathing slowing to match the silence of the nave as though it commands a certain tranquility to permit someone further.

(He has never been sure if places like this are designed for him. He tried when he was young. Tried with that megachurch years ago, back when he had broken more than mended. But in Ojai, he comes nonetheless, drawn in whenever the world feels too sonorous. When the thoughts don’t line up and numbers don’t succeed. He is present because this house of God doesn’t expect anything of him. Doesn’t demand that he be more than what he is.)

Moving down the aisle without sound, steps measured as he passes the rows of wooden pews, he slides onto the fourth bench with an exhale. His gaze drifts intuitively to the front where the altar stands, reminiscing for a moment about you, barely four months ago, walking to him in a white dress who danced in soft folds and your hand, resting over the round curve of your stomach while your other had looped through Craig’s arm, who had stood tall and proud, heedful – for once – of your frame like it had been crystal. Andrew had stood beside the pastor, utterly undone and his ribcage tightening so abruptly that he had been assured he was about to pass out before you even reached him.

His sight had narrowed, edges of surroundings fading into a haze that placed only you in focus, each step you took measured, all too slow and fast at once, until Deran’s voice had cut through it, amused from where he stood at his brother’s side. “Blink,” he had muttered. “Or at least try to smile. You look like you’re about to die.” He hadn’t been incorrect – and Andrew would have died a happy man if it had ended there, in that suspended second of bliss.

Now, staring at this precise spot, Andrew remains motionless, enveloped in the hypothesis that if he were to look hard enough, he might still see you there: the giggle you had let slip when Craig had leaned closer to murmur something in your ear that Andrew hadn’t caught but observed landing on your face, the vows you had exchanged, the golden heart at your collarbone reflecting the sun each time you breathed or spoke. His hand slides into the pocket of his jeans, retrieving his phone to check for messages or calls that he might have missed, thumb brushing over the screen before it lights up to the lockscreen that has been his for the past year.

It’s you. Asleep. Curled alongside him on the couch back in Oceanside, your head laying on his chest while his arm had been draped around you without a care in the world for a brief instant, and in the photograph – taken by Craig without warning nor permission – Andrew is oblivious of the camera, eyes unguarded and fixed entirely on you with a gentleness in his expression that resembled peace. His eyes drifts to the corner: no missed calls, no messages, nothing.

(You had asked for an hour on your own. An hour. Sixty minutes. Three thousand six hundred seconds in which all could happen. In which the body could betray, where his miracles could be tested by fate, where he would not be there.)

“I’ll be fine, Andy,” you had said, smiling at him in that manner that always made it challenging for him to argue. “And if anything happens, I’ll call you.”

Anything. The word pressures against his head, heavier than it should be and expanding into possibilities he doesn’t want to pursue and yet can’t fully stop from forming.

(Eight and a half months is too close. Too close to a moment that doesn’t delay for a call. What if it happens now? What if you are alone when it starts? How would you get in touch with him if you fall? And if he doesn’t hear the phone? What if agreeing to this hour because he couldn’t say no turns into the moment he fails you again? What if- Bad thoughts. One. Two. Three. Four. He counts the points of contact between your bodies in the picture.)

Pushing himself up from the pew, movement controlled, he redirects the restless energy into actions he can discipline instead of letting his mind wander where it doesn’t need to go. The votive candles sit to the side of the church, arranged in rows beside a wooden prie-dieu worn smooth by years of palms that came prior to his, reciting the Paternoster and supplicating and confessing. His fingers hover above the small cluster of unlit candles before selecting two – one on behalf of you and one on behalf of them – striking the match with a skillful flick, the scent of sulfur cutting through the air before the flame stabilizes, bringing it to the first wick and inspecting as it catches. The second follows, placed nearby the first, his hand remaining in the space above the flames, hesitant of the next step.

He bows his head so that the gesture holds intention. “I…” he starts, voice raspy.

(He has no psalm to offer. No practiced litany or structured pleas to fall back on. Only the fear lodged in his heart like a splinter impossible to remove. The recognition that if there is any higher power listening, it will have to take him as he is, unpolished and unworthy, or not at all.)

Exhaling, the breath leaves him slowly. “Keep them safe,” he whispers, barely above the hush of the church as if speaking louder might wreck the fragile structure of what he is attempting. “I know what I’ve done. But…” His jaw tightens, the sentence stalling, caught between divulgence and request. “But don’t let them pay for it,” he continues in desperation. “Not her. Not them.”

His hands travel at his sides, fingers curling so tightly that it forms crescent moons on his palms. “Let it stop with me. Whatever it is. Whatever is…” he swallows, throat shrinking. “Whatever is in me. Don’t let it reach them.”

Silence pursues. Vast, stretching in the wake of his own voice, echoing in the beams and the pews and the confessional. His gaze raises then, drawn upward by the light altering above the candles and the hues that spread across the wooden floor and climbs along his shirt in a kaleidoscope. The stained glass stands tall above him, its structure held in lines of dark lead with deep cobalt blue pooling in the robes of the figure at its center, solemn, amber scattering outward in halos at the edges of the scene and vermilion, threading through the contours of hands and faces, frozen in the act of blessing.

The man in the glass doesn’t look down so much as through, his hands raised in an unmistakable motion: fingers extended, palm open, and those gathered around him tilt their heads down, arranged in a manner that implies reverence. Andrew’s gaze drifts to the side of the pane, to the small inscription painted into its frame. Saint Oliver. He stands there a second longer before drawing out his phone to the image of you, typing reflexively the four digits of the day you met before searching for it. Oliver. The result comes up instantly, condensed into a one-word definition: peace.

(If his son could be anything…If there is one thing he could hope for without feeling like requesting for too much…it would be that. Peace. A life untouched by the necessity to anticipate harm. A mind that doesn’t turn against itself. A heart that loves and is loved in return without question.)

His jaw clenches as he lowers the phone, screen dimming back into darkness as he slips it into his jeans once more, the name reverberating in his chest like an epiphany he has been waiting for. You had already selected hers. Whispered it in the dead of the night while he was pressing his temple to the spot where his children kept rolling. His throat had closed, emotion rising and forcing him to blink slowly so the tears wouldn’t spill. And so, because you had found the girl’s name, you had handed him the other half.

(He had not known how to choose. Because names aren’t just sounds. They are intentions. An idea spoken aloud and given in the hope that it would become part of that someone.) (Oliver. Peace. That’s a good hope.)

The sound of his phone vibrating cuts through the church, his body reacting before his mind can even come up with a new spiral of thoughts.

The message is from you. Concise. Clear. I think it’s starting. ────────── The sun had started to dip by the time you were all on the shore, the July heatwave no longer hitting your skin, and the tide pulling back enough to result in a wide stretch of damp ground. You stood barefoot at the edge of the makeshift court Craig had insisted on scribbling with the heel of his foot, lines uneven, half-erased by the breeze, while the grains of the Oceanside’s sand clung to your calves and the hem of your shorts, hair still carrying faint traces of salt from earlier, when you had been lying on your towel with a book open but unread, too engaged in peering up every few seconds at the three men surfing like the water belonged to them, recognized them, answered.

(and Andrew…Andrew had been less showy than Craig, less poised than Deran, but precise, like moored to his board. he had feigned not to look at you each time the tubes permitted him to do an air reverse or a rodeo flip. you had feigned not to notice your mouth go dry at the sight of him. and in itself, it had worked. barely.)

“Alright, teams are obvious,” Craig announced, tossing the ball from one hand to the other, grin wide and edged with challenge. “Me and Deran, cause we are the best, against you and Pope. Sounds good?”

You rolled your eyes, stepping closer to Andrew without thinking, your shoulder brushing his just enough to register the heat of his skin before you moved past him, as though it hadn’t stirred anything at all while you were scrambling to gather yourself back. Andrew didn’t respond to Craig’s jab, taking position beside you where he could observe everything – the ball, his brothers, you – his gaze flicking toward your own for half a second before returning forward, controlled.

(he was trying so, so hard it was endearing. but he was just as terrible as you at pretending. two weeks together and you were acting like teenagers who didn’t want to get caught by their parents.)

“Try to keep up,” Deran added dryly from across the net.

You grinned. “Fine, if you promise not to cry when we’re finished with you.”

Craig barked a laugh, turning to his younger brother. “Oh, she’s confident today.”

The game commenced, ball snapping through the air as Craig hit hard, Deran coordinating his movements from years of playing together and knowing where the other would be without requiring a second glance.  For the first few points, you were mostly reacting: swearing when you missed, laughing when the sand shifted under your feet, but Andrew…Andew was adjusting, mapping the rhythm, the angles, the way Craig favored power over precision, how Deran compensated for it, and now he played differently, forestalling where the ball would end up before it had crossed the net, his hand stroking your lower back once, twice, guiding you without words. “Focus,” he murmured under his breath.

You huffed a chuckle, breath vanishing as you pushed hair away from your face, already stepping back into position. “I am focused.”

He didn’t even look at you when he answered, mouth twitching. “Not on the game.”

The serve came rapidly once more, Craig sending it with unnecessary force just to prove a point, but you darted frontward this time, without hesitation, arms locking just in time to bump it upward, the impact stinging pleasantly as it left your skin and sending it straight between the two brothers before either could react, the sound landing sharp, quickly followed by their overlapping voices.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Craig groaned, taking back the ball.

Deran instantly shot back with a finger pointed at him. “How could you miss that?”

“You were right there too, man!” he replied, tossing it to him with no warning.

You giggled, panting, turning toward Andrew, who had stepped closer, halting just short of where it would be noticeable, hands hanging at his sides, not certain what to do with them or himself and managing a quiet, “Good.”

“Okay, okay,” Craig called, his competitive side creeping back in despite his heavy breaths. “Match point and the losers buy the beers.”

“Deal, Craigo,” you retorted.

Back and forth, the ball flew among you all in a tempo that kept building with each push, up until you slipped in the sand and your arms caught the ball low and sent it up in a high arc that hung too long. “Andrew!” you called, but he was already there, stepping in and timing it perfectly as his body aligned while he jumped, arm swinging through, the hit clean and cutting past Craig’s outstretched hand to end on the sand.

“Oh, fuck off,” Craig groaned, straightening up and dragging a hand over his face while you laughed brightly.

And before you could stop yourself or ponder about it, you were running, crossing the distance between you and Andrew in two quick steps, your arms wrapping around him as you hopped, the momentum carrying you high as he caught you mechanically, hands enclosing behind your back as if he had done it a hundred times.

“Did you see that?” you beamed, forehead resting against his. “We make a good team!”

He nodded, his fingers tightening on your hips. “Yeah.”

(and…that was it. not the massive realization that this man would be yours for the rest of your life. no, this one you had months ago, long before you were even dating. and anyone hearing you expressing that after a fortnight would most likely call you mad. fuck them. but what you realized, right here, right now, was that you couldn’t care less about what his brothers might think of you two together.)

His body stilled for half a heartbeat when your lips met his, caught off guard, but quickly giving in, hand traveling on your back to bring you even nearer as he kissed you back with the same intensity he carried in everything else.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me!” Craig’s voice cut through, followed by Deran’s satisfied laugh.

“I told you,” he replied, and you witnessed, in the corner of your eyes, his hand reaching out. “C’mon, pay up.”

Craig grumbled, digging into the pocket of his shorts, pulling out a crumpled bill and slapping it into Deran’s palm. “I thought he’d never have the guts,” he muttered.

Pulling back a little, your fingers threaded into Andrew’s curls, legs still enveloped around his waist as you met his staring, completely undone gaze. “Hi,” you whispered, unable to stop the grin that spread across your face.

His digits caressed along your spine, eyes flicking past you to his brothers before returning instantly, like he couldn’t look away for long. “Hi,” he responded with a hoarse voice.

Behind you, Craig made a noise of exaggerated disgust. “Alright, alright, we get it. Can you not do that right in front of us?”

You huffed a snort, not even turning your head as you raised your hand in his direction, middle finger extended without ceremony as you leaned back in yet again, pressing another kiss to Andrew’s mouth, nose brushing his as you pulled away. “I’m not too heavy, right?” you asked teasingly.

His hands adjusted at your back and thigh, firm, holding you effortlessly, shaking his head as he answered, “I’ve got you.” ────────── “I’ve got you.”

The words reach you despite all the layers: the sharp antiseptic smell, the distorted hum of machines, even amid the blur of passage and voices that don’t settle into meaning. You hold onto them the way you hold his hand, fingers tautening around his as if the pressure itself could help to anchor you into tangibility and not disperse with the crushing tide of sensations overtaking your body.

(it’s okay. he’s here. he made it.)

There had been a second (or ten, or a minute, an hour…you couldn’t recall) when you were alone, seated in the garden, back alongside the lounge chair that still contained the ghost of his proposal, your bare feet into the grass as the wind stirred through the oaks in a mesmerizing dance, leaves whispering together, and the next, an unequivocal warmth had flowed between your thighs – the rupture of the amniotic sacs. Just like that. No prelude, no noteworthy discomfort, only the realization that today was the day.

You recollect saying his name, or thinking it, or both, hand seizing for your phone with a slowness that didn’t match the urgency blooming inside your belly, your mind striving to hold onto the steps you had both created: call him or text, breathe, no exertion since Andrew is close. After that, the whole thing is hazy. You remember the text ‘I think it’s starting’ and his call while driving home (was he panicked? was he collected?), the door opening and his strong arms enveloping around you, muttering sweet nothings until you were sat in the vehicle. You recall the car too, or at least the motion of it, his hand gripping yours so tightly it had almost hurt while the other was on the wheel, gaze flicking from you to the road with an attention that bordered on alarm.

He didn’t let go. Even here, on your back, in a room that seems too incandescent, too clean and too full of doctors and nurses who are trying to reassure and act with purpose, none of it exists like the man at your side does, the one whose hand, with a wedding band alike yours, is right there, thumb caressing over your knuckles in slow strokes.

“I’ve got you sweetheart,” he repeats, gentler this time, leaning closer until his forehead is an inch from touching yours, as if proximity could shield from the pain. You look at him through your lashes, observing the lines of his face and the tension held in his jaw. Even his hazel eyes, so often controlled, are wide now, trembling no matter how hard he strains to contain it.

“I know,” you breathe, though your voice feels distant even to your own ears, grip tightening around his hand as another wave builds inside you, slow at first, then rising, rising, until it crests in an intensity that steals the air from your lungs. You gasp, back arching as it travels through you, nails digging into his skin as if you could hold yourself together through him.

“That’s it,” he whispers immediately, unwavering despite his eyes searching briefly toward the doctors before snapping back to you. “You’re doing so good. Just breathe. I’m here. I’ve got you.”

Someone, much closer than presumed, enters in your visual field. “Okay, Mrs. Cody,” the person says and you could practically throw your arms (no, too painful) in joy at hearing this name because it’s now your name, “when you feel the next contraction, I need you to push so your babies can see how beautiful their parents are. Sounds good?”

You nod – or at least you assume you do. The next wave comes faster, stronger, crashing into you while your body bears down and the effort draws from someplace rooted deep inside you, primal, producing a push. It hurts, stings, stretching you in ways you can’t comprehend, and yet, beneath it, there is a vaster emotion. A broken sound escapes your lips, halfway through a sob and a laugh. “I can’t-” you gasp even if your body is already giving everything it has.

“Yes, you can,” Andrew responds, his lips on your knuckles, your inner wrist, your temple, marking every spot he is permitted to attain. “You are so strong, and…” he throws a look where the doctors are working, “…just one more push, okay? Give one more.”

This one is the worst, your vision blurring at the edges, tears slipping free, body quivering under the effort as the pressure builds and builds until- A cry. The sound cuts through everything because it signifies that a baby is here, in the world, breathing and alive. “Is…” you begin, but the words vanish as the weight is placed on your chest. The weight of your very tiny and very warm son. Your hands come up instinctively, cradling, wobbling as they attempt to take in the shape of him, the rise and fall of his chest, the sound of his cries that feel impossibly loud for such a small being.

“Oh my God,” you murmur despite your continuous sobs. “Oh, honey-” You look at Andrew, whose stare is already set on the baby, and his face is open like you’ve never witnessed previously, every barrier stripped away, tears spilling unreservedly down his cheeks without halting them, his hand still clutching yours while the other hovers above your son. “Hey,” you breathe, voice softening despite the exhaustion. “Do you see that?”

“Yes,” he answers with a wrecked tone as he finally allows his fingers to brush gently against the baby as if he is sacred and could disappear with one wrong contact. “He’s- He’s here.”

The doctors ask him something indiscernible, to which he agrees, his hands shaking as they place the scissors in them and guide him toward the cord, explaining where to cut, how to hold it with no hesitation. He swallows, hard, throat working around a fear that – you guess – has less to do with the act itself but what it epitomizes, glancing once to your eyes in search of a response before returning to the fragile tube connecting you to the newborn on your chest. It’s only once you begin to count with him that he finds the control to follow through.

“One,” you whisper, mooring him the same manner he has moored you with every wave of pain.

“Two,” he continues, his grip adjusting and the tremor lessened, contained within the structure you have constructed together.

“Three.” “Four.”

The cord is severed with an exhale, his shoulders dropping as he sinks back beside you, the pad of his thumb stroking the fluid-slick curve of the baby’s ear. “I…I found the name. Oliver,” he says, the name leaving his mouth like a prayer and shaped with care. “Means peace.”

(peace. yes, you feel it in his weight. in his warmth pressed on your skin and in the frantic rhythm of his tiny heart that beats against yours. this boy is peace. not the kind that arrives after the storm. the kind that makes you forget there ever was one.)

“Oliver,” you repeat, tilting your head to peer up at Andrew once more, taking in the full extent of what this instant is doing to him, the man who rarely allows himself to be seen this way by strangers, bare and open, fingers splayed over his son’s back and counting under his breath. “I love it.”

The moment is cut short as the nurses come closer, their hands cautious but efficient as they begin to lift Oliver from your chest, their voices reassuring, explaining that they need to measure him, wash him, check that all is alright, except your body resists the separation intuitively, arms tightening around him for a second longer before you force yourself to let go.

“It’s okay,” Andrew assures, his hand returning to yours once the baby leaves your chest, unyielding. “He’s right there, don’t worry.”

You hum, though the absence feels wrong, like something has been taken from you too soon, your hands lingering uselessly in the space where Oliver had been, your body striving to focus and grasp that there is still- The contraction tears through you before the thought can fully form, harder than ever before. Your whole body attempts to arch, a cry escaping you freely, fingers clamping down around Andrew’s hand as the pain comes back in full force, more demanding.

“No.” you gasp as your head falls back, sweat running in rivulets along your back and temples. “I can’t do it again, Andy, I-”

“You can, sweetheart,” he cuts in, the tremor now long gone, buried beneath a newfound strength forged in the seconds since Oliver entered the world. “I’m right here, I’m not letting go.” His forehead connects with yours, handing you one of his smiles that uncovers the dimples. “You’re beautiful,” he adds, which earns in response the smallest huff of snort.

Instructions come faster, more urgent and insistent, your body responding despite the exhaustion that drags at every muscle, spent by the effort that has already occurred. “Again Mrs. Cody,” someone shouts.

You shake your head weakly, tears slipping sideways into your hair as you catch your breath. “Please, I can’t,” you plead.

Andrew’s grip only increases at your words. “Look at me,” he says, and you do, because you always do – and since even here, when all seems difficult, he is still the one thing that doesn’t blur nor fade. His eyes hold yours, unblinking. “One and it’s over. I promise, okay? You trust me?”

And when the next contraction comes, you meet it, for if there’s one certitude in this lifetime, it’s that Andrew would never lie to you. You use what you have left, every last piece of strength and oxygen and determination. The cry that ensues is the most beautiful sound you’ve ever heard, your body collapsing back against the bed as the tension releases, an exhale tearing out of you in a sob carrying relief and incredulity in equal measure, hands reaching before they even put her on you.

And there she is, placed against you. All humid and sticky and perfect. Your daughter. Oliver positioned beside her on your chest, the world narrows once again to this: the sound of their cries, the way their bodies fit on yours like puzzle pieces. You laugh through the tears as your palms shift between them, connecting, memorizing. “Hello Juliet,” you whisper with a shaky voice, an emotion too large to contain blossoming in your ribcage. “Hello Oliver.”

Andrew leans in, his lips brushing yours, traveling to your temple, then the space between your brows as if he can’t decide where to place his affection, rapidly followed by a kiss on each of the babies’ head.

“My angels,” he breathes, the word dissolving against your skin, and it’s more than enough to fill every space that ever felt empty. ────────── “Honestly honey, if our babies turn out with dents all over, blame me,” you murmured in the dimness of the bedroom with a laugh that belonged to you and you alone – one that he loved, patiently coaxed out of hiding.

And Andrew, who had been resting his temple on the rounded curve of your abdomen, exhaled a low sound of amusement. “They won’t,” he answered, tone flat in a vain endeavor to conceal the gentleness beneath it, raising his head to glance up at you. “And if they do, we’ll say Craig dropped them.”

You snorted, fingers resuming their prodding from one side to the other, waiting with eagerness for the faintest response, who came before he could count to four with a ripple beneath his jawline. “There,” you chirped, tilting your head toward him. “Did you feel that?”

Shifting closer instead of answering right away, his body aligned alongside yours with attention, hand sliding over your stomach in an attempt to cover the space where the movement had been, where it might be again. “Yeah.”

(Again. Please. Let him feel it again.)

The mattress dipped under your motion as a hand threaded through his curls, fingertips grazing his scalp in slow, absent strokes that drew a hum from his chest. “Come closer,” you grinned, and even though there was barely any gap left to close, he obeyed, trailing kisses all along the waves. “They are pretty active tonight.” Your pinkie twirled around a piece of his hair. “I think they know you’re here.”

“They…You think?” he asked, a surge of hope breaching through before he could temper it, fragile and almost boyish in a manner he rarely conceded himself to be in the daylight. He didn’t budge a muscle. Didn’t breathe.

You smiled down at him, slowing your caresses in his hair to guide him a few inches to the side, where a new undulation brushed his face. “I do,” you answered, “you know why?” He shook his head. “Because every time you’re close, my heart is pounding like crazy.” The pad of your thumb rubbed along his temple, prying out another sound from deep in his chest. “And they feel that. They know it’s beating for their dad.”

Andrew swallowed, his throat enclosing as a sentiment rose: not honed like fear, not acrid like the void he had carried most of his existence with Smurf, but full, almost unbearably so. The man who had once been taught that affection came measured and conditional, that warmth was to be earned in only fragments as a reciprocity for whatever she commanded of him, was now in your arms, where there was no rationing, no withholding or negotiation for scraps of care. And he had one certainty: he would not starve ever again. His hand travelled up to rest on your heart, feeling its rapid pulses that matched with his own.

“They know it’s beating for their dad,” you repeated, observing him. “And that you’re their home, just like you’re mine.”

He nodded once, but the motion was small, almost imperceptible, not quite trusting himself to do more without shattering whatever fragile equilibrium he still held together. So…he did what he knew best instead: he kissed his wife, again and again, pursuing no clear pattern but his instinct, committing to memory your splendor through touch. His hand remained on your stomach, yes, but the rest of him moved up, lips connecting to the hollow between your breasts, then on each sensitive nipple, earning a small gasp from you and a hand tightening in his curls. He couldn’t stop. Not until his face found its place at the junction of your neck and shoulder, taking a lungful of your scent.

Quiet for a moment, your fingers continued their unhurried path through his scalp. “I’ve been thinking,” you ended up whispering with a tone that made him lift his head just enough to see your profile. “I…I might have an idea,” you continued, staring at the ceiling before making eye contact with Andrew. “For her name.”

“Wha-What is it?” he asked cautiously.

Leaning closer, your voice dropped to the word. “Juliet.” Silence ensued, only disturbed by Andrew’s sharp inhale. “It reminded me of…of Julia. And I thought-” Your voice faltered briefly, due certainly to his face, holding back tears, “I thought it could be a nice way to keep her close. If you want.”

(Julia. The one he couldn’t rescue from Smurf. From Baz. From drugs. From himself. The one they all left behind. One. Two. Three. Four. He counted your lashes.)

You were watching him carefully now, hesitant, almost like prepared to take the name back if it hurt. “It’s okay if-”

“No,” he cut in, his hand resuming its idle patterns on your stomach. “It’s…it’s good.”

Relief flickered across your face as your fingers weaved through every curl that fell on his forehead. “So, you like it?” you wondered timidly.

(How could he utter it? Put into words how you made him comprehend that not all had been lost? That you gave a way for Julia to no longer be abandoned. That you killed Smurf a thousand times. Defeated her in every way she would have feared. By loving him right. By burning her overpriced couch and overpriced clothes. By freeing what she had kept on a leach. No, he knew his daughter wasn’t Julia. And that was the point. You were not trying to give him back what had been taken. You were snapping the final nail in Smurf’s coffin.)

He nodded, his gaze dropping to your stomach, to the place where his children rested. “Yeah.” He pressed a kiss to your shoulder. “It’s a pretty name. Juliet.”

Yes, Andrew loved how this was how Janine Cody ended: with children she would never touch and a name she could never ruin. ────────── He strives to count but it isn’t fruitful, the numbers unraveling midway through the sequence, and even the room itself is hostile to a symmetry that could alleviate the noise in his head. His eyes keep staring at the painted patterns running along the hospital bedroom walls: uneven rows of triangles and squares and rectangles that don’t align properly, none sharing the same dimensions nor the same angles, just a cluster of shapes scattered on a chartreuse wallpaper without discipline as if whoever designed this place had never considered what it felt like to require order to be able to breathe.

(It’s supposed to be a square. But one side is longer. So it’s not a rectangle either. Wrong. It’s all wrong. The spacing is inconsistent too. Why would they- Stop. One. Two. Three. Four. He needs to count.)

His knee bounces a few more times before he stills it with a hand pushed hard against his thigh, jaw contracting sufficiently to ache while he forces his gaze elsewhere as long as it’s far from the crooked geometry threatening to splinter his concentration, searching for alternative task to latch onto while he waits. Standing by is worse than the fear itself. Worse because it leaves room for thought, and moments like this have always been treacherous territory for Andrew.

(What if one of them stopped breathing while he wasn’t there? What if you hemorrhaged? You had told him to go first in the room while they were stitching you but maybe he shouldn’t have. What if there was damage they hadn’t caught yet? Bad thoughts. One. Two. Three. Fou-)

The door opens before the spiral can wholly root, Andrew rising before his mind can even catch up, feet carrying him across the room as two nurses guide your bed inside while another pair roll the bassinets beside you, their inaudible voices and relaxed smiles altering the entire atmosphere of the room in a single instant. 

“There we are,” one of the women murmurs warmly as she blocks the brakes beneath your bed. “Mom and Dad can finally get some peace and quiet with their babies.”

The other nurse laughs under her breath while carefully steering one of the cribs. “And what adorable babies they are.”

You beam despite the exhaustion pulling at your features, your entire body dragging the evidence of what it has endured in the last hours, and yet the sight of you strikes him with ample force to disrupt his inhaling. Because you are tired, yes, but beneath it…you are radiant. Not in the simplistic sense people use for beauty, but how stained glass becomes incandescent when sunlight dances through it – the ethereal angel who gave him the right to call himself your husband.

“They get it from their dad,” you reply sleepily to the nurses’ praise, voice coarsened by the crying and exertion with a pinch of amusement amid every syllable.

Andrew lowers his gaze at the remark, unable to formulate a response, for beauty has forever been deemed divine to him, and everything divine in his existence has arrived wearing your face, not his. The staff finishes settling the room into place, checking monitors one final time, offering reassurances and congratulations that start to blur together because his attention has narrowed onto you and the bassinets beside the bed. He doesn’t even hear the nurses leave, just a sudden silence that reminds him of the church’s sacredness.

Standing there for a few more seconds without budging a muscle, he takes the entire scene in, sealing it in its own kind of mental resin: you, lying under the pale blue blanket, painted by the low golden lighting of the bedroom and the babies in diapers too large for them, making noises he couldn’t wait to decode. His family.

You notice him staring. “Honey,” you mutter, “come here. I’m missing you.” He obeys promptly, crossing the distance between you in three strides. (Three. He wants to go back and make it four. No. Bad thought. One. Two. Three. Four.) Reaching the bed, Andrew intertwines your hands together before lowering his forehead against them, breathing once, deeply, relishing in the contact of your skin and the cool wedding band to steady himself. “You okay?” you ask.

The question undoes him. (You are the one who carried those babies. The one who labored through tears and agony. You are the one who should be cared for. Yesterday, today, and evermore. Not him. Never him.) He lifts his head to look at you properly, eyes slowly tracing the details of your features and cataloguing the damp strands of hair against your temples, the remnants of tears dried along your cheeks. “Yeah,” he replies hoarsely. “You shouldn’t ask me that, sweetheart. Are you okay?”

Your smile widens despite all the emotions, fingers brushing against the back of his hand so tenderly it could split his chest open. “Tired but…” Your gaze drifts toward the cribs. “It was worth it.”

Andrew nods immediately, for nothing on earth has ever been truer. “And no pain?” he adds, his brows drawing together with concern that refuses to depart him since the delivery room and witnessing your body strain beyond what he had thought tolerable.

You shake your head. “No pain. I promise.” Lifting one hand weakly, you point first toward Oliver, then Juliet. “Can you bring them closer? It’s…” Goosebumps rise along your arms as if even your body protests against the distance. “…empty inside. It feels weird.”

Releasing your hand hesitantly, he moves, conducting each one nearer with measured gestures, terrified of jostling them despite the wheel barely making noise against the floor. He stops between them afterward, heed captured by the tiny forms lying there, freshly cleaned, neither dressed beyond diapers for the two of you had insisted on skin-to-skin before the onesies and the photographs and whatever endless ritual awaits outside the door. “Is it good like that?” he asks without looking away from them.

“Yes,” you murmur sleepily. “It’s perfect.” When he returns beside you, you reach for his hand and lift it toward your mouth, smoothing a lingering kiss on his knuckles as he turns his palm to cradle your cheek, thumb brushing beneath your eye. You lean into the contact, lids half closed until your expression brightens abruptly with wonder, voice dropping conspiratorially despite the emptiness of the room. “Have you seen their feet? And their hands? They are so tiny!”

His gaze flickers back toward the bassinets, hand slipping from your face as he steps to them once more, bending at the waist as his pads brush carefully over Oliver’s soft soles first, followed by Juliet’s, each impossibly small beneath the breadth of his palm.

(One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Five on the other. Ten toes. Ten fingers. Good number. Her twin? Ten. Ten. Good. The babies are okay. Fine.)

“Yes,” he responds eventually, tracing the delicate curve of Juliet’s heel. “It’s…small.” But the word feels inadequate because…small could feel synonymous of meaningless, and if there’s one thing that Andrew is assured of, it’s that those two beings are the furthest definition of meaningless. He loves all of them already: the shape of their nose, Oliver’s cupid’s bow, Juliet’s thin curly hair, the rise and fall of their breathing…they are simply flawless.

The babies stir beneath his touch, tiny movements no larger than the twitch of a leaf in the breeze, yet it petrifies Andrew instantaneously as he withdraws his hand halfway and throws you an alarmed look, to which you smile, soft and reassuring. “It’s okay, Andy,” you yawn, sinking into the mattress. “You won’t hurt them.”

He poorly tries to conceal his frown at your tiredness now that the adrenaline no longer keeps you upright. “You should rest,” he says quietly. “You’ve done great today.”

A sleepy smile blooms on your face. “Okay.” Your eyes drift toward the babies before returning to him. “You can do the skin-to-skin while I sleep.”

Fear flickers through him so quickly he hopes you miss it. (Both? Alone? What if he holds them wrong? Or one slips? What if he isn’t enough for both?) Still, he nods since the last thing he wants is to place more worry onto your shoulders after everything your body has endured. “Yes.”

“You have to take off your shirt for that,” you add singingly.

Andrew’s brow furrows again. “Yes…I know.”

A grin appears on your face, weary, yes, but playful enough to make a blush spread from his chest to cheeks. “I know you know,” you whisper, giving him the smallest wink. “I just want to enjoy the view for some nice dreams.”

The sound that escapes him is half a snort, half a disbelieving breath, leaning down to press a kiss at the top of your head. “Fine, boss.” Straightening, he reaches for the hem of his shirt and pulls it over his head in one smooth motion, folding it thoroughly over the nearby chair.

One of your eyes open once more, travelling over him with obvious appreciation before you drown deeper into the pillows. “Yes,” you sigh contentedly. “Exactly what I needed.” He shakes his head, though the corners of his mouth betray him. Your lashes finally lower completely. “Wake me if there’s an issue,” you end up murmuring drowsily.

Andrew’s gaze softens at the trust embedded within the request, the ease with which you hand him your three precious lives before allowing rest to find you. “I will,” he promises to himself.

For a moment, after your breathing evens out, he remains motionless beside the bed, observing the exhaustion pulling you fully under, your hand loosely curled atop the blanket and your wedding ring glinting whenever the dim hospital light catches it, until eventually his focus drifts back toward the two beings and his pulse accelerates at the realization that the next part belongs entirely to him.

(It’s the first time he holds his children and he can’t mess it up. You’re sleeping and he doesn’t want to wake you and fail you. There’s no doctor or nurse either. Just him. He should know how to do this naturally, right? Isn’t fatherhood supposed to awake something? Maybe he is not made for that. Maybe he is a bad father already. Bad thought. One. Two. Three. Four. He counts the wheels. He has to do the skin-to-skin. The medical staff said it was important. The book said it was important. Most importantly, you said it was important.)

He approaches so cautiously that the chair next to you barely makes a sound when he lowers himself into it, knees brushing the edge of the bassinets, positioned close enough for him to reach both without getting on his feet. His palms flatten against his thighs first, grounding himself through the contact of the textile so he can finally leans forward. Oliver naps profoundly, mouth parted and one tiny fist near his cheek, unaware of the apocalypse he has caused inside Andrew’s ribcage merely by existing, while Juliet remains awake, eyes half-open with heavy lids, like she is still attempting to comprehend the transition from darkness to light.

Hands hovering uncertainly over Oliver first, they slide beneath the baby’s body the way the nurses demonstrated earlier, supporting the weight of his head with care as he lifts him against his chest, the warmth immediate through skin-to-skin contact. And the instant Oliver settles there, Andrew understands two things concurrently: the first, that his son fits on him with terrifying perfection, heartbeat fluttering against his sternum in syncopation with the percussion of his own, and the second, that Juliet still lies awake, her small arms lunging weakly.

A sharp ache cuts through him. (Because he knows this sentiment. What it means to view affection install elsewhere first. To learn silence instead of reassurance. To become accustomed to being the second thought.) His jaw tautens at the thought. (No. Not here. Not with them. Never with them. He swore to himself that no one will spend a second wondering if they were left behind.)

Heart beginning to hammer against his ribs, Andrew shifts in the chair, adjusting Oliver higher along one side of his chest before inclining toward Juliet’s crib, actions slower now, more precise from fear of disturbing the boy already asleep. When he gathers the little girl into his free arm, she startles at the change, face scrunching in protest before he instinctively murmurs, “Hey, hey…it’s okay bug,” his voice low enough that it barely rises above the quietude, and somehow the sound reaches her because she relaxes once he positions her on the opposite side of his torso.

For a second…he simply halts there, overwhelmed by the notion that he has two entire futures entrusted in his hands. His children.

(This is what communion is. Not the wine. Nor the scripture. Not even the kneeling, begging forgiveness from a God he has never fully grasped. This. Holding his miracles close enough to feel their breathing on his skin. Holding until terror and devotion become indistinguishable. The only communion that will ever lead him closer to heaven.)

His pulse races violently beneath them, so loud he becomes convinced they must hear it too, and he forces himself to inhale slowly through his nose the way you had both worked on months ago whenever the nightmares threatened to pull you under. (One. Two. Three. Four. In. Out. In. Out.) The breath leaves him shakily. (Again.)

Oliver remains asleep through all of it, cheek pressed on the left side of Andrew’s chest, trusting and looking so much like you that it borders on painful: from the softness around his mouth, to the shape of his nose, and Andrew can’t help but stare at him in awe. But Juliet…Juliet is still awake and not crying or fussy. She is looking upward with intensity, tiny brows furrowed as if the effort of focusing on him requires all she possesses, her and her wide haz- His breath ceases. Hazel. Her eyes are hazel. Still very much clouded by the recent birth, but unmistakably close to his own shade.

No one bearing his eyes had ever peered at him with such unquestioning love before, yet here she is, only hours old, as though she had entered the world already certain that wherever he is, home will be there too. “Hello,” he whispers to her, panicked somehow of shattering the moment if he speaks louder. “I’m your dad. It’s okay.”

Juliet’s mouth opens briefly before shutting, his entire body bringing her closer despite the absence of space between them. He begins to rock, almost imperceptibly, just enough motion for the chair beneath him to shift in slow rhythm while his hands continue their adjustments minutely on their backs, terrified of supporting them incorrectly, or allowing their heads to tilt too far – all the catastrophes his mind can invent in the span of seconds.

But gradually, the movement becomes smoother. (Forward. Back. Forward. Back. Better than the breathing. Better than the counting.) “You’re okay,” he whispers again, even if he no longer can tell whether he is addressing her or himself. “Dad’s got you. You and your brother. No one’s going anywhere. I promise.”

He lowers his head, placing a kiss at the top of Juliet’s head, then Oliver’s, because yes, ‘dad’ is not an abstract word anymore. It’s his title. Andrew Cody is a father. A dad.

(He spent his existence believing he would never be one. Baz said so. Smurf thought so. A whole life thinking that inheritance could only mean damage. That the violence would be passed from hand to hand like a curse. A family ritual. Another Cody thing. Fear masquerading once more as love. But this…this is his legacy. Tenderness. Safety.)

Oliver shifts in his sleep before sinking deeper against him, tiny fingers flexing near Andrew’s chin, while Juliet’s eyelids begin to droop heavier and heavier with the help of the rocking motion. “That’s it,” he hums. “You can sleep, bug.” Her gaze lingers stubbornly for another few seconds, still fixed toward his face with a startling intensity, before at last they close fully and her small body melts into his chest beside her brother. It’s only then that Andrew slows, just enough to listen to their breaths. (In. Out. In. Out. They breathe.)

Careful not to disturb the sleeping babies, Andrew reaches blindly toward the bed until his fingertips brush your arm, and even unconscious, you lean into the contact. He doesn’t move afterward, grateful to all the stars above, for he is holding everything he has ever wanted. ────────── Craig found you prior to the ceremony, pushing through the door separating the nave from the narthex with all the subtlety of a storm. The beige suit fitted his broad frame, long hair tied back up and clean for once, which in itself felt biblical enough to mark the date, his dress shoes clicking on the parquet until he noticed you seated on the wooden bench near the entrance, bouquet clasped so tightly in your lap that the stems had commenced to crook beneath your fingers.

“You know,” he started, leaning one shoulder against the wall with a grin pulling at his mouth, “it’s still time to run if you want.”

A snort escaped you before you could prevent it, one hand sliding down over your five-month pregnant belly covered by the white silky fabric. “What’s ‘running’ again?” you asked dryly. “I forgot a while ago.”

Craig barked out a laugh, sufficiently loud that it echoed throughout the room. Recalling where he was, he lowered it into an exaggerated whisper, dropping onto the bench beside you with his knees spread wide and hands clasped together in between. “Okay, so…” He glanced sideways at you. “What are we doing here? Contemplating our lives?”

You stared down at your pair of flats peeking from the dress, at the hem of the white fabric spilling around your ankles – anywhere but him. “Maybe.”

“Maybe,” he parroted right back, nudging your shoulder with his own. “What are you thinking about?”

Your fingers slackened around the bouquet, at last, cautiously placing it by your side on the bench, inhaling leisurely through your nose while somewhere deeper in the church, you perceived the distant creak of pews and Deran speaking to someone – Andrew, who was likely standing at the altar and verifying for a thousandth time that his brother had the rings with him. “I’m just…” Your voice trailed off as your palm came to rest over your stomach once more, hoping to experience some movement today, but still nothing. “I’m just thinking about the people here today.”

Craig’s expression changed, awkwardness creeping into the lines of his face as he began picking at the edge of his sleeve with rough fingers, undoubtedly regretting that the conversation had entered the emotional territory. “Is it because there’s only Deran and I?” he asked after a beat. “Pop-I mean Andrew, told us that it was your idea, but I can go talk to h-”

“Craig.” You cut him off, smiling despite yourself. “Don’t worry. I love that Deran and you are here.” Your gaze softened. “I wouldn’t have wanted more people.” He studied you carefully, still uncertain about your claim. “We both know it wouldn’t have suited Andrew.”

That finally earned a laugh from him. “True,” he admitted. “He would’ve tried for you, but…” He grimaced, a look that conveyed all the words in the world passing through his eyes. You laughed too, the sound lighter, and for a brief second, the tension inside your chest relaxed enough to breathe properly. “So? Why the pouting then?” Craig asked, tilting his head toward you. “Isn’t this supposed to be the best day of your life?” He gestured vaguely to the stomach. “At least until…you know. Gremlin day.”

You elbowed him. “I am absolutely telling your niece or nephew that you called them gremlins.”

“Your honor, in my defense,” he said solemnly, placing a hand against his chest, “this baby has been conceived by two gremlins.”

Despite the giggle that escaped you, the emotion still lingered heavily around your ribs, which he noticed (because of course he did. it was Craig. no matter how much he feigned otherwise, he was perceptive and good-hearted). “I just meant…” Your voice quietened. “That thinking about the people here reminded me of the ones who couldn’t be.”

The teasing left his face completely then, substituted by a sincerity so genuine it caught you off guard. “Your parents would’ve been really happy for you,” he murmured.

You blinked. “You think so?”

“I know so.” He shrugged before a smirk slowly returned. “I mean…it could’ve been worse.” He angled toward you with an exaggerated flirtatious face. “Could’ve been me.”

“Ugh, as if!” you snorted, even as tears gathered unwillingly at the corners of your eyes.

Craig reached over without hesitation, thumb brushing beneath your left eye before it could fall. “Exactly,” he said firmly, though amusement still remained in his tone. “Now you’re about to marry the kindest guy on earth, so no more crying, okay?” His grin widened. “At least not until you see him in the suit.”

A watery chuckle escaped you. “Okay.” You let him fuss over you long enough to aid you blow your nose. “I bet he looks fucking hot,” you added.

Craig choked on his own guffaw, glancing to the church doors as if the pastor might appear and smite you on sight. “Mind you, this is a church!”

That only made the two of you cackle harder, filling the narthex until it became the only sound in the room. Eventually, you cleared your throat, nerves returning all at once now that the moment was sufficiently close to be palpable. “Hey, Craig?”

“Hm?” He tried to rearrange his face into seriousness again and failed miserably.

You bit at your lower lip before asking, “Will you walk me to the aisle?”

The expression that crossed his face nearly wrecked you, for all the joked disappeared in the bat of an eye, leaving only tenderness behind. “It would be…” He paused, deepening his voice halfway through to hide the emotion threatening to crack through it. “It would be an honor, to bring my sister to the aisle.”

Slowly, you rose from the bench, the movement heavier with the weight of your pregnancy, and Craig’s eyes enlarged the second he saw the full dress properly for the first time, the sunlight coming through the windows, highlighting the lace sleeves and silk white fabric. “Fuck,” he blurted out instinctively. “You’re pretty.”

You smacked his arm. “Language!”

“Sorry, sorry,” he muttered, yet he was still grinning while you slipped your hand through his arm. Then, quieter, right before he pushed open the doors, he added, “My brother is gonna lose his mind.”

The church glowed gold when you entered it, the kind of color you had only seen in films, amber and blue scarred over the pews and altar due to the stained glass windows. Andrew was there, at the end of the aisle, in a camel-colored suit that fitted him so obscenely well you momentarily forgot every coherent thought you had ever possessed.

(oh, you were absolutely getting him out of that suit tonight. no. maybe not entirely out of it. the jacket would stay on. only the jacket.)

He looked devastatingly gorgeous. And the worst part was that his face screamed you those same kind of thoughts, for the second his eyes landed on you, every part of him went still – not blinking, probably not even breathing.

Your sinful train of thought got interrupted by Craig, leaning down toward your ear. “You forgot your bouquet on the bench.”

You looked down. “…shit.”

“Language,” Craig whispered smugly.

You ignored him entirely, too busy ogling at Andrew while you continued down the short aisle, and only then did Deran leaned toward his brother and mumbled something under his breath that forced Andrew to blink twice in rapid succession. You nearly chortled out loud and by the time you reached him, your chest throbbed from the overwhelming sentiment of love. Craig pressed a quick kiss to your temple before placing your hand into Andrew’s, the whole world narrowing to him.

You barely heard the pastor speaking. Barely registered the words about devotion and covenant and holy matrimony because Andrew was looking at you as if he was witnessing a revelation in real time, his thumb moving shakily against your knuckles while emotion climbed visibly up his throat.

When it was time for the vows, he swallowed hard enough that you witnessed the movement. “I’m not good…” he began roughly, eyes locked on yours. “With words. Or with love. But I swear that I’ll spend every day trying.” Deran silently handed him the ring before Andrew even had to ask. “I’ll love you when things are easy,” Andrew continued, voice breaking on the last word while he slid the band onto your finger with trembling hands. “And when they’re not. Or we’re tired. Or scared. Or life hurts.” Your eyes stung. “I love every version of you…” He stepped closer, the pad of his thumb caressing gently the heart necklace resting at your collarbone. “…with every version of me.”

You were already crying when your turn came. “The day we met, I thought you were the quietest man I had ever known.” A laugh rippled behind you both from Craig and Deran. “Which was strange considering you have the loudest brother on earth.” Craig snorted. “But then we spent time together,” you continued, smiling through tears, “and I realized you were actually the loudest one.” Andrew’s brows furrowed in confusion.

“In your acts,” you explained. “The way you kept me safe during skateboard lessons. How you guarded my drinks at parties. How you never let me feel alone.” Deran handed you Andrew’s ring. “Andrew,” you whispered with a trembling voice, “I know you spent a long time believing you were hard to love.” His throat bobbed. “But that’s the easiest thing I’ve ever done in my life.” You slid the ring onto his finger carefully. “And I love every version of you…with every version of me.”

Andrew kissed you before the pastor could even finish the ceremony. One second you were standing there, painted in light by the windows and candles, and the next his hand was cradling your face, mouth on yours with such tenderness…You didn’t catch the pastor blessing you and declaring you husband and wife afterward, for the only thing existing in that moment was Andrew, kissing you as though devotion itself had taken human form.

And later that day, when Craig and Deran took the car to go back to Oceanside, the bedroom door closed behind you both with a clicked that seemed to hush the entire world at once, leaving only the sound of your breathing and Andrew, standing there in the light of the bedside lamp, staring at you with a similar expression to the one he had worn at the altar: overwhelmed, reverential, undone.

For an instant, neither of you moved. Then, Andrew crossed the room to you, his hands finding your waist, forehead lowering briefly against yours before his mouth brushed your cheek, your jaw, the corner of your lips. “So pretty,” he murmured on your skin. His fingers traced the back of your dress, fumbling until the buttons were found, each one off striping another layer of restraint from him as his breath grew rougher while the lace slipped open inch by inch beneath his hands. “So soft.” A kiss landed against your shoulder. “My wife.” Another along the curve of your neck. “Love you.”

The dress finally fell from your arms, Andrew’s pupils dilatating the more skin appeared, his hands smoothing over your sides and his lips trailing after every newly revealed part of you. “My angel.” It became increasingly difficult not to bury your fingers in his curls and tug. Andrew lowered himself onto one knee, helping you step out of the dress pooled around your feet before reaching for your flat shoes, fingers unfastening the delicate straps with concentration and not realizing that your focus was now set on the wedding band at his finger, glowing under the light.

He took the first shoe off gently, pressing a kiss on your ankle afterward, followed by the calf, then the knee and performing the same treatment with the second leg. “So beautiful,” he whispered hoarsely. By the time his mouth was on the inside of your thigh, your hand was threaded tightly into his hair, drawing a low sound from his throat that made warmth bloom in the pit of your stomach.

“Andrew,” you breathed. His eyes lifted at the sound of his name, dark and heavy and full of love. You guided him up, sitting at the edge of the bed, your dress forgotten on the floor while he remained standing between your knees. And since the sight of him like this: loosened tie, swollen lips, trembling hands, wedding band gleaming, was ample to make mischief spark alive in your veins, you tilted your head and whispered teasingly, “Come here, husband.”

The reaction was so genuine you couldn’t stop your giggle, Andrew frozen to the spot, blinking once, twice, and asking boyishly, “Can you say that again, please?”

“My husband,” you repeated, the sound coming out of his chest outright sinful, kissing you with desperation, both hands rising to cradle your face. You could feel the smile breaking on his face as he kissed you deeper, tongue dancing with yours. Pulling back just enough to breathe, your fingers traveled to the lapels of his camel jacket, smoothing over the fabric before grinning. “Everything off but this jacket.”

Andrew huffed a laugh against your mouth, forehead dropping on yours. “Bossy wife.” ────────── Two in the morning has ceaselessly seemed dissimilar from the rest of the day, even when he was but a kid, an hour where all is stripped down to its plainest frame and left exposed in the dark, every creak of the house magnified till it felt like an earthquake. Andrew lies awake, staring at the ceiling and listening to your sleepy breaths, one of your legs tangled over his and arm curled around his waist, as if even unconscious you refuse to permit distance between your bodies.

He knows why he can’t rest. Or rather, he knows but attempts to sand the edges down into practicalities instead of naming the truth directly, for issues can be solved, or catalogued, or checked off one after another until they cease clawing at his ribcage. The doors are locked (He verified them three times before bed.), the windows too, the oven is switched off, the coffee machine unplugged, the baby monitor sits on his nightstand, volume high enough that he can even perceive the sound machine in the nursery – set on a cycle of artificial ocean waves. But still…his eyes remain wide open.

(In the book, it said newborns wake every two to four hours. Oliver woke up at midnight. Juliet ten minutes later. That suggests they could wake any second now. Perhaps they’re hungry already. Perhaps one of them rolled on their belly. Or the sacks opened. Or the monitor stopped working and he didn’t notice. Or- Bad thought. One. Two. Three. Four. He counts the corners of the ceiling. Again. One. Two. Three. Four.)

Your grip tautens around him in your slumber as he begins to move, your forehead pressing between his shoulder blades with a hum of protest that nearly persuades him to stay, for the bed is warm and you smell like milk and lavender soap, paired with the sweetness of the lotion you rubbed onto your skin earlier while he was feeding Juliet. But the thoughts persist. Therefore, prudently, Andrew untangles himself from your hold, lifting your arm gradually enough that you merely sigh and curl toward the empty spot he leaves behind.

For a few seconds, he remains on his bare feet in the dark bedroom, wearing nothing but his boxers, anticipating for a sign, but there’s none: no crying, no fussing, only the ocean sounds spilling from beneath the nursery door. The hallway floor creaks at each of his steps as he walks to it, pulse decelerating because movement at least feels useful here, his everlasting vigilance transmuted into ritual – father keeping vigil in the middle of the night for the sake of the two souls resting down the corridor.

The nursery is dim when he slips inside, illuminated only by the pale blue glow of the baby monitor and the greenish shimmer of the stars stuck to the ceiling above the cribs, both your constellations stretching over the children in uneven lines that you had insisted looked lovelier imperfect. (Andrew had reorganized them twice afterward anyway.)

Juliet sleeps on her side despite every attempt to keep her centered, dinosaur sleep sack bunched beneath her chin as one tiny hand rest near her face, while Oliver, in the crib beside hers, lies flat on his back wrapped inside a whale-patterned sack. Watching attentively, he stands there for a while, checking the rise and fall of their chests through the haze of fatigue and panic, until eventually his exhalation unconsciously syncs to theirs.

Checking Juliet first this time, Andrew notices, with a frown, a small striped fabric that couldn’t be larger than his palm, wedged under her cheek. Her sock. “Bug,” he murmurs, leaning down, “how’d your sock get here?” Very delicately, he unzips the dinosaur sleeping bag, uncovering her foot and sliding the sock back over her ankle and smoothing the fabric into place. “There. Better.”

His fingertips brush against the sole of her foot just to feel the smoothness there, before zipping up the sack. He hasn’t even arrived at four in his mind when Oliver startles awake, his arms jolting in the air and his face scrunching in distress, mouth opening around a breath that could become tears withing seconds. Andrew reacts before thinking: hands gliding beneath him, lifting him against his bare chest with urgency while his heart hammers hard enough to quake his entire ribcage. “Shhh,” he hums, low and solid, the vibration carrying from his sternum into Oliver’s little body. “Let’s not wake your sister.”

That was a thing you had discovered during the first few days home, bringing one of the babies on his torso during a crying fit, only for the humming coming out of his throat pacifying them rapidly. “They like knowing they’re not alone,” you told him later. “That their dad is never far.”

So…that’s what he does now, because he can’t sing the way you do, soothing them with melodies effortlessly, but he can offer this at least. Oliver squirms a little against him, panic receding with his cheek pressed over Andrew’s heartbeat. The chair near the window creaks when he lowers himself into it, one broad hand spread protectively across the baby’s back as the stars overhead glow on the ceiling, the only sounds in the room being the artificial ocean and his humming, guiding Oliver once more to doze.

Andrew smooths a kiss on the top of his head, scattered with tufts of hair. “You can go back to sleep,” he whispers. “Your mom and I are next door.”

(The words still feel unreal. Mom. Son. Daughter. In their own room. In this house. Far, far from the ghosts. From Oceanside and the jobs and the blood. Where nothing would hurt them. Hurt you. There are moments where he has to repeat to himself that it’s not counterfeit. That he is just beating the odds time and time again.)

Eventually, he goes back on his feet, placing Oliver heedfully into the whale sleeping bag and adjusting the zipper (making sure four times in a row if it’s correctly fastened), checking on Juliet for good measure, the pad of his pointer hovering near her nose just to feel the air against his skin.

(They are both breathing. One. Two. Three. Four. He counts their inhales and exhales.)

When he slips back into the bedroom, you stir as he settles beneath the covers, drawing him backward until his shoulder blades rests alongside your breasts and your arm loops around his waist to pull him closer, breath warm on the shell of his ear. “Are they okay?” you mumble sleepily.

Andrew’s hand finds your under the blanket, fingers intertwining. “Yes,” he replies. “They’re breathing.”

A chuckle vibrates against his spine before you peck the spot behind his lobe that continuously makes him shiver. “Good,” you smile. “It was a very nice first week at home, don’t you think?”

He nods into the darkness. “Yeah.” A pause settles prior to the question escaping him. “You think they like the stars?”

“I’m sure they love the stars,” you whisper, another kiss ending up where his neck meets his shoulder as your fingers drift into his hair, nails scraping his scalp in slow motions that unravels every knot inside him one by one. “And I’m sure they’ll love the garden too.” His eyes start closing before he even realizes it. “And I’m even more sure they love their very attentive dad.”

The words make his brow furrow. “You don’t think I’m…” he hesitates. “Too much?”

Feeling your head shaking against his back in denial, you respond. “No.” Another soft kiss at the nape of his neck. “I’m so happy I know I can count on you.” Your voice grows quieter with fatigue yet again. “Thank you, honey.”

Andrew frowns even harder at that, genuinely unable to comprehend. (Of course you can rely on him. You carried two children inside your body until it hurt to be on your feet. You bled and sobbed and brought heaven into the world with your own hands. The least he can do is stay awake beside the children for the rest of his life. Why are you thanking him? Praising him when he should devote each morning to be on his knees at your altar?)

“Don’t,” His voice breaks with the exhaustion. “Don’t thank me.”

“Oh, shush,” you grumble, amused. “I can if I want to.” Your hand smooths lazily over his bare stomach. “After all, the love of my life is a good father, a good husband, and has the sweetest ass in the entire town.” A pause. “County. No…state. Maybe even galaxy.”

A snort spills out of him before he can think about stopping it. But what he desperately wants to tell you in return, it’s that the love of his life is the best mother he has ever seen, the gentlest wife, and the closest thing to grace he believes this world has ever produced. Exhaustion prevents him from responding though, his only thought being that down the hallway, the sound machine continues its endless tide for two babies, and that beside him, you breathe too. And for tonight, that’s sufficient to let him sleep. ────────── “Look at that!” you cooed, balancing Juliet on your left side, her head on your breast, while Oliver rested in the crook of your opposite arm, both babies bundled in soft cotton cloths like mismatched little cocoons, their faces scrunched by languor and puzzlement alike. “That’s dada!” You widened your eyes in feign awe toward the twins. “Making sure you’ll be comfortable in the big scary Sardines Soak!”

Andrew, crouched beside the bathtub with one sleeve shoved halfway to his elbow and his entire attention fixed on the thermometer floating in the water, frowned without lifting his head. “Why are you calling it that?”

“Because it’s their first time in there, so it’s big, scary…” you replied matter-of-factly, kissing the top of Juliet’s head who kept drooling on your shirt, “and they are sardines about to be packed.”

His fingers stirred the bathwater yet again in anticipation of examining the display for what had to be the tenth time in the last several minutes, brows still drawn in a concentration so solemn, you could have thought he was back to studying the plan of a job rather than preparing two inches of water for newborns. “The bath is not ready. It’s ninety-seven point eight right now.”

You beamed amorously at the sight of him, feeling close to the woman you were a year and a half ago and who fell head over heels with him as he repeatedly saved you from dropping on your ass during skateboard lessons, or drove you back from a party because you had called him and were frightened. This man, who somehow became your husband (karma probably owed you some good deeds from a past life), had the patience of squatting for the better part of twenty minutes just so the water could be between ninety-eight and one hundred degrees.

(you knew, you fucking knew, he read it somewhere. probably…in three separate books. no, you had to be realistic. five books. and from now on, the numbers would live inside his brain. honestly? that was adorable. adorable and very attractive. so much that you regretted the general lack of sleep to show him some real gratitude.)

The bathroom itself looked very Andrew-like organized, every object aligned with military precision in and around the tub: the bath seats positioned side by side, stacks of muslins arranged by sizes and shades, miniature hooded towels with ears warming over the radiator, plastic jugs lined up near his knee alongside baby cleanser and lotion placed symmetrically. At last, he nodded to himself. “Okay,” he murmured. “Ninety-eight point six.”

“There he is,” you teased gently. “The protector of our sardines.”

Andrew rolled his eyes, even if the corners of his mouth twitched upward, standing up and moving toward you, hands reaching for Juliet with an extreme caution that hadn’t yet decrease despite five continuous days of parenthood in this house. “Okay,” he reassured the babies, voice lowering into that tone reserved solely for the three of you. “Let’s do this slowly.”

The first few moments were tentative, all conscientious palms and reassuring murmurs as the twins blinked blearily at the warm water surrounding them. Oliver startled at the contact, face crumpling in outrage the second it grazed his legs, probably persuaded that existing outside the womb was not worth the inconvenience, while Juliet kicked a foot on the surface, hard enough to create the smallest splash.

“It’s okay, bug. Mom and Dad are here,” Andrew murmured instantly, one wide hand supporting her stomach while the other poured a small stream of water over her legs from the jug. “See? It’s warm.”

(you were sure your ovaries just detonated on the spot. seven days. in total, the babies had spent seven days on this earth and he already sounded like he had been built for fatherhood. which…didn’t surprise you exactly. but it certainly didn’t help your common decision for only one more pregnancy. in a few years.)

Another spatter of water interrupted your thoughts. “Ouch!” you gasped theatrically, bringing one hand to your heart as if you had been hurt, the other still on Oliver. “Jules has chosen violence today.”

“She’s your daughter,” Andrew replied, deadpan. You snorted, reaching for the other jug to stream the crystal clear liquid along Oliver’s body, covered by the yellow muslin to keep his warmth, observing his fingers flex in response while Andrew supported your daughter’s head, using cotton wool to clean her face. His shirt clung to his chest, curls commencing to darken his temples from the humidity filling the bathroom.

The sheer domesticity of the scene overwhelmed you, your throat tightening unexpectedly. Perhaps sensing it, Andrew lifted his gaze toward you, carrying with it that familiar attentiveness that always made you feel transparent to him, as though he had devoted himself so completely to loving you that your emotions had become part of his own nervous system – an invisible string tying both your souls until you couldn’t pinpoint which belonged to whom. “You okay, sweetheart?” he asked.

You nodded right before the sentiment could swallow you whole. “Yeah, yeah…” But the tenderness in his expression was becoming dangerous to your composure, so you did the only reasonable (absurd) thing you could think about, flicking your wet fingers directly at his face.

Andrew blinked once, twice. A droplet clung to one of his eyelashes while he stared at you with a tinge of disbelief, still attending to Juliet. “Did you just…throw water at me?”

“No, never,” you answered solemnly, pointing at Oliver. “He did.”

Three seconds passed before laughter burst out of you irrepressibly as you witnessed his frown expanding, giggle amply loud that Juliet let out a small indignant sound from her bath seat as Oliver’s mouth latched onto your pointer, probably as a reminder for you that feeding time was near. Somehow, Andrew’s expression only made it worse, for he looked bemused for a minute, not in possession of the textbook for this kind of situation.

(oh god. maybe it was the hormones. or maybe it was the fact that you hadn’t slept more than two consecutive hours in a week and felt the fatigue down to your bones. but this face…this gorgeous, confused, hesitant face cracked your heart open all over again. because Andrew had spent too many years deciphering people for danger. searching every smile for cruelty hidden underneath, and you knew that this sort of vigilance didn’t evaporate in the blink of an eye with love. there was no manual for dismantling decades of his mother’s voice in his head. no miracle switch that taught someone the difference between laughing at and laughing with. only this: thousands upon thousands micro moments until his body finally ceased bracing for impact.)

Parsing through your reaction, his gaze flicked from your face to his shirt who had now drips of it all over and then back at you, as if the answer might materialize somewhere between the two. “I don’t…” he muttered slowly, blinking a droplet away that rolled down his cheek. “I don’t understand what’s funny.”

And all at once, your smile faltered. “Andy, I wasn’t-” You glanced to the tiled floor fleetingly as blood crept up to your face in guilt. “I just…”

For a second, you felt the reflexive apology already gathering someplace behind his mouth regardless of the fact that he had done nothing wrong. But that only lasted a second. Because the next, water ran in rivulets all along your collarbone, a small tentative smile blooming on Andrew’s face, as if he was testing whether he had done the right thing. You gasped, intertwined with glee. “Andrew David Cody!”

A little more confidence entered his posture at your tone, sufficient that the smile reached his eyes, softening his features. “You started the war.”

You leaned a few inches to the side, maintaining a hand on Oliver’s torso and kissing Andrew, who himself was attempting to prevent Juliet from spattering larger amounts with her limbs. This was without taking you into account, who used the distraction of the kiss for your other hand to disappear beneath the hem of his shirt, running a wet palm all along his muscular chest. A groan escaped him and fell against your lips, jerking at the contact, not able to block your chuckle into the embrace.

“You’re impossible,” he murmured.

“And yet,” you replied smugly, “you’re the one who married me.”

“True.” His mouth brushed yours once more. “Terrible decision.”

“Mhm. Yes, tragic.”

The twins chose that exact moment to protest, noises rising in stereo until you both pulled apart with matching smiles, returning your attention toward them. And for a while, the bathroom did settle into a calmer rhythm, the two of you working as a tandem, alternating between cleaning and explaining to the babies step by step what was happening – even without them comprehending the words – just so they could associate baths with warmth and safety. Andrew stayed focused but less serious, tongue pressing the inside of his cheek as he rinsed Juliet’s wisps of dark curls.

Tickling your son to see him squirming, a gasp suddenly flew out of you as you felt something dripping beneath the waistband of your shorts. “Andy!”

His expression remained neutral despite the mirth lurking in his eyes, one soaked hand still hidden mischievously on the curve of your ass. “Sorry,” he said with no sincerity whatsoever. “My hand slipped.”

“You awful liar.”

A grin appeared fully, open and boyish, his dimples flashing while you stared at him in feign affront and pure affection. You scooped up another palmful of water to hit him directly across the chest this time. And suddenly the entire bathroom fell into beautiful chaos yet again: your husband retaliating, his laughter bouncing against the tiled walls – the kind of happiness people spent entire lifetimes hoping for. The kind that proved Andrew that the family he created would never resemble the one he survived. ────────── The drive back home seems endless, every mile carrying the peculiar ache of missing the three people who exist only twenty minutes away from him, yet inhabit each and every of his thoughts. Andrew keeps one hand on the steering wheel, the other tapping four times on his thigh during the red lights, the repetitive pattern less desperate nowadays, more out of habit than compulsion. Weariness persists underneath his skin after a full day at the workshop: cedar dust clinging to his jeans, forearms sore from sanding and lifting, the scent of varnish embedded into the lines of his hands no matter how thoroughly he scrubbed them before heading out.

(He still doesn’t grasp how he ended up here. Husband. Father. Carpenter. Those terms remain too beautiful and unsoiled to fit within his head. But there’s peace at least. Even in the woodshop. In the silence. In shaping raw material into furniture. He enjoys that the work leaves proof behind. Like tables, cabinets, cribs. Those are tangible things. Useful. Far from his destructive past profession.)

The closer he gets to the house, the more the stiffness between his shoulder blades eases, antsy for the sound of your voice or the babies’ cries or the impossible softness of whatever domestic noise is awaiting behind the front door. Except tonight, ahead of reaching the porch…he hears music. Andrew slows midway up the path, keys still in hand, his brows drawing together as the melody spills faintly through the screen door alongside giggles and the muffled thump of movement across the hardwood floor. It’s one of those albums you replay nonstop in the car and shower, songs he has memorized inadvertently, so much that his brain anticipates the next verse before it arrives.

Pushing open the door soundlessly, he steps inside to attain the living room, who glimmers amber with the late afternoon light distilling through the windows…and there you are, at the center of it all, swaying barefoot on the parquet in one of his old shirts and shorts, hair loose while the twins sit on the colorful playmat disseminated with stacking cups, chew cubes and plush animals.

His gaze travels back to you, taking in the faint layer of sweat on your collarbone and the sway of your hips accompanied by the tune, his mouth lifting into a small smile as he leans a shoulder against the doorway without disrupting the scene, giving himself one suspended second to capture pictures in his mind.

Oliver is the first to notice him, letting out a squeal of delight so loud it nearly overlaps the music itself, small hands absorbed into an uncoordinated attempt to clap while his whole body rocks with excitement as he sits upright among the toys. Juliet turns a heartbeat after, her hazel eyes widening before she breaks into a delighted babbling, “Dadadada…” spilling from her mouth with conviction despite the fact that Andrew knows it doesn’t really mean anything right now, that she calls almost everything dada lately, including the dogs in town and the rocking chair in their nursery.

In the twinkling of an eye, both twins begin crawling fast toward him. Well, fast…nine-month-old version of fast. “Hey,” he breathes, dropping his keys onto the nearby table and crossing the room in two strides, crouching just in time to catch Oliver prior to a faceplant of enthusiasm as Juliet reaches him half a second later with an indignant sound, lifting both arms upward in demand.

Andrew snorts under his breath – still astonished every time the sound comes out of him this easily – and gathers both babies into his arms at once, one balanced against each hip as he rises to his feet. The reaction is instantaneous: his son squeaks once more, burying both hands into his shirt’s collar while the little girl presses her forehead on his shoulder before leaning back to grin at him, curls bouncing wildly around her face. And somehow, impossibly, they laugh harder as he bounces them in his arms.

(That part is yours. It has to be. He has no memory of guffaws looking like this when he was a child. No recollection of joy not interlaced with fear. Yet these two appear to find delight in him naturally, as though his existence alone is amply entertaining.)

“My bugs,” he smiles, kissing both his children’s temple. “What are you two doing, huh?” To which he receives as a response mostly spit and excited gibberish.

You’re walking toward them, smile sufficiently bright that it sands down the remaining edges left from his workday, your arms sliding around his waist, therefore encircling too the babies and forming one general embrace in the middle of the living room. “Hello, sir,” you greet flirtatiously, tilting your face to his with that expression that still makes his thoughts short-circuit. “You come here often?”

Andrew’s pulse stumbles, for even after all this time – eternally, he suspects – you still affect him with terrifying ease. He leans down to kiss you delicately, murmuring against your lips, “Only when I know you’re around.” The sentence comes out quieter than intended, more uncertain than smug, internally wincing because after two years together, one spent married, and hundreds of thousands kisses, he still has no idea how to match your effortless teasing.

But still…your gaze drops briefly toward his mouth and traveling back to his eyes, a little hitch in your breath he overhears, making him think that, perhaps, he answered correctly after all. Juliet interrupts the moment with a vexed noise from between you both, twisting in Andrew’s hold until it becomes obvious she wants to be put back down. “Okay, okay,” he whispers. “Bossy just like your mom.”

Lowering her first, followed by Oliver, both babies resume their determined expedition toward the pile of toys neither of you manage to keep organized for more than two hours at a time, abandoning their parents now that the reunion has been completed successfully. Each picks their activity: Oliver heading directly for the stacking cups while Juliet pauses halfway there to line two cubes side by side, choosing one to chew on, brows furrowed.

Andrew observes them for a few more moments before your arms return around his neck, properly this time, his own hands on both sides of your hips as the music continues, drifting through the room to engulf you both. And without realizing it, he begins swaying with you – unconscious motions side to side, children babbling nearby. He blinks once, twice, his chin lowering to your shoulder as comprehension lands into place. “Are you…” he mutters beside your ear, voice threaded with disbelief and amusement, “…making me dance?”

Your fingers glide into the curls at the nape of his neck, twirling one. “Only took two years.”

A quiet laugh leaves him under his breath, forehead brushing yours and hands clenching around your waist. “I…” Andrew starts cautiously, as if admitting it aloud might somehow alter the balance of the universe – his, at least. “I think I like it.”

Your gaze raises back toward his, triumphant and tender. “Good.” You kiss him once. “Cause I plan on us dancing for the next fifty years.”

And Andrew right there, in this house, children playing in close proximity, wife dancing with him beneath the evening light, realizes with an overwhelming clarity that fifty years…will never be enough time to kiss every inch of gratitude from your skin. ────────── (noise…so much noise…no. not just that. crying. someone was crying. not the usual fussing, but a piercing one. fuck. the babies were crying.)

Disoriented, your hand shot across the mattress to Andrew’s side of the bed, expecting his warmth and broad shoulders and the steady rise and fall of his lungs below your palm, only to encounter cold sheets instead. Not just empty, no, cold, indicating he had been gone for a while. The realization cut through the haze in your brain in a split second.

(what if one of them couldn’t breathe? what if they were sick? what if Andrew got hurt trying to pick them up half-asleep? what if- was that how your husband’s brain functioned? were you commencing to synchronize with his spiraling?)

You were already out of bed before the thought could finish forming, practically sprinting down the hallway barefoot, one hand braced against the wall to steady yourself as the nursery light spilled from underneath the door. The sight awaiting for you inside stopped you short: Andrew sat in the rocking chair near the window with one baby in each arm, shoulders slumped and bowed around them as if attempting to physically shield them from whatever had upset them, both Oliver and Juliet crying so hard their bodies quivered with it, Andrew seeming frighteningly close to collapsing.

Hair disheveled from his anxious hands dragging through it repeatedly and chest bare with faint stains of spit near his collarbone, his tears were trailing down his cheeks as he rocked helplessly the babies, attempting to soothe both at once and undoubtedly believing he was failing at it. The instant he looked up and noticed you standing there, something inside his expression fractured further. “I…” His voice cracked. “I think one of them had a nightmare and…and I can’t stop their crying.”

“I tried everything,” he continued hoarsely, panic crowding each word until they stumbled over one another. “Food. Diaper. Humming. I checked their temperature four times and-” His grip stiffened around the babies. “Nothing works.” Another tear slipped free. “I’m useless.”

“Oh, honey.” You crossed the room, voice soft despite your own lingering alarm, and crouched beside him to press a quick kiss against his humid temple before lifting Juliet from his arms. She was red-faced from screaming, tiny fingers trying to clutch desperately at Andrew’s skin even as you gathered her alongside your chest, hiccupping sobs continuing to shake her body as you began to sway her.

“It’s okay,” you murmured, speaking to Andrew as much as to the babies. “You’re doing your best.” Juliet buried her face against your shoulder with another broken cry. “I think you’re right,” you added. “Maybe there was a nightmare.”

Andrew brought Oliver closer to his chest after your daughter left his arms, and only then did you notice the extent of the trembling running through him. Not just his hands, but from his whole body. You reached over instinctively, fingers threading through his hair to soothe him whereas Juliet persisted crying weakly against you. He shook his head hard. “I was really trying,” he whispered, shame saturating each and every syllable. “I didn’t want you to wake up.”

The sentence stung in ways he most definitely didn’t intend to, because of course he hadn’t. Of course he had sat here alone, bearing all this terror and anxiety himself instead of calling for help, genuinely convinced that struggling on his own was preferable to burdening you. Making a clicking noise with your tongue, you adjusted Juliet higher on your chest as her fist tangled into the fabric of your pajama shirt. “Andrew,” you replied, “it’s okay. You’re the one always up during the night. Always feeding and changing…”

But he couldn’t respond, his throat working uselessly around the emotion lodged there as you viewed the panic still trapped behind his eyes no matter how tightly he held the babies. Something inside you ached with understanding, for this wasn’t truly about your crying infants…it was about helplessness, fear, about loving someone sufficiently that every tear felt close to the Armageddon.

Juliet’s sobs had weakened a little by then, turned into hiccupping little cries, her face flushed red and pressed against your breast, fingers still twisting into your shirt as though she feared being set down back into her crib. You transferred her into the crook of your arm instead, brushing damp curls away from her forehead. “I know,” you cooed. “I know it’s not funny to be a baby.” Her mouth remained turned downward. “Always hungry,” you continued. “Or dirty. Or sleepy.” Your pointer smoothed gently down her forehead to the tip of her nose. “It’s not easy.”

Blinking up at you through her damp lashes, you kept going. “But when you’re very, very sad,” you murmured, glancing briefly to Andrew, “daddy gets sad too.” His throat visibly bobbed up. “And we don’t want daddy sad, okay?” Juliet sniffed again, lower lip still trembling but the cries had stopped at least, replaced by erratic inhales as you resumed stroking her forehead. “Yes,” you smiled. “That’s better like that.” Her small body melted further onto yours. “It was a very scary dream, I’m sure it was Jules,” you soothed. “But now you don’t have to be scared anymore because mommy and daddy are here.”

From beside you came the sound of Andrew panting shakily. You looked over to find him attempting to mirror your gestures on Oliver, rough hand moving with astonishing delicacy as he brushed trembling fingers over your son’s forehead. “Yes,” he whispered hoarsely to Oliver, thick from weeping. “It was probably scary.” Oliver’s palm remained over his heart. “I…” Andrew swallowed hard. “I also have nightmares.” The confession landed between all four of you. “And they scare me too.”

Lowering his head to kiss the top of Oliver’s hair, your husband’s eyes squeezed shut for a few seconds afterward as if anchoring himself through the contact. “But you know what helps me?” he asked to an Oliver who blinked sleepily at him. “Your mom.” Andrew’s palm moved slowly along his son’s back. “She’s always there for my nightmares.”

The tenderness of this sentence nearly undid you in the middle of the nursery, for he had said it with such certainty and faith – like you were the lighthouse in his mind’s tempest, the gravity that kept him on earth. Side by side, you both kept rocking the babies during the next minutes as the sea of tears eroded away into fatigue. Oliver eventually went limp and heavy on Andrew’s chest as Juliet’s lashes fluttered slower and slower against her cheeks.

The room hushed up until only faint sniffles and the artificial ocean sounds remained, briefly interrupted by the whisper of your name, uttered by your husband. You hummed in response, unwilling to speak loudly enough to disturb the babies who were drifting to sleep yet again. He took a hitching breath, another tear rolling down his face. “I’m so scared,” he admitted. “What if…” His voice faltered. “What if their nightmares…”

(you read between the lines. that those were not baby nightmares filled with monsters under the crib or loud sounds or unfamiliar shadows. that those were his nightmares. the type that caused sweat soaked sheets. the kind where he yelled for people and begged for pardon.)

Heedfully keeping Juliet safe on your arm, you extended your free hand to his face, cupping his cheek, who leaned into the touch in the blink of an eye. “Shh…They won’t be like yours, Andy,” you breathed. “I promise.” His eyes closed at the connection with your palm. “Just like they won’t be like mine.”

(because despite this whole existence…the warehouse still remained in you. buried underneath the ordinary days and the diapers and the laughter, yes. but also visible through the scars and the distress of being confined and meeting unfamiliar individuals. but of course, now neither of you said the word aloud. who wanted to bring back the worst day of their lives?)

Andrew grasped nonetheless, and you witnessed his eyes turning from cloudy hazel to clear hazel, nodding at your oath, for you were the one who had spoken it. When you finally placed Juliet back into her crib, Andrew trailed with Oliver cradled against him, both of you moving with extra slowness so the mattresses barely dipped with the babies’ weight and the zip of their sleeping sack didn’t wake them after all those efforts.

You lingered there another moment, observing their breathing rise and fall, before turning to Andrew, who still stood beside the cribs, looking wrecked by the entire ordeal. Without a word, you stepped toward him and wrapped both arms around his waist, making him fold into you with an exhale of relief. Guiding him backward until he sat back onto the rocking chair, you climbed him, straddling his lap, fingers traveling through his curls soothingly, handing him the tenderness and adoration you wished someone had once offered the little boy he used to be.

For somewhere inside this man, beneath the husband and the father and the man he had taught himself to be piece by piece, there was still a child who woke from nightmares with no one coming when he cried. So you held him tighter, kissed and kept vigil over all the versions of Andrew Cody that had once been left isolated. ────────── The kitchen, thus far, contains remnants of the birthday party regardless of the fact that two days have elapsed since the twins turned one: stray ribbons reappearing every few hours in the most random places even if Andrew has already searched and scrubbed every corner, the paper crown Juliet refused to remove until bedtime resting crookedly beside the sink.

(Three hundred and sixty five days celebrated. Eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours. More than thirty-one million seconds since the delivery room, the cries, the blood and hearing Oliver’s heartbeat outside your body for the first time. Thirty-one million seconds since Juliet peered up at him and tilted his entire world on its axis forevermore.)

Standing at the kitchen island, methodically peeling orange slices apart for the twins, Andrew removes every trace of the white pith with a concentration that reminds him of the pre-jobs reconnaissance while the two babies sit strapped to their respective highchairs (the first objects he had constructed in his workshop). Oliver smacks both palms enthusiastically on the tray in front of him, seeking attention whereas Juliet is opting for the observation of the process with a mirrored air of attention on her features, curls spilling wildly around her face after the afternoon nap.

(Too much skin makes them spit it out. Juliet doesn’t like the texture. Oliver constantly tries to swallow pieces whole even if they are too large. Better to fix it now than panic later.  He has learned the lesson. One. Two. Three. Four. He counts the seeds he takes away.)

Behind him, the microwave whirrs as you reheat the lasagna Adrian and Deran brought over after the party, insisting that the two of you shouldn’t have to cook for at least a few days after hosting everyone. (Andrew doesn’t know what he is the most grateful for. The food. The assistance the whole time to prevent a birthday disaster. Or that Adrian brought back the spark in his brother’s eyes.) You hum absently along with the music playing low from the speaker near the sink, swaying, entirely unaware – or perhaps extremely aware – of the fact that your husband has peeled the same orange slice for thirty consecutive seconds, unable to steer his gaze away from the curve of your ass.

(Focus. Focus. He is well acquainted with each inch of your body. Has traced it hundreds of times with his hands, his mouth. Knows all the idiosyncrasies that you veil to the rest of the world. And yet…he keeps picturing how easily he could lift you onto the counter and- No. No. One. Two. Three. Four. He has to focus on the orange. On the children.)

You glance over your shoulder without turning fully. “Andrew?”

He blinks at you, sheepish. “Hm?”

“You know I can feel your stare, right? And I’m pretty sure there’s no orange hiding in my shorts,” you joke, rolling said body part for good measure.

Heat crawls up from the back of his neck to the tip of his ears, and, clearing his throat, he finishes arranging the slices equally between both trays just as Juliet reaches for one in an attempt to feed a piece of it to her stuffed fox instead of herself. “No, bug,” Andrew coaxes, rescuing the plushie before it becomes fruit-coated forever. “You have to eat. Your fox doesn’t need it to grow. You do.”

Beaming at him with no remorse but a spark of comprehension behind her eyes, Juliet awaits a moment, two, and suddenly points directly at him, letting out a loud. “Dada!”

All things halt: the microwave buzz, the radio, your dance – even his own heartbeat comes to a standstill. For one hanging second, the kitchen appears submerged underwater, silence rushing around the single word pronounced by a little girl, currently radiating joy at the reaction she has caused. You turn toward him with an agape mouth, only to be met by Andrew who stares back, one orange slice still frozen between his fingers. Juliet slaps her hands against the tray. “Dada!”

The sound punches straight through his ribcage. (He has been called many things in his life. Most of them cruel. Some earned. A number in jail. Pope. The softer names only came because you came. And now…this.) The rind slips from his fingers onto the counter messily, but he can’t register for there is cotton packed inside both his ears, pulse hammering sufficiently hard to distort the room around him, barely overhearing you gasping her name.

She squeals happily at the excitement surrounding her and points once more at him with complete confidence in the term. “Dada!”

Andrew is convinced that right here, right now, he might faint in front of the three of you as Juliet continues chanting the word proudly, kicking her feet against the highchair – his little girl who could have picked many words as her first, but still chose him.

You crouch beside Juliet, face glowing with enthusiasm. “Who’s dada?” you ask her gently. “Can you show mommy where dada is?” Only for her to throw both her arms toward him, proud each time she repeats the word, chest puffed with accomplishment while Andrew stands there, slowly dismantled molecule by molecule via a twelve-month-old girl in a green tulle dress.

(There are moments in life that split existence cleanly in half. A before and an after. Meeting you. The first night you spent by his side. Kissing you in the parking lot near Deran’s bar. The bullet. The warehouse. The ultrasound. Becoming your husband. The delivery room. And now this. This tiny voice calling him with certainty.)

By the fifth ‘dada’, Andrew finally laughs weakly beneath his breath and steps toward Juliet’s chair, cupping the side of her face to place a kiss at the top of her curls. “Yeah bug,” he whispers hoarsely. “That’s me.”

A month later, the twins occupy the playmat on the floor directly in front of the television, surrounded by squeaking toys and the seventeen stuffed animals Craig continues bringing on each of his bimonthly visits despite your repeated warnings that the children most definitely don’t need a plush shark larger than themselves (to which he had counteracted last week with a giant teddy bear, claiming that he had respected your rule since it was not a shark).

Andrew absentmindedly runs his fingers up and down your periwinkle cardigan while your head rests beneath his chin, the two of you only half paying attention to the animal documentary aired because parenting has now permanently divided your brains into multiple directions at all times: currently to Juliet, who is chewing on a rubber dinosaur, and Oliver, transfixed by the television.

Outside, rain taps against the windows, the lamp in the living room the only source of light, glowing a range of warm colors around all four of you. Andrew can feel sleep commencing to drag at him – a fact that still wonders him after decades spent unable to rest properly, today nothing more but a memory, exorcised by every morning spent with your walls around him. But with a long day at the workshop and dinner and the baths…he enjoys nothing more but this pleasant buzz of fatigue.

Without warning, Oliver directs a finger at the television. “Bi’d!” Andrew blinks once as onscreen, a flock of barn swallow lifts into the sky, departing South Africa to migrate. The small boy repeats determinedly, with a frown on his face. “Bi’d!”

You both sit up. “What is he saying?” you whisper, before the realization hits simultaneously, “Bird,” you gasp.

Squeaking excitedly for someone has finally understand him, he continues. “Bi’d!”

Andrew reaches down to scoop Oliver into his arms while your own hands grab Juliet, breathing a small, “Yes. Exactly. Bird. I’m…” he runs his pointer along the bridge of his son’s nose. “I’m very proud of you, buddy.”

The documentary keeps going, long forgotten in the background as you both take the twins hands to help them clap, Juliet excited to not miss out a moment regardless of the context. “Good job Ollie!” you grin, guiding her palms together.

And sitting there with the three of you, listening to his son reiterating the word bird, Andrew can’t help but whisper, “Thank you,” to the woman by his side, the beautiful alchemist who transubstantiated the lead of his body into gold. The one he keeps falling in love over and over again, until every battlefield inside him has forgotten the shape of war, till even the oldest trenches have bloomed with lilies. ────────── The album lied open in front of you, blank pages awaiting patiently to be crammed, and every few minutes, your stare drifted toward it with a certain tenderness inside your ribcage whenever you thought about the twins, who would one day turn those pages themselves, years from now, fingers tracing images of lives that respired before they did. A hand sorting through the shots spread across the coffee table as the other supported below your stomach, you sat cross-legged on the couch while doing so, the weight heavy on your thighs.

(but you wanted them to know they were loved prior to even being born. that in this home, there had always been laughter and kisses and sunlight for them. proof. you needed them to have a physical proof.)

You had already displayed a few photographs of yourself as a child near the first page: one with a missing front tooth and grass stains on your knees, another at the beach, wrapped in a towel too large for your small body, mid-laugh with your mother. There were also the prints for the next pages: the ultrasounds slid into transparent sleeves, and a blurry snapshot Craig had taken of you and Andrew asleep together on the couch two months ago, your cheek on his chest while one of his arm curled around the swell of your belly – protective even unconscious.

Beside the album sat the old cardboard box Andrew had brought home weeks earlier from one of the Cody’s storage unit in Oceanside after you mentioned desiring pictures of both of you as babies and children for the first page, and though he had handed you the box without protest, there had been a reluctance in his posture afterward…something quiet and watchful in the manner he set it down before finding an excuse to leave the room with a muttered, “There’s probably nothing useful in there.”

At the time, you hadn’t thought much about it. But now…now you realized. For all contained her.

Your fingers slowed over another picture, brows knitting together as you studied the woman with a toddler Andrew perched stiffly against her hip, blond hair cut to her shoulders and a makeup immaculate that you could perceive in spite of the graininess of the old image, beautiful in the polished manner magazine actresses often were, and yet there was a hollowness behind her smile that made unease crawl up your spine, something performative about the affection in the picture, as though motherhood had merely been another role she liked wearing publicly.

Every shot was with her. Young Andrew and Juliet by the pool? Their mother behind in a lounge chair. Blowing a birthday candle? She was kissing his cheek. Even in one where he couldn’t have been older than four, her hand remained fixed on him too tightly as she pecked his lips, fingers curved into his shoulder with a pressure visible through the glossy paper.

But there was one…one that you stared at longer than the others: a small Andrew, sitting on the porch step of the house in Oceanside, clutching to a skateboard, curls messy from the wind with his mother inclined over him, smiling toward the camera. Despite the brightness of the image and despite the California sunlight, the little boy’s eyes already looked wary.

Still suspended onto that snapshot, you didn’t register Andrew entering in the room up until his arms slipped around your shoulders from behind and bent enough to press a kiss on your cheek, the familiar warmth of him easing the knots inside your chest and mind. “What are you doing?” he murmured.

You tilted your head to him, smiling faintly regardless of the heaviness lingering around the images. “I am…” Your fingers tapped against the album. “Starting a project for the babies. So when they are older, they get to have all the pictures.”

His gaze dropped to the table, following the spread of photographs till his attention landed on one in particular. The one you had just let go of. You witnessed the exact moment his expression altered through a tightness around the mouth. “And that?” he asked quietly.

You exhaled through your nose. “I thought it would be nice to have us on the first page when we kids but…” Your throat tightened. “There’s always…”

Andrew’s jaw flexed. “…Smurf.”

The nickname landed wrong inside you the same way it always did. You had never enquired where it came from because part of you suspected Andrew himself to no longer recall, but hearing such a childish, almost affectionate word attached to someone capable of so much cruelty had made you want to throw up since day one, like she had somehow corrupted language itself. You nodded. “Yeah.”

Andrew reached forward, picking up one of the shots with cautious fingers, eyes fixed on it with distantness. “She loved taking pictures with us,” he said eventually. “Don’t think you’ll find one where she isn’t on.” He lowered himself onto the couch by your side, posture tense in a manner that told you how his thoughts had traveled somewhere painful, and for several seconds the only sound in the room came from the ceiling fan overhead. He sighed. “What will I say?”

You frowned in lack of comprehension. “Wha-What do you mean?”

Andrew lifted his gaze toward you, and the sight of his eyes nearly undid you, moisture gathering in the corners, restrained only by the sheer habit. “To the babies,” he replied. “About Smurf.” His fingers tautened around the edges of the photograph, hard enough to bend it, guilt flashing across his face as he quickly loosened his grip. “What will I tell them? What…can I say?”

The vulnerability in the question was painful. Not because he was asking what story to tell – Andrew wasn’t a liar – but because he was questioning whether the truth itself was audible, survivable. You grasped the hand not clenched around the image, fingers threading through his. “You’ll say whatever you want, whenever you want,” you answered. “It might take years. Or decades. Or maybe you’ll never feel ready to tell them everything.” You lifted his knuckles to your mouth and kissed the back of his hand. “Andrew…”

His eyes closed at the contact. “…what you went through is terrible,” you continued. “And I understand if you don’t want to speak about her with them. This is your choice.”

His thumb caressed four times your skin, the movement embedded into him. “One day they’ll ask who their grandmother was,” he said after a long silence, voice coarsened by the emotion he was struggling unsuccessfully to contain. “And…” A bitter laugh escaped him. “…even if I want her to disappear for good…I don’t want to lie to them.”

“Then you won’t lie,” you whispered. “And the day they’re old enough to understand, you’ll tell them the truth about her.” You paused. “Or at least the truth you are willing to share.” Andrew lowered his eyes, breathing shallowly as you brought your palm to his cheek, guiding his face back to yours with infinite care. “And you’ll explain why you don’t want to talk about her,” you added. “Why their dad has nightmares some night. How certain wounds take a long time to mend.”

His mouth trembled as he whispered, “How their mom saved their dad.”

A watery chuckle escaped you (when did you start crying? you couldn’t pinpoint.). “That too.”

For a moment neither of you budged, the snapshots remaining dispersed across the table between you both like fragments of another existence. Eventually, his eyes drifted back to the one in his hand. “How about we just cut it?”

You blinked and didn’t try to hide your smile. “With pleasure.”

Reaching toward the coffee table, you grabbed the scissors beside the album while Andrew held it steadily between his fingers, and together, you cut around the outline of the small boy until the blond woman vanished entirely from the frame to fall at your feet. He stared at the altered picture, his thumb brushing over the child – over him – before placing it into the album, right by your side. Where he had always belonged. ────────── The grass is uneven below and in all sides of the picnic blanket, soft in some places and prickly in others where summer has singed the ends. But Andrew has still spent the last thirty minutes flattening them for the comfort of the twins, who are both too engaged carrying on a conversation in their own language of babbles and squeals that seem important to them. Andrew listens without interrupting, not because he comprehends any of it, but for he adores the sound too dearly to break it apart with his words, the stream of their voices filling the garden while cicadas drone in the trees.

Today has been…quite the step in his fatherhood journey: the very first day completely on his own with the babies while you were somewhere else, relaxing, existing outside motherhood for more than ninety consecutive minutes. To achieve this small miracle, he had bought you a spa day three weeks ago after noticing on the calendar that this present day marked the two years of your abduction. The cursed day that robbed a piece of you: the one who enjoyed to be outside, to speak to others, to party.

“You can still cancel it,” you had told him for perhaps the fifth time this morning, hovering near the kitchen counter, chewing at your lower lip. “I don’t mind staying home. Really.”

Andrew recalls the kiss he had placed on his lip. “How about we make a deal?” Another peck. “You try taking your car. Try going in there and try to relax. And if at any moment you don’t feel well, you call. Deal?”

And you had nodded, accepting for your world to expand outside the breastfeeding, the sleeping schedules, the isolation even just for twelve hours.

(And anyway he would sooner fistfight God himself than let you believe there is a single thing on earth he would refuse you. One day, back in Oceanside, he had thought that he could give you his bed, room, house, air in his lungs if you desired so. And to this day, he still would. After all…you gave him peace. A home. Unconditional love. Twins. And somehow, you still thanked him every night for changing diapers and waking up during the night and being a good father to his own children. How could he not give you everything after that?)

So, he had closed the shop today, and plunged into his usual state of crisis management: temperatures of the bottles checked twice in a row on the inside of his wrist, the diaper tabs secured on both sides, assuring himself that the nap monitor functioned properly (by inserting new batteries), and that the baby shampoo was rinsed completely from Juliet’s curls for he read in the parenting books that residue could irritate the scalp, therefore devoting four minutes making certain no soap remained whatsoever.

(But yes, there had been small disasters. Juliet, who cried because Oliver touched her toy. Oliver, who cried because Juliet cried. And yet, it had been one of the happiest days of his life. This one and the nine hundred forty one who had preceded it since you had met. But today the babies had belly laughed every time he had put a napkin on his face. Oliver fell asleep drooling on his shoulder after lunch. Juliet kept offering him pieces of her crackers.)

Speaking of the devil, she interrupts his thoughts with a light smack on his knee via a teddy bear she has affectionately named C’aig, for his brother who holds his role of uncle (and housemate) extremely seriously by buying all sorts of toys and sugary food whenever he is in a store (to yours and Andrew’s despair.) “Dada!”

He looks down at her. “Yeah? Showing me Craig the bear?” He lifts the plush with its tropical shirt and shorts as she beams at him, nodding with her curls wild from the humidity. Oliver, probably deciding that a conversation with his sister should include him too, crawls back across the blanket and hands a squeaky giraffe into his empty hand. Accepting this offering, Andrew whispers, “Thank you. I like it,” to his son’s delight.

For a while, the three of them remain there, with the summer sunlight slowly giving away to large stripes of tangerine and apricot shades and the mild air, till the back door slides open, every head turning to the origin of the sound. To you, the sky colors catching the edges of your hair as you step barefoot onto the patio, carrying your shoes in one hand, with a bright smile. “Hi babies!” you wave.

The reaction is chaotic, both twins almost toppling sideways, their faces lighting up with pure joy before simultaneous cries of “Mamamama!” burst from them, sufficiently loud to scatter away the birds in the trees and quiet the cicadas.

You set your bag down near the patio steps, kneeling several feet away in the grass, arms opening wide to them both. “Come here, my loves!”

Launching first with no hesitation of any kind, Oliver drops onto all fours and barrels across the lawn toward you with astonishing speed, babbling excitedly the entire way. But Juliet…Juliet has a moment of delay, which immediately sharpens Andrew’s attention. For, instead of crawling, she grips his forearm tightly and begins struggling to get onto her feet: it’s slow and tentative, his daughter rising with a wobble in the standing position, knees shaking with the effort while her curls bounce around her flushed cheeks.

One step. And then another follows after, clumsy and miraculous beyond language, arms lifted to each side of her for balance while he trails beside on his knees through the grass with both hands hovering inches from her back, your eyes shining as you cheered, “Come on Jules! Look at you!”

(She is walking. This beautiful, wonderful little girl is walking. Fourteen months ago she fitted on one side of his chest while he counted her breathing, hand wrapped around his finger. One. Two. Three. Four. He presently counts the distance she covers.)

Attempting a third step, Juliet’s equilibrium fades right there, pitching sideways with a startled cry before Andrew catches her against him, amply rapid that she never falls to the ground, but the fright alone shatters her composure. “Oh, no,” he murmurs, rocking her through her tears. “Don’t worry, you’re okay.”

From the corner of his eyes, he perceives Oliver, freezing mid-crawl and turning around at the sound of his sister crying. Then, with complete determination, he deviates of direction to go back through the grass toward them as swiftly as possible, while Andrew witnesses in stunned silent his son arriving and pushing onto his unsteady feet at the very last instant, balancing with effort his body to stumble through the remaining steps toward his twin. Facing her, he babbles a sound, patting her shoulder clumsily with one chubby hand, once, twice, and before Andrew can even process the tenderness of this whole situation, Oliver leans forward and plants a spit-covered kiss directly on Juliet’s cheek, who ceases her sobbing.

The moment doesn’t feel like an epiphany nor a violent strike of comprehension, for Andrew already recognizes this truth down to the marrow of his bones: those two babies love instinctively, with no trace of the hunger or the cruelty or the competition that once passed through the Cody bloodline like a dogma. But today, another certainty lodges inside him.

(They will take care of each other. Long after childhood. Long after schooldays and scraped knees and graduations. Long after him. Long after you.)

Crossing the grass to reach them, you are laughing and weeping at once just as Juliet clasps Oliver’s hand to pull herself upright once more, determined to strive for another step now that she knows someone will always turn back for her, help her stand, and kiss the tears from her cheeks. ────────── You blessed the daylight hours and its share of new adventures with the babies, but you blessed the dusk as well and its silence, minus the occasional muted creak of the wood. Today was one of those. Stretching across the mattress on your stomach, ankles kicking lazily in the air and your phone illuminating your face in the dimness, you were scrolling through the hundreds of shots accumulated over the last months.

There was one of Andrew that you adored, with his skateboard in the backyard, sunlight striking the droplets of sweat on his shoulders while he pushed wet hair away from his forehead, Juliet and Oliver sat on the grass applauding and beaming, cheeks covered in watermelon juice. Another, of the twins at the beach for the first time, seawater kissing their ankles while they stared at the Pacific with wonder in their gaze, grasping perhaps the immensity of the world and what it had to offer. Then, came the blurry selfie Deran had sent from Hawaii during a surfing contest, Adrian tucked beneath his arm with matching smiles at the camera, all bronze skin and ocean-light and felicity (even if you had suspected this journey to be more of the ‘elope’ sort).

Andrew entered the bedroom noiselessly, enough that most people wouldn’t have noticed him at all, yet your body recognized him instantly, attuned to his presence through an arcane instinct that had only sharpened with time up until even the quietude between you had become its own dialect.

“How are the babies?” you whispered, locking your phone.

“Sleeping,” he answered.

Your grin widened as you placed it onto your bedside table. “And Craig?”

Andrew’s voice remained perfectly deadpan as he repeated, “Sleeping,” which made you snort underneath your breath as you ducked your head in the pillow.

Craig had arrived three days ago in his truck with a duffel bag, two new plushies for the babies, and the vague announcement with a rueful smile that he ‘needed a break before he lost his fucking mind’ which translated after further interrogation from you (and beer bribery), into Renn, his everlasting on and off girlfriend, taking Nick away after a fight for an undetermined amount of time, ending up in Craig realizing that silence in his place felt less like peace and more like desertion. And Andrew, who loved with an absolute loyalty, hadn’t even required the explanation to let him stay there.

You finally turned your face as he got to the bed. (fuck. there remained moments where the sight of him still struck you with the force of kismet itself. as if the universe had aligned centuries ago solely so this exact man would one day walk to you in soft sweatpants after checking on your children.)

Sliding beside you on the bed, one leg slipping between yours while his palm rose to cradle your cheek, his thumb brushed below your eye before leaning down to press a slow kiss onto the skin just above your armpit, inhaling deeply after in the manner he perpetually did when he sought comfort from your very existence, as though you were the finest ambrosia and he could survive solely from breathing you in.

“Do you think he’ll be fine here?” he whispered, concern threading the question while his lips lingered against your skin.

Your gaze found his – those hazel eyes that had spent years, decades, trying to aid his brother with the drugs’ issues and still petrified that he could fall back in this trap. “Well…” Your fingers drifted into the curls at the nape of his neck. “Deran agreed that he needed the change of scenery with Renn and Nick gone and everything, so what better than here? Where he has us.”

Andrew exhaled leisurely. “Yes, I know, but-”

“But you don’t want me taking care of him on top of the rest,” you cut in knowingly, amused when his expression betrayed that you were correct. You kissed the top of his head. “Craig, and I know this might shock you, is technically a grown man.” You continued, “And anyway, when was the last time he actually did something catastrophically stupid since the twins were born?”

Andrew looked up at you with one eyebrow raised so high it nearly vanished beneath his curls. “Their birthday,” he replied without blinking. “When he tried hitting on the princess.”

An astonished laugh bolted out as you rolled suddenly until his back hit the mattress so you could hide your face in the crook of his neck while his arms wrapped around your waist. “Okay,” you wheezed between giggles. “So we keep all the princesses of Ojai far from him.” Andrew’s chest vibrated beneath your cheek with reluctant amusement.

You pushed yourself up onto one elbow, fingertips drifting absentmindedly along the broad place of his chest and arms, tracing veins, freckles, and all the familiar geography you could navigate blindfolded now. “Craig loves being here,” you added quietly. “And he needs support right now.” Your thumb traced over the curve of his collarbone. “That’s what families do, Andy. Helping each other. So we help him.”

A small smile appeared at the corner of his mouth, devastatingly beautiful. “I love you,” he rasped. “Have I said it enough today?”

You pretended to consider it seriously. “Oh, I don’t know…One more probably wouldn’t hurt.”

He raised his head, mouth finding yours with this particular kind of tenderness that bordered close to worship – your own, modern-day armorist. “Love you, Mrs. Cody,” he whispered against your parted lips.

Smiling into the kiss, you responded, “Love you, Mr. Cody.” You settled against his chest fully, head rising and falling with each of his breaths while his fingers wandered absently along your spine, the rhythm nearly enough to lull you to sleep. Nearly. For a thought had been sitting internally all day long, growing larger each and every hour till it became impossible to ignore anymore.

Eventually, you mumbled into the quiet, “I was thinking today.”

You didn’t require to view his features to hear the smirk in his voice. “Dangerous.”

“Hey!” you exclaimed while pinching his side sufficiently hard to make him laugh breathlessly.

“Sorry, sorry,” he surrendered, raising both hands. “I’m listening.”

You bit his shoulder lightly in retaliation before speaking once more. “I was watching the kids this morning.” Andrew hummed, his palms returning to your waist. “They were playing together, and laughing and…” You took a big breath. “And I started thinking that maybe…maybe they could have another little playmate.”

The reaction below you was instantaneous. Andrew froze as though even his heartbeat had ceased and inch by inch, his hands slid to your shoulders, elevating you to search your face directly with wide, startled eyes, attempting to decipher whether you were serious or teasing or somewhere in between. “You…” His throat worked visibly. “You’re serious?”

You wrapped your hands around both his biceps, basking in the strength displayed underneath the pads of your fingers and the prominent veins running along his forearms. “Very.”

“I thought we said-”

Tongue prying open his mouth, you swallowed the argument before it fully formed while his arms slid downward to cup your ass under the sleep shorts you wore, body responding prior to his brain managing to reorganize itself, a low sound spilling out of his lips.

“I know what we said,” you smiled once you finally pulled back, your forehead resting against his as you wetted your eyes in an exaggerated plea. “But are you really gonna make your wife beg for another baby?”

Andrew sighed, the kind coming from a man recognizing his defeat in a discussion before it properly began. “What if they’re twins again?” he asked in silent acquiescence.

A delighted grin spread across your face as you sat up enough to tug your shirt over your head. “Then we’ll have two beautiful sets of twins!” His eyes darkened as they trailed all along your exposed skin, briefly closing as you reached for the hem of his next, dragging it off while he lifted his arms to help you remove it.

“And anyway…” you added brightly, hands traveling to his sweatpants, “isn’t it nice to make them?” ────────── It’s six-thirty in the morning and Andrew, no matter how much he has sought for it all night, can’t summon sleep, lying flat on his back beside you while the pale indigo glimmer of Ojai commences to filter through the curtains, his gaze concentrated on the ceiling while his thoughts run in endless circuits that refuse to die down no matter how he attempts to organize them.

(The lunches are packed. He has prepared them last night after dinner. Apples slices soaked in lemon juice so they don’t brown. Sandwiches cut diagonally. Vegetables arranged in separate containers because Juliet dislikes when different textures touch. Their coats await by the entrance beside their shoes, laces loosened. The backpacks are ready. Folders checked. Four times. Extra clothes packed in case of accidents. Emergency contact sheet verified. One. Two. Three. Four. He counts the rhythm of your breathing.)

His gaze flicks to the alarm clock on your bedside table, checking how many minutes have passed. 6:32. (Which means that if they wake at six-forty, breakfast can begin by seven, teeth brushed and dressed by seven-thirty, shoes on by seven-forty-five…)

Your fingertip presses suddenly on his jaw, redirecting his face toward you before the spiral can fully root. “Why so grumpy?” you whisper sleepily.

Andrew exhales through his nose, turning his head to look at you fully. “Do you think they’re ready?”

Your smile arises in the twinkling of an eye, fond with that effortless confidence he has so long exerted himself to comprehend and memorize. “Honey,” you reply, inching closer beneath the blankets, “they’ve spent all summer waiting for today.”

“I know.” His brows furrow farther. “I know, but I’m still…” The sentence evaporates halfway through and he opts for a sigh as a substitute. “What if they don’t make friends?”

You study him for a few breaths. “Are you afraid they won’t make friends,” you ask prudently, “or that Juliet won’t?”

The accuracy of the questioning lands with precision – a dart right in the bullseye – for yes… yes, that’s exactly it. At first it had been in the little things, habits easy to dismiss individually: how Juliet lined her toys in rows before playing with them, crying if someone moved an object out of the pattern, how loud sounds startled her into silence rather than tantrums, how she observed strangers instead of speaking to them, preferring the company of the animals at the neighboring farm.

But as she grows, the resemblance deepens beyond those peculiarities into something far more profound, till Andrew can recognize the architecture of his own mind inside hers, every similitude accompanied by visions of what it was like for him to grow up deeming your natural way of being as a flaw awaiting to be corrected.

(What if the other children notice? They are like wolves scenting blood. One. Two. Three. Fou- What if they mock the way she pauses before answering? What if they shove her aside because she doesn’t laugh at the right moment? Bad thoughts. What if they make her feel strange? Calling her weird. Or a freak. Broken. What if she comes home one day carrying the same shame, he spent half his life swallowing whole?)

He realizes too tardily that a portion of his relentless intrusive thoughts escaped aloud in a fractured soliloquy when your hand settles over his chest, thumb caressing above his heartbeat. “Sorry,” he mutters, clenching his hand four times in a row. “But I just…” He swallows with difficulty. “I want people to be gentle with her, you know? Don’t want her feeling wrong.”

The tenderness in your face aches worse somehow, as if you had mapped the labyrinthic path of his fears and entered it willingly, prepared to sand down the sharpest edges inside his soul with the same patience and devotion he uses on warped wood in the workshop until splinters transform into silk beneath his hands. You lean forward, brushing a kiss on his shoulder, followed by another at the base of his throat. “Yes, I know. And that’s why…” One finger lifts. “We’re starting with half-days.” An additional finger. “And we already talked with the teacher.” A third final one. “And you checked the background of every member of the staff. Twice.”

Andrew’s eyes narrow faintly. “You weren’t supposed to know.”

A grin spreads across your face. “Oh, I’m very aware of that.” You look unbearably pleased with yourself and Andrew desires nothing more than to mark love bites all along the delicate curve of your throat to make you confess how, when you add, “Craig can be a real rat when rightly bribed.”

He rubs a hand over his face, exhaling a long tired breath. “And he sold this information in exchange for…?”

“Watching The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives with beer and pizza.”

“Right. Of course.” The words leave him impassively, so much that you laugh, incandescent in the dawn light, with a pillow mark onto the cheek, all messy and Elysian at once, leaning forward to kiss him languidly – the sort that mutes the interference in his head better than counting ever does.

Rapid footsteps erupt without warning down the hallway. “One…” you murmur against his lips who bloom with a smile. “Two-”

The bedroom door bursts open before you can attain three. “Mommy! Daddy! It’s today!” Oliver launches himself on the bed with absolutely no regard for possible body damage or bed resistance, bouncing onto the mattress while Andrew instinctively makes a barrier with his arm between his son’s limbs and your ribs. Juliet, who arrives a heartbeat later, chooses another route and climbs with deliberate care, knees digging into the blankets before she folds herself right against his chest with a sleepy pout aimed toward her brother.

“Ollie!” she scolds, voice still thick with residual fatigue. “Stop! You’re gonna fall!”

You catch Oliver’s wrists mid-bounce before the prophecy turns into reality. “Okay, okay!” you laugh. “The little monkey can stop his acrobatics!”

Andrew brushes a curl away from Juliet’s face, pressing a kiss onto the crown of her head, breathing in the scent of her strawberry shampoo. “Pancakes?” he asks, to which they both cheer like it’s Christmas morning.

You shake your head, lowering your voice into a conspiratorial tone. “Better hurry before Uncle Craig wakes up and steals all of them.”

“No!” both twins cry in horror.

 “And don’t wake your sister!” you call after them while their footsteps thunder away down the hallway in sync with Oliver running too fast and Juliet shouting at him to slow down, allowing for silence to return after the storm.

For a second, Andrew lingers there, observing the doorway they disappeared through, a sentiment coiling in his chest at the reminder that there was once a version of him, years ago, convinced that children would fear him, that fatherhood would expose each fracture and ugliness inherited through Smurf’s blood. Yet…now his mornings begin with babies racing to the two of you, for excitement has to be shared with parents first.

Stealing one more peck from you before he can drown too deeply in his mind, Andrew pushes aside the blankets. “I should start making them now before it becomes war in the kitchen.”

“Good idea.” You stretch lazily, shirt riding up to expose patches of skin highlighted by the sunlight starting its ascent, and Andrew’s gaze catches there helplessly, dragging a hand over his face to remind himself of his initial mission. You go on your feet, smacking his ass as you pass behind him and whisper, “I’m gonna check on Evie,” the morning parting you into familiar rhythms.

The kitchen slowly fills with the scent of cooking, the butter sizzling on the pan while the twins are perched on the wooden counter chairs he finished building last month, their socked feet swinging beneath them while chatter overlaps between gulps of juice. Pouring pancake batter with concentration, Andrew makes sure that the circles are measured identically in size (half a ladle spread over two inches) before flipping them after counting till the perfect number, distributing evenly the number of chocolate chips on Juliet’s pancakes for the texture to not be ruined, and pre-opening in advance the syrup bottle for Oliver, who last time had covered the kitchen table with it.

(That doesn’t halt him from the usual ritual. Wiping the counter. Realigning the forks. Checking the stove knob. Twice. Not thinking about their school day. One. Two. Three. Four. He counts the sound of steps approaching.)

And indeed, when he throws a look mid-flip, you are back, holding Evie by the hand, the two-year-old girl still wrapped in sleepiness with her curls mussed and her tiger plush tucked firmly underneath the arm as she rubs her eyes with the back of her hand. “Look who decided to wish you a good first day at school!” you announce.

Juliet beams instantaneously, her entire face lighting from within in that manner that never fails to remind Andrew of stained glass catching the light. “Vee!” The youngest blinks at her sister from the safety of your leg. “Today you’re gonna be alone with mommy and daddy!” she explains while pushing her apple juice toward Evie once she gets settled into her highchair. “But it’s okay,” Juliet continues seriously, “Ollie and I will come back in…” She pauses to count slowly on her fingers, lips moving silently at each number. “…five hours.”

Evie stares at her hand a second, two, before raising her own with a grin. “Five!”

Oliver claps excitedly around a mouthful of pancake. “Yes, Vivi! Five!”

And for a few minutes, a tranquil ambience ensues, the twins absorbed by the food and their attempts to help their little sister grasp the notion of school. While so, Andrew moves around them to avoid all sorts of catastrophes that could potentially derail the whole schedule: cutting Oliver’s pancakes into small bites so he doesn’t choke or stuff it into his mouth at once, wiping a drop of syrup prior to reaching Juliet’s sleeve, checking Evie’s cantaloupe for signs that it went bad…

Heavy footsteps resonate down the hallway in long drags, Craig making an appearance despite the early hour, wearing a Javel-stained jogging pants and a faded Metallica shirt that has officially survived two decades in his company, long hair wild as he squints against the kitchen lamp.

“Well, well, well…” he yawns, stumbling in the room as he wraps each child into one crushing bear hug after the other, making them all giggle. “Look at my favorite little students.” His hands land heavily on Juliet and Oliver’s heads, ruffling their hair.

“Now listen carefully. School is really important. Your dad, Uncle Deran and I…” Craig trails off, just for a moment, ample for Andrew to register the flicker behind his brother’s grin, how his gaze drifts to the lunchboxes lined neatly at the corner of the counter, probably to the idea of the loving parents who made them – those ordinary things none of the Cody brothers ever possessed long enough to take for granted.

(They had jobs before they had homework. Learned additions and subtractions and divisions for them. Learned how to steal before history. Smurf necessitated arms more than report cards anyway. So, of course she agreed when Craig quitted to drive Deran around. When Deran stopped to surf. She knew her claws were confining them further into boxes.)

Craig scratches the back of his neck awkwardly, forcing the grin back into place. “We weren’t that good there. So you little gremlins better learn cool things for me, ‘kay?” Both kids nod – Oliver eagerly and Juliet seriously. “And if someone tries to give you shit-”

“Craig,” Andrew warns right away.

“-to bother you,” he corrects without missing a beat, “bite them and run.”

Both you and Andrew sigh simultaneously just as the children burst into laughter. “Craig.”

“Fine, fine! No biting.”

Despite himself, Andrew feels an odd warmth observing this scene unfold, for his younger brother has become woven to this house so tightly that occasionally he forgets there had ever been a period where Craig wasn’t ensconced somewhere inside, eating their food or teaching the children questionable life lessons and vocabulary.

(Three years ago all had still felt temporary. Deran and Adrian were still dividing their time between Oceanside and their new house in Santa Barbara. But not late after, the three Cody brothers had taken a decision. Selling Smurf’s house to severe the last rotten root their mother had left buried there. Renn left eventually too, their relationship collapsing underneath the weight of all the things neither of them knew how to mend, the custody allowing him to have Nick two weekends per month. And for a while…Craig had wandered in that old familiar way of his, with wide smiles to conceal the emptiness, with rowdy jokes to hide the terror of being alone.)

(Both of you had been so tormented by the possibility of relapse. So he had resided for days. Who became weeks. That turned into months. Until the children stopped asking when Uncle Craig was visiting and instead questioned when he was leaving. Afraid that ‘one today’ could turn into ‘today’. But for now…this place stays a haven for him. The first home constructed without Smurf evolving at the center of it.)

Eventually, breakfast turns into shoes and backpacks and repeated reminders to use the bathroom before departing, until all of a sudden…everyone is at the front door. Standing very still as you zip her green fleece jacket, Juliet’s fingers are clutched around the straps of her backpack, whispering something in your ear that makes you nod and whisper in return – an exchange completely out of Andrew’s earshot as he zips Oliver’s own jacket.

After hugs and promises to Evie of coming back soon, the twins are scooped up by Craig in one motion, shrieking with protest and laughter all the same. “Go make me proud, little Codys.”

Ushering them gently to the truck, Andrew helps his children climb up into the backseat with their bag nearly their size while you stand in the driveway, holding Evie against your chest and waving (staying back for the drop-off intentionally, giving him the space you know he needs for this part). He looks one final time in the rearview mirror, in time to register you mouthing ‘I love you’ to him.

The drive to school goes on in a strange sort of quiet, broken mostly by Oliver’s nonstop excitement that constantly reminds him of you, while Juliet stays unusually silent beside him, hands fidgeting with the hem of her jacket.

He clears his throat. “You know,” he starts carefully, eyes flicking toward them through the mirror, “if either of you feels uncomfortable or scared or anything at all, you do like we told you with your mom and you warn an adult right away.”

“Yes, Daddy,” Oliver replies.

“And stay together,” Andrew continues, fingers whitening around the wheel. “Especially at recess. Protect each other.”

His son groans. “Daddy! We’re not babies!” Next to him, his sister stares out the window thoughtfully, though one hand has gripped to Oliver’s somewhere during the drive, reminding him Andrew of the past, when his Julia had looked for their comfort in spite of each and every issue that life had thrown at them.

By the time they reach the school parking lot, there’s already chaos everywhere with children darting between adults, teachers waving signs, car doors slamming…Andrew feels his pulse spikes at the overwhelming noise pressing against his skull.

(One. Two. Three. Four. Too many people. And germs. What if they get lost? What if someone pushes Juliet because she hesitates at the doorstep of the classroom? What if they are separated? Fuck, aren’t there scissors in class? He shouldn’t have said yes. Should have negotiated with you for one more year at home. No. They want to go to school. He needs to breath. In. Out. In. Out. His thoughts are making him think the worse. He knows that. It’s not real.)

Getting out first, he helps them both onto the sidewalk before kneeling in front of them to hug Oliver, small arms launching around his neck with ample force to knock him sideways. “Goodbye daddy! Love you!”

Andrew holds him tighter for a split second, kissing the top of his hair. “Love you too, Ollie.”

Then Juliet steps forward soundlessly, wrapping her arms around him too, more cautious than her brother, cheek pressing against his shoulder, both closing their eyes. Very softly, she whispers near his ear, “Everything’s gonna be okay, dad.” His throat tightens. “I love you.” There’s a moment where he is certain he is about to cry there, in front of his children’s school.

Instead, thinking about the terrible start it would give them, he kisses her forehead and responds, “I love you too, bug.” ────────── Beads of sweat kept dripping from his forehead, only to evanesce on the plywood surface of the ramp beneath him, absorbed by the sun-warmed timber as the wheels of the skateboard maintained their pattern (Back and forth. Back and forth.), one sufficiently repetitive that his mind began to forget the nightmare that had woken him up at dawn, now lost to the movement of his knees bending with the curve of the vert ramps.

(One. Two. Three. Four. Push. Lean. Turn. Repeat.)

He couldn’t recall when he had started – an hour ago mayhap? Two? Time behaved oddly once he entered this state, each pass across the half pipe aiding him to restrict the world to questions of balance and momentum. The only thing that his mind could pay attention to anyway, was the oath he had taken last night during dinner to the twins: a whole day dedicated to them before summer ended and their first year of school commenced, each choosing an activity without any compromise with the parents.

And now there he was, absolutely not terrified by the choice made by his son…skateboarding.

(Lie. Because boards broke bones. Ramps meant head injuries. Children were smaller and therefore closer to concrete. The helmet could loosen. The knee pads could slip. Wrists were fragile and teeth too. Every possible injury replayed. Bad thought. One. Two. Three. Four. But what if he hit his head wrong? No. Bad. Thought. In. Out. In. Out.)

When Oliver finally burst into the backyard a dozen of minutes later, carrying his own skateboard with two arms and a grin that seemed to be painful for his cheeks, Andrew crouched to recheck the equipment despite the certainty that you had done it inside the house: the helmet strap was secure, the elbow pads aligned, the shoelaces tied tightly to not get caught in the wheels…Then once more, for his fingers still felt uneasy.

“You remember how to fall?” he asked seriously.

Oliver nodded impatiently. “Roll on my shoulder.”

“And?”

“Protect the head.”

“And?”

“Don’t lock my arms.”

He exhaled slowly, kissing the helmet as he lifted him to get on the half pipe. “Good.” Then, because he realized how he sounded, added, “I’m proud of you.”

The first few attempts remained hesitant, wobbling a little till finding balance as he rolled at the center of the ramp where it was flat, Andrew hovering beside him, hands close enough to catch without actually touching, every muscle inside his body wound tight with vigilance. And despite himself and the panic scratching at his ribs, another memory bled through the present: you, six years ago, laughing breathlessly in the skatepark of Oceanside as he lingered the same way, pretending stillness while internally cataloguing every possible angle you could fall from.

“I look stupid!” you had complained with a sigh.

“You’re fine.”

“I’m not fine! This is deeply humiliating. I can barely stay upright and there are twelve-year-olds doing tricks behind me! Tricks, Andrew!”

“You’re doing good.” He had attempted to comfort you while swallowing his smile – a futile endeavor.

(Back then, in the halcyon days, the skatepark had been its own country. A refuge. An excuse to steal a handful of hours with you every week to be hidden from the rest of the world. In a bubble remote from the jobs and the parties and the weight of being a Cody. Just two souls building a series of moments that neither realized would become a lifetime.)

But alas, like often, the memories turned sour.

(Because the warehouse happened. The instant where he had turned back and discovered what a world without his other half inside it felt like. What came after had never entered the ledger of his atonements and the men he executed never joined the procession of his sins. The blood, the wails, the fire he left behind…none of it visited him at night. There was no remorse. None. Not when he could still picture you on that chair, bounded, the sight carved with a precision no knife could rival. Time softened many wounds. But not that one.)

His jaw tightened unconsciously as Oliver rolled past him. (No. Not today. One. Two. Three. Four. He refused to let that memory spread its poison to the present.) So, Andrew set himself into motion, skating next to his son, who laughed every time he managed a smooth turn, matching his pace.

“Very good,” Andrew called.

Oliver beamed of pride at the compliment, dimples testifying for it. “Really?”

The approving reply didn’t even emerge from his mouth when the board under his son’s feet rolled in the wrong angle, making him crash sideways onto the ramp hard enough that the sound echoed throughout the yard. For one horrifying second, he was transported once more into the past: to you, crumpled against the concrete of the skatepark, blood running down your eyebrow as the panic drowned his mind.

Dropping to his knees, he breathed a shaky “Oliver?” hoping for an answer – any would do – only to be met by…a laugh?

The little boy sat up with a delighted grin, knee pads half-twisted and wrist guards scraped. “Did you see that, dad?” he gasped. Andrew stared at him for a few more moments, his pulse hammering in his cranium as he managed to nod. Oliver pushed himself up on his feet, adjusting the pads and helmet with determination as he repositioned the board. “Again, please?”

Andrew exhaled slowly through his nose. “Okay. But-” He tried to swallow the lump in his throat and shook his head. “Nothing. You did great. Good reflex.”

So they persevered, side by side, Oliver’s confidence growing with each attempt, his son’s elation amply loud to extinguish the darker burning corners of his mind for a little while, correcting posture sometimes and praising always. By the time the back door slid open, Oliver was achieving nice turns on his own. Glancing up, Andrew caught your eyes as you stepped into the yard holding Evie with Juliet walking beside, carrying a cardboard box that contained the unfinished puzzle she had been focused on all week.

The three girls of his life sat in the grass, Evie taking up the space between your legs to observe her big sister with wide curious eyes, Juliet organizing the pieces into rows of colors next to you, explaining patiently why she had to start from the corners to work outside in. He found himself staring instead of skating for a moment, just a little brief millisecond dedicated to watching how the daylight turned your cotton blouse in a diaphanous-like material, how his daughters leaned on you, whose attention was divided between both without either feeling left alone.

(Two decades ago he had picked up – stolen – a copy of The Odyssey from a bookstore to impress Cath. He remembered attempting to read it in secrecy so no one could mock him. Reading about Odysseus crossing oceans for twenty years to return to his wife and son. And he had understood it…at least partly. But so many years spent fighting and surviving gods and storms and shipwrecks and monsters? The idea felt romantic like so many stories were. Romantic but chimerical.)

Now, as you sat in the backyard with the two little girls and his son skating two feet away, Andrew comprehended with clarity that twenty years wasn’t that impressive. That for a man like him, it could have been fifty years or two lifetimes and it wouldn’t have been relevant, for in the end he would have ended back in the arms of his own modern-day Penelope.

He was able to see Odysseus now – his desperation, his devotion – as there was no distance he wouldn’t travel to return to you, no storm he wouldn’t walk into and absolutely no length of time that would convince him to stay away.

The only story he had read and never grasped even to this day, was the one of Orpheus, the bard who had descended into the underworld to retrieve the woman he treasured, Eurydice, and nearly succeeded, being handed an impossible miracle only to turn around and lose her all over again. What Andrew knew deep to the marrow of his bones was that he would have kept walking.

(Even if his legs gave out. If every gate to heaven had closed and every mouth of hell opened. Even if every god had barred the way. He would have kept walking. Would have dragged himself over shattered glass and rusted nails before looking back. Crawled if he could not walk. Bled if he could not crawl. He would have burned anything, even himself, if there was nothing left to offer just to make sure you made it home.)

He didn’t know when his legs had brought him here, board in hand and the shadow of his body covering you from the sun, just that all of a sudden he had the urge to exorcise your demons long held sheathed under your smile. So, he held out one of his hands toward you without a word, only a stare that carried the unvoiced request.

“Honey…” you breathed, realizing what he was implying through the gesture.

“I know,” he whispered so no one else would hear. “But just-” He tilted his head to the board in his other hand. “Just try. Please.”

Eyes flickering to the object, then to the ramp, and quickly back to him, you ended up nodding prudently, a hint of apprehension in your eyes, taking his hand and getting up. You turned to Juliet and asked, “Jules, can you watch your sister one minute?”

The girl, who was already showing to her little sister how the pieces of her puzzle connected together, nodded seriously. “Yes mom!”

Guiding you to the half pipe, Andrew’s fingers hastily found yours to lace through as your breathing grew shallower the closer you got to it, face painted with fear of the last memory you had of being on a board – the one day who had tainted and altered the rest of your existence. Your hands trembled as you placed a foot atop of it. He stepped closer. “I’ve got you,” he murmured as a reassurance, squeezing your hand twice.

The words seemed to reopen a Pandora’s box of memories because without warning, he could smell Oceanside all over again: the hot asphalt of the skatepark, the lingering aroma of saltwater, the perspiration and sunscreen of your skin after a long day at work paired with his lesson…

You pushed forward precariously. The movement was uncertain, your body summoning up the mechanics but not yet trusting them, knees bent but the shoulders tense. “One,” Andrew counted, hand locked around yours as he matched every inch of progress. “Two…”

“Wow!” Oliver shouted, coming to a halt in the middle of the flat portion of the vert ramp, awe sparkling in his eyes. “Mom! You’re doing like me!”

“I know!” you laughed breathlessly, the sound carried away by the breeze as you pushed once more, forcing Andrew to loosen his grip as his fingers slid from your palm to your knuckles, then to the tips of your own digits, maintaining that last thread until he sensed you no longer needed him to hold on.

Only a few feet were bridged. Nothing that would impress anyone else. But he knew the truth there, – the one that untied the knot in his chest – knew that each accomplishment was a form of cure, a manner of refusing for the worst day of your life to have the final word. The ramp, the board, the wind…none of that belonged to it. You didn’t. And witnessing Juliet abandon all interest in the puzzle to clap enthusiastically for her mother, Evie copying her sister for the joy of it all, while you asked Oliver for advices, Andrew knew.

(Yes, now he understood Odysseus. The stubbornness required to keep choosing the same course no matter how many times the sea tried to draw him under. Because he had spent his own life treading water too. Smurf’s voice had been its own kind of siren song, pulling every one of her boys toward the rocks and convincing them that the wreckage was part of love. The violence, the cash, the substances…endless tides dragging them farther from the shore until Julia drowned. And Cath. And Baz.)

Long gone was the man who had been standing at the mouth of inferno, imploring fate to rewrite his prophecy, for his journey was over. His children were calling for him and the one woman he would spend a thousand lifetimes finding again and again was laughing in the noontide.

He was home in his Ithaca. - The afternoon unfolded far differently from the morning: there were no cheers this time, no wheels rattling on the plywood, no excited voice shouting to pay heed to another trick, only the quiet. Juliet was not the type of child who filled every corner with words. With her it was simple: she talked when she had something to say and remained silent when she didn’t. As surprising as it was for the people who didn’t know the five-year-old girl, Juliet wasn’t one for contrived niceties.

And Andrew…comprehended that. Perhaps a little too well. Therefore, that was why, walking hand in hand inside the neighboring farm, neither seemed to mind at the quietness surrounding them.

The owners of the farm, Rhonda and Diane, had never minded the presence of the family, especially not Juliet’s, who, with her wild auburn curls, had spent so much time among the animals over the years that she had become part of the landscape herself – a small shadow drifting between the paddocks and the fences with pockets brimming with carrots and apples.

Glancing down at her as they followed the dirt path cutting through the property, her hand curled tighter around two of his fingers as her gaze remained fix somewhere ahead, studying the movements of the animals. However, after a while, Andrew noticed her pace changing, and at first it was subtle…until it wasn’t. Her legs accelerated with determination, a crease appearing between her brows and her mouth tightening in an air that he recognized as frustration – one directed at her body for not quite keeping up with the speed she sought after.

This facility of reading her every micro expression was mainly imputable to the fact that he had lived with similar ones since he was born: this irritation addressed to the self, the common agitation when not being able to catch if a stranger talking was joyful or sad…But here, all was straightforward.

Without a word, he bent down and scooped her effortlessly, the frown vanishing in a flash to make room for her smile as she looped both arms around his neck, cheek resting on his shoulder as if she had secretly been hoping for this exact outcome. “There you are my bug,” he murmured, running a hand four times alongside her back.

Her nose scrunched. “I’m not tired, dad.”

“I know you are not.”

“So why?” she asked, dragging the last word with a pout that resembled too closely to your own – the best kind of weapon there was against Andrew’s heart.

He looked at her, stare meeting stare. “I really want to see the horses too,” he replied (Not quite lying since watching the horses meant watching his daughter near them. And he really wanted to be witnessing another one of those moments.)

The grin she gave him in response was worth all the stains of mud he would end up with at the end of the day on his clothes and shoes (Yes, he realized what that meant. Stiff-bristle brush. Cold water. White vinegar. Fifty minutes. Rinse. Twice for good measure. If it was not clean by then…He couldn’t do it three times. Odd number. So he would do it four. But there was no price he wouldn’t pay for his daughter.)

Together, they continued until the horse paddock came into view, and even prior to their arrival at the fence, one particular horse lifted its head from the grass and began trotting toward them – it was the yearling appaloosa that Rhonda and Diane had let Juliet named personally after viewing one of your childhood films that had made the children jolly almost all the way whereas he had escaped to the bathroom twice to hide his tears.

Juliet straightened in her father’s arms. “Arthax!”

The horse neighed as they approached, Andrew lowering his little girl to the ground before she darted away, producing apples form the pockets of her coat, to the great pleasure of the equine who accepted the offering enthusiastically by licking the fruit clean from her hand, earning a giggle from her mouth. The sound filled Andrew somewhere deep in the chest and made him smile as well.

Reaching through the rails, the pads of her digits brushed through the horse’s dark mane before moving to stroke the velvety muzzle. “So soft,” she whispered, and it took a few seconds for Andrew to absorb that she was not addressing herself or the horse but him, like she couldn’t help but share this observation.

Andrew crouched beside her. “Yeah?”

She nodded seriously, like presenting the most essential facts to adore this horse as much as she did – narrowed down to one undisputable argument. “He is very soft.”

It was in those instants that he wished for his daughter to always know what he had spent most of his life wondering: that she was never too much, or wrong, or difficult to love.

(And it was also in them that Andrew saw an uglier truth. Because every day he spent loving his children made it harder to excuse what had happened to him. To understand. Harder to forgive it. He would cross oceans for his son. Would burn kingdoms for his daughters. So what did it signify when the woman who was supposed to love him and his siblings had so often chosen not to even cross the room?)

Arthax wandered away and back to the rest of the herd, interrupting Andrew’s bitter thoughts just as Juliet waved goodbye at the animal, assuring herself that he was returning to his mother before taking once more her father’s hand to go visit the goats – which habitually consisted in her attempting to persuade them not to chew her coat in exchange of carrots. Next were the chickens. Then the geese. And the cows.

Staying beside her through all of it and only intervening when she required it, Andrew sighted, as he looked up at the sky, that the afternoon was giving way around them. The light that had painted the paddocks in gold when they arrived was now deepened into ambery shades, long shadows spreading across the farm and cooling the air. And besides, Juliet’s energy had ebbed by then, at least enough that her steps grew slower and closer to his side.

When they reached the gate leading back to the road, Juliet halted her walk, Andrew following the action. She stared down at the dust gathered at the tip of her shoes, twisting a button of her coat between her pointer and thumb before tilting her head back to him. “Daddy?”

He hummed. “Yeah?”

She looked down at their joined hands. “Thank you for today. It was really funny.” The words arrived quietly, earnest.

Getting on his knees until they were eye-level, he replied, “You’re right. It was funny.”

Juliet smiled, a small one at a corner of her mouth at first, that quickly widened across her face, and before he could add another sentence, she stepped forward, wrapping her arms around his neck. Andrew’s breath stalled. Instantly, he folded around her, a hand settling between her shoulder blades while the other cradled the back of her head, gathering her close against his chest and ignoring how her curls tickled his jaw. His eyes drifted shut. “Thank you,” he murmured, repeating her words back to her.

(Thank you for allowing him the privilege of being her father. For the laughs, the questions, the hugs. For the miracle that transformed a man who once believed himself unworthy of love into the recipient of it. For all of it. For her.)

For another few moments, neither moved and the farm behind them set into its evening sounds, full of crickets singing in the distance and horses galloping. Andrew remained there, holding his daughter, wishing that he could preserve moments as beautiful as this in the same manner people pressed flowers between pages. ────────── “And here,” Craig announces, with in his hand a camcorder that should reside in another century, its red recording light blinking every two seconds, “we have the disgustingly beautiful married couple in their natural habitat that you also call ‘mom and dad’.”

You don’t even bother to look up from the birthday cake as you let out a sigh. “Craig.”

“Observe carefully Evie,” he continues as though you haven’t spoken, the noise of the zoom lens whirring through the kitchen as you adjust the final decorations on the birthday cake and straighten the seven candles, “when you’ll watch this in eleven years, I want you to know that your mother has spent three hours making this cake abomination.”

You seize the cake knife in hand and feign to threaten Craig. “This what?” you banter, still attempting to retain an ominous edge.

Andrew stares from the counter he has been wiping for what must be the third time in the past ten minutes, hazel eyes narrowing toward his brother with a lethal quietude – ample that Craig visibly reconsiders his life choices. “Masterpiece,” he corrects without delay but his older brother keeps glaring. “Actually, I would like the camera to officially record that this is possibly the greatest cake ever made by human hands.” Only then does Andrew nod and returns to wiping the cloth over the marble. “Thank God,” Craig addresses the camera. “I almost died. Evie, use that stare when you’re older if you want to scare men.”

You snort despite yourself while across the kitchen, Andrew finishes with the countertop and folds the cleaning cloth and gloves with his habitual precision before walking up behind you to throw crumbs into the trash. His other hand finds the small of your back as he passes, fingers brushing there in the silent grammar of your marriage – like when he pulls out the chair for you to sit, check whether you have eaten, make himself useful afore words are necessary. The kiss on your shoulder ensues a second later, all swift, delicate and natural as breathing.

Craig groans. “Oh come on! Seriously! I hate you two,” he proclaims to the camera with amusement wrapped in the complaint. “You’re absolutely sickening. Look at them, Vee.”  He points at the two of you. “Look at your parents! Do you know what this leads to?”

“Don’t.”

“Of course you know. Cause when you’ll watch this, you’ll be eighteen and we won’t have to talk about ‘the bees and the birds’ anymore,” he keeps going, ignoring your word of warning. “So if you end up with twelve more siblings by the time you have access to those images, this is why.”

Andrew and you answer at the same time. “No.”

“That’s exactly what people say and then they still have another baby.”

Shaking your head, you reply, “We are not having another baby.”

“Isn’t it what you said after the twins?” Craig asks rhetorically, zooming even more on the area where your faces are, only to be met by two pairs of eyes rolling in perfect synchrony, the coordinated movement only making the younger brother burst into laughter.

(there are days where you ponder if Craig will still be the same at eighty, sitting on a porch somewhere with silver hair, a beer balanced on the armrest and making awful sex innuendos to whoever poor person happens to be trapped withing hearing distance. realistically he will probably end up the type of man who flirts shamelessly with every woman at the retirement home so…the answer is yes. some people grow older and then there’s Craig.)

Outside, the garden has become its ordinary carnival of noise, which signifies that Adrian and Deran have cast aside any hope for serenity while lying on the lounge chairs, the children now sprinting through the yard in search of one another while Bodhi, the two men’s labrador, follows Oliver around in ecstatic circles with his tail whipping the air and looking on the verge of fainting from joy whenever he gets pet. Even Nick, who was pretending an hour ago of being too old at thirteen to play hide-and-seek, is now grinning as he helps Evie locate the best hiding spot available and lets himself be discovered by her every single time.

Arriving the previous week at Craig’s house, only two streets away, for the holiday season, Nick – with the self-conscious posture of a teenager trying hard to act older – had been nothing but helpful, always saying yes. He has said yes to hang the decorations with Andrew and you the night before, carrying boxes without being asked or complaining, to cheer louder than anyone during Juliet’s latest show-jumping competition with Arthax, to accompany Oliver to the much bigger skatepark in Ojai to show him additional tricks, and has even accepted to watch The Parent Trap with Evie three times in seven days, learning for the birthday girl the secret handshake.

There is a kindness in him that echoes Craig’s so faithfully it makes your chest ache, because for all his jests, eyerolls and perpetual endeavors to appear unaffected, Craig has always loved people with his entire heart. He simply mastered early on the art of disguising it as irritation, to wrap concern in teasing and devotion in complaints. Nick, however, has not picked up that trick.

“Found you!” Evie screams outside while Nick clutches his chest and collapses into the grass, making her and the twins giggle at their cousin’s theatrics.

Craig’s voice pulls you back. “Earth to birthday mom.”

You blink. “Hm?”

“The cake.”

Glancing down at the finished product with its heart-shaped form covered in chocolate fudge frosting and ornamental stars, you wipe your hands on a dish towel. “Well…I think it’s good,” you announce before pointing a finger at Craig, who is still holding the camera. “Now go outside and film there instead of here. We’re bringing the cake.”

“Sure I can’t have a few more scenes of your mating rituals?” he asks with a smirk.

“If you don’t go film your niece in the next thirty seconds-”

Craig clasps his heart in mock scandal and comments to the camcorder. “Fine! Fine! I am leaving the kitchen. But my niece has to know it was not without protest.” And right before stepping through the backdoor he adds, “Just don’t conceive in the kitchen!”

You open your mouth to respond, armed with at least three different threats involving the cake slicer and the garbage disposal, but he is gone before you can deliver any of them, wearing the delighted expression of a man who has survived another encounter with your husband’s deathly stare. For a second, the kitchen falls blessedly quiet and you see in the corner of your eyes Andrew, one hand coming up to pinch the bridge of his nose “Is it just me or is he getting worse with the years?” you ask, incapable of dissimulating the snort.

Andrew nods. “He is. Still don’t know how we put up with him here for so long.”

Chuckling, you reach for the box of matches during which time Andrew prudently slides both hands beneath the cake plate, counting under his breath to overcome the wave of pressure (about the precarious equilibrium of it? or about the seven candles placed there for your youngest? knowing him, it can very well be both.). Catching rapidly, the small flames dance on his face and accentuate his piercing hazel eyes, not fixed on the cake but on you with the attention of a person who has spent a decade cataloguing the shape of your existence and still hasn’t grown tired of it. “There,” you murmur with a smile.

“It’s perfect,” he replies with a raspy tone, the word not directed to the baked good.

Shaking your head, you rise onto your toes and press a kiss to his mouth – a peck at first, only for him to tilt his head into it, stealing another few seconds until permitting you to pull away. “Come on Mr. Cody, let’s not make the kids wait.”

His gaze trails all along your face, nodding before he walks a step behind you with the cake while you hold the door open for him. The song is all messy and pure at once, with Craig who can’t resist harmonizing in the worst possible key, and Adrian, sticking his tongue out to make Evie break the feigned solemn air she is taking of a princess surrounded by her court. Placing the birthday cake diligently in front of her, Andrew adjusts its position by less than an inch to the left before deeming it acceptable.

(you can bet good money that he just centered it with the wood grain of the table and his daughter’s chair.)

He steps back, hand finding yours just as the little girl closes her eyes, pressing her lips together and making a wish, blowing out the candles in one determined breath. The table erupts and for one picture perfect moment, while everyone celebrates, you look at Andrew – whose eyes are already fixed on your face. Judging by the smile spreading across his face, you suspect that whatever Evie has just wished for…he is thinking that he already got his.

Later, after the cake, the sticky fingers and the smear of frosting on Oliver’s wrist that Andrew notices and wipes before it can spread all over, it’s time for the gifts. Without being solicited, Nick glides by her side into the role of assistant, retrieving each package and handing it over, even if the first one necessitates also the help of Deran, considering the size of it. Not wrapped in paper, his and Adrian’s present is a hand painted surfboard, spattered in shades of bright blues, yellows and the names of the family intricately hidden in the patterns.

“You have the best reason to visit us in Santa Barbara for the summer,” Adrian smiles, assisting to lift it up so she can observe it closely.

Deran adds. “Yeah, we can teach you properly with your own board now.”

When it gets place to the side, Evie launches herself at both of them, thanking like she has been gifted the moon and promising to listen to her uncles when she’ll be there. Craig’s present is next, and somehow, even prior to the wrapping paper being ripped out, you just know that a disaster is coming, for his face bears the gleeful guilt of a man who has set a spark and is now awaiting for everyone else to contemplate the fire. The box reveals a drum set scaled for a child, which makes you briefly consider murder with a cymbal.

“Craig,” you articulate very quietly, concealing it with a smile and a thumbs-up directed at your youngest, “you know that I hate you, right?”

He raises his hands and shrugs, amused. “I know, I know…But what can I say? She has rhythm and I’m nurturing it! Hey, Evie!” He leans toward her and stage-whispers, “You should play it on Sunday mornings! It’s the best hour.”

(years ago you aspired to murder your brother-in-law with the closest heavy object on behalf of leaving you in the middle of a party to snort drugs so…poisoning him here would only be a ‘long-time coming’ situation, right?)

Nick delivers his present with less fanfare: a massive science kit, seeing that he heard her claiming to be the next astronaut to go walk on the moon, then Oliver, who gives her a set of acrylic paints, that he had been saving up for since she eyed it up through the shop window. Evie lights up at it, at being seen for all the things that she is: a surfer, a drummer, a scientist and a painter – young enough to believe that she can be all of them at once. Juliet hands over a bracelet she spent weeks making herself, beads spelling out ‘Vee’, accompanied by a journal with a lock, hugging her sister tightly and murmuring something in her ear that makes her grin.

Then, Andrew disappears briefly, not without squeezing your hand first. What he brings out from the garage is so large that everyone falls silent…even Craig. It’s a dollhouse. Not a flimsy toy-store version, but an entire miniature house built entirely by him, with walls painted by hand and stairs and small furniture and even a room upstairs that has bookshelves no bigger than your palm.

Evie’s mouth falls open. “Dad…”

Andrew clears his throat, placing it next to her to avoid showing how much the moment affects him, not because his children shouldn’t see him cry – he has spent many years teaching his son that tears are not to be mistaken with weakness. And you know it has nothing to do with Deran or Craig either, if anything, they would comprehend better than anyone: they had endured the same house, the same mother. But still, there are days like this one where you can witness the truth hidden beneath his features and eyes, this small part of him that whispers in his ear that it’s never meant to last. “I made it for you,” he ends up saying.

She jumps into his arms, her father now smiling through the impact while she wraps both arms around his neck, and you can see the way his face softens when the devil on his shoulder lifts its claws to let him appreciate the embrace.

Stepping forward last, you place in Evie’s hand her photo album, tied with a silver ribbon. When she opens it, her hands move page by page with growing wonder, each spread filled with pictures and notes in your handwriting. Among them: Andrew as a child, circa 1981, caught in one of the rare photographs where he is smiling, the rest of the frame meticulously trimmed away since it belonged to a history none of the children cared to revisit (a point they had made to Andrew adamantly), leaving only him and a silver glitter inscription, Your cute dad. There is also one of you with a missing tooth and a teddy bear clutched tight to your chest, annotated with Your mom who always wanted a hug.

Another picture of Andrew and you, prior to even being a couple, standing next to each other at some party Craig had forced his older brother to attend. You are cradling a beer and smiling at something he has just said while Andrew, true to form, wears his usual stern expression but yet, the image betrays him: his body angled toward yours, attention fixed solely on your lips, a softness in the eyes that makes it obvious – as clearly as if it had been underlined – that he had already fallen long before confessing it on the parking lot of Deran’s former bar.

Evie’s ultrasounds, Juliet and Oliver asleep on either side of your belly, there is even a picture of her in the crib the day she was born, another of Andrew holding her for the first time, face wrecked with awe, the twins on your bed as you show them their new sister, and a few sheets later one of Evie perched on Craig’s shoulder while he wore heart-shaped sunglasses in pure cool uncle spirit while she ate ice cream.

A page. Then another. She keeps turning them long after the others have moved on to finish their plates and drinks, and although he participates when spoken to, nods when Craig talks, answers when Oliver asks a question…you notice that part of Andrew never truly leaves Evie, his gaze returning to her over and over with the same certainty a compass returns north.

When the party finally winds down and Craig, Deran, Adrian and Bodhi pile back into Craig’s truck for the night, Nick preferring with his usual enthusiasm to stay for a sleepover with his cousins, you find Evie sitting on the sofa, album open across her knees.

Her eyes are fixed on one of the wedding photographs. You set down the face product that you are about to apply on the coffee table to sit beside her. “What are you still doing up, Evie-Lou? Don’t you want to go with the others?”

“In a minute,” she says, without looking away.

You tuck a loose piece of hair behind her ear. “What is it?”

She frows faintly while still staring at the shot of you and Andrew outside the church after the wedding, his hands framing your face while you kiss. “If…If I tell you my wish,” she asks in a small voice, “is it true that it doesn’t come true?”

You smile and smooth your hand down her back. “Well, I’m your mom, so I’m certain that the stars would still make it happen.”

Evie glances toward the hallway to make sure no one else can hear her before leaning closer. “I wished for Uncle Craig to find someone who looks at him just like you look at Daddy.”

You throat contracts painfully, enough that you have to kiss the top of her head before answering. “That’s a very good wish.” Looking up at you, her eyes are soft with all the solemnity of a child asking the universe for help. “And I’m sure,” you add gently, “that one day your wish will come true.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.” You smile and press your lips once more to her hair. “Now go to bed. And don’t stay up too late with the others!”

She nods, tucking the album against her chest, but a moment later, right before she disappears in the hallway to join them, she throws you a grin, one that tells you in a second that she has absolutely no intention of following that instruction whatsoever. ────────── Andrew had assumed he could postpone this conversation for a few more years. Not forever, no, he had never been naïve enough to think that…but longer would have allowed him to pretend a while more. Long enough that the children would be older when the questions ultimately occurred, just enough that Her cursed name wouldn’t reverberate like a corpse dragged across the floorboards of the life he had devoted over a decade building with his own hands.

He had been reiterating the same novena since his children were born, an obstinate litany of avoidance to keep them safe and permitting him to form a world where no one had to know the woman whose acrimonious love wore the face of syrupy words and tight leaches. How five children had mistaken their fear for devotion. He almost convinced himself that because She was dead, that the years had gone by and that his own children had grown up far from Her damaging nature, then perhaps the past could remain where he had locked it away.

Instead, the assignment came home on a random Tuesday afternoon, folded into their backpacks on a poster of pastel paper with an instruction from their first-grade teacher that said ‘Write about the people who make up your family’. By the time the three children had spread out around the living room coffee table that afternoon, Evie on her knees with a bowl of crayons – too little for school but eager to prove her drawing skills – while Juliet sorted them for her by shade, Oliver leaning so far over the work that his tongue poked from the corner of his mouth in concentration, Andrew knew that the safe route was already long gone.

At first it was manageable, the children filling the branches they already were familiar with: mother, father, their uncles Craig, Deran and his husband Adrian, their aunt Julia…even Baz found a place there. Then came your mother and father, the ones you had spoken about so naturally over time that the twins had long ago realized how the shape of your grief had modeled your family map, with a mother who went among the stars, as you told them, when you were twenty-one and a father who later joined her.

Oliver had been the first to ask about his own branch, pointing at a blank space that Andrew filled in with little to no information. Colin. Dead preceding Andrew and Julia being born. Not a family name. Not even a photograph of him. A father known mostly through the hollow outline of what Billy painted about him, the kind of man whose life remained a mystery because the deeper parts had been buried in the fields with him and the war in his head.

Then Juliet, who had been coloring the trunk of the tree, lifted her eyes and asked her father the one question he had wanted to avoid. “What about your mom?”

His chest constricted, as though a hammer had installed itself directly atop his ribs, but he kept his voice neutral and expression meticulously composed. No, worse, he even smiled to not reveal the hurt lurking beneath it, not knowing whether, deep down, if it was for his own sake or Juliet’s, who observed the world the same manner he did: through collecting details, patterns, pauses and drawing conclusions from all combined.

“She was…” he began, but the sentence withered before it reached the air, like flowers wilting at the sound of Her name – vowels and consonants carved onto a monument he had spent so long striving to abrade into dust. “Her name was Janine Cody.” Saying it tasted rancid, like spending years building the Hanging Gardens of Babylon stone by stone, only to glance down and discover the soil beneath his nails still came from her tomb – the decaying body in his empyrean world.

Oliver wrote it down with application. “How do you spell Janine?”

He told him, then came the next question, and the next, and the next…Andrew kept going because if he stopped now, he was certain he might never start again. “When was she bo- October eleventh. Nineteen fifty-three.” The words were clinical, stripped of love, as though he were reading information from an old file instead of speaking about the woman who had raised him.

But still…the more interrogations came…the more the panic rose in him like the flood, and in the blink of an eye, he was up on his feet, excusing himself. The bathroom door shut behind him with a soft click, bracing both hands on the sink and bending his head down over the basin, eyes shut tight as his breath came unevenly through his nose and bile climbed in the throat. For a moment, all he could hear was the rush inside his ears and the numbers he forced himself to count since counting was still one of the few things left in the world he could trust when everything began to splinter and you were not there to reassure him.

(One. Two. Three. Four. She was dead. The children were safe. It was not Oceanside. You were not back in that house. She was dead. You never met her. One. Two. Three. Four. No. She had no right to come back. No right to be here. He didn’t want her name on their family tree. She was nothing. One. Two. Three. F-)

He splashed water on his face, keeping his palms on the cool porcelain long enough for the shock of the temperature to drag him back to the present, eyes open now toward his own reflection. He stared at the face he had inherited from the one person he didn’t trust, jaw tight, eyes too bright and the mouth set in that grim line he hated sighting on himself.

(One. Two. Three. Four. In. Out. In. Out. He counted the tiles. Four across. Four down. Good number. Even number.)

He remained in the room until the fear ceased asphyxiating quite so hard, unlocking your shampoo to inhale its familiar scent, fingers lingering on the fabric of your pajamas draped over the chair to seek reassurance in the proof of your existence. When he eventually made his way back, conscious that the storm was still inscribed on his face, he found the children exactly where he had left them: bent over their drawings and giggling about the shape of Juliet’s leaves.

Sitting down, Andrew only had to wait a minute before Oliver asked him, “Was she nice like Mommy?” and the question should have been simple to answer, but how could he explain to a six-year-old that the absence of kindness can still wear the face of a mother, can still feed her kids while teaching them how to shoot a gun or rob a place, calling it love.

Andrew swallowed before responding, and even then his voice came out rougher than intended. “No.”

“She didn’t comfort you when you had a bad dream?” A shake of the head. The boy’s brow furrowed, asking earnestly, “Help you with your homework?” Again, Andrew shook his head. “Sing you a song before bed and kiss you goodnight?”

Not knowing when the tears occurred, only that warm rivulets suddenly descended his face to drop onto his jeans, Andrew covered his mouth with one of his hands, trying and failing to keep himself and his sobs together because there once had been a time where the term mother had signified surveillance and the brutal requirements of being useful. Now there was a child, no, his child, who was born out of love, asking him whether that woman had even done the simplest sort of kind acts in the world, and every answer was no, no, no, while his eyes burned and the room went blurry around the rims.

The twins comprehended what he sought perhaps better than he did, for before he could speak again, and with no discussion, nor exchange of glances, Juliet arose from her kneeling position to walk to him, small arms reaching around his waist as Oliver followed right away, curling at the other side. Then, noticing that Evie was still at the table with a pencil in hand, staring with a confusion painted across her features, her sister lifted a hand and made a beckoning motion. The crayon was abandoned, rolling uselessly in favor of a group hug.

Oliver brushed his father’s back once, twice, three times (Odd number. In. Out.), replicating the gestures he had witnessed his parents do to the siblings whenever they had a bad dream or felt sad. Now he desired to return the favor. “It’s okay, daddy,” he whispered against his shirt, voice muffled. “If you want…” He paused, probably searching for a solution clever or large enough to fix whatever was wrong. “Mommy can sing you a song!”

“Yeah?” The sound that escaped Andrew was halfway between a laugh and a sob, pulling closer his three children until they were tucked against him. “Yeah. I’d love that.”

They stayed there, in a tangle of arms, for a while, letting the panic retreat like a tide moving away from the shore, up until Oliver tilted his face up into his father’s shirt and asked, in the softest voice, “Dad?”

“Hm?”

“You know how you always tell me we are safe?”

Andrew closed his eyes. “Yeah.”

“Well,” he said quietly, squeezing him harder. “You’re safe too.”

(He couldn’t utter a word. Couldn’t even inhale past the ache in his trachea. Safety had always been the thing he provided. The thing he assembled around you. Then around the children when they were born. Through the locks and the counted exits, the background checks and the emergency plans. Never once did he expect to receive it in return and still…he did. A decade ago in the dead of the night when you had comforted him after a nightmare, when he was so convinced that you saw him as nothing more than Craig’s brother. And every single day since, as long as it was passed in your company, he knew the sentiment could be found in your embrace. But here, now, safety came from his son.)

Later, much later, when the tears had long been eased and the room no longer felt like it was tilting around him, the children came back from school with their final version of the project. When he peered at the tree laid flat across the kitchen table, he went very still, for in the careful branches and colored leaves, there was no mention of Smurf. None. No name, no date, just an empty space.

And even though he recognized that this exclusion could never fully undo the corrosion of what had been done – the Cody brothers would forever bear those scars – Andrew also knew in that instant that the blight she thought she could pass through the bloodline hadn’t been invited onto that poster. Nor into their lives. That meant only one thing: the family was safe. ────────── “Wow, wait, wait, wait young lady!” you exclaim, the apple peeler stalling midway through the motion as your gaze lifts from the kitchen island and catches sight of Evie walking past the doorway. “Is it my dress?”

She stops dead in her tracks, offering a sheepish glance in return, one that does little to veil her guilt, particularly when framed by the telltale traces of your makeup on her face with the sweep of your mascara along her lashes and the tint of your lipstick adorning her mouth. “Mom, please,” she laments, stretching the first word out.

You lower the apple in your hand with painstaking slowness, allowing the silence to expand between you, loving nothing more than to drag her suffering another minute for the theatrics of it all. “That’s strange,” you muse. “I don’t remember saying yes to you borrowing my dress.”

“Oh, please, mom.” Her expression turns Andrew-like, the eyeroll clearly wanting to happen while every muscle in her face fights to maintain composure, leaving only her eyes to communicate the full extent of her exasperation. “You never wear it.”

You look up and down once more at the dress in question, with its soft white fabric and floating shape who conveys a whole string of memories with it. The last time you wore it was, what? Eighteen, maybe nineteen years ago? It had been for a party organized by Craig and Deran in the Oceanside house, your palms jittery from craving to store your sentiments for Andrew somewhere private and safe and covert from Craig’s loud interference, therefore placing it in the purchase of a new pair of gloves so he could scrub without tearing his skin. Party where the two of you had ended up sharing a bed since Craig had stolen the couch, pretending there was nothing already half-formed between you, that you were not standing on the edge of something.

(you can still recall knocking on his door. the linen fabric of the sheet. his tense body on the mattress as you had ached to touch him. the unbearable relief when you had held each other.)

Looking back at Evie, you exhale through your nose, covering the smile. “Fine. But don’t stain it and don’t rip it.”

She makes a strangled sound of gratitude and throws herself in your arms before you can brace, hugging you so tightly that the apple almost slips from your fingers. “Thank you,” she breathes into your shoulder. “I promise I’ll be careful.”

“Mh-hm.” You kiss the top of her head. “And don’t forget protections either.”

Pulling away with such speed and horror that you are on the brink of breaking the serious façade, she grimaces. “Okay, I’m leaving!”

You place the apple and its peeler back on the counter before following her to the doorstep as she grabs her handbag from the entry table. “I’m joking. But…not really. Don’t forget tha-”

“I know,” she cuts in quickly, reciting the list that she has heard so many times she can’t omit an element while lifting her fingers. “Condoms in the slip pocket. Pepper spray and spiked drink tests in the front one. If I don’t feel safe I call Dad.” She pauses after opening the door, one eyebrow raised in the exact same expression Andrew produces when he is being asked to tolerate nonsense. “Mom, you know it’s just a party at Shelly’s.”

You raise a finger at her in warning. “Exactly. It’s a party and you’re fifteen. I’m preparing for every scenario.” A car horn sounds outside, making Evie visibly perk up as you mouth, ‘Saved by the bell’.

“Okay that’s me!” she smiles, kissing your cheek and shouting to the rest of the house, “Bye Dad! Bye Ollie!”

You shake your head as she runs down to the vehicle where Areesha, her closest friend since fifth grade and drum lessons, awaits in the driver’s seat, one arm out of the open window while music erupts from the speakers. The second she notices you watching, she calls, “Good evening Mrs. Cody!” with the same cheerful politeness she has greeted you with for years now, ever since she was a ten-year-old girl nervously asking whether she could stay for dinner after practice.

“Good evening girls, be safe!” you reply, returning the wave as Evie slides into the passenger seat beside her. And that is the reason why your anxiety loosens its grip by a fraction. If your daughter is to be somewhere other than home tonight, well at least it’s with Areesha: the girl who spent half her childhood in your kitchen, who knows where the spare blankets are kept, cried in your arms after her first heartbreak and always texts when she arrives safely. There are few people you would entrust with your children, but Areesha has always been one of them.

Evie leans out of the window to wave one final time before the car pulls away from the curb while you watch the taillights disappear into the evening. Remaining there for a few more minutes, you breath the fresh air, noticing the shadow of Juliet appearing on the path that leads the house to the farm, still in her riding breeches and muddy boots, with the peaceful demeanor she wears every time she comes back from a few hours spent in the company of Arthax and the other animals, a place where nobody requires from her to be more than she is.

“Hi mom, Vee left?” she asks as she halts just outside the threshold, bending to remove her boots and lining them against the wall and alongside the outdoor carpet.

Helping her shrug off her equestrian quilted jacket that holds the scent of hay and sweat, you nod. “Yes. She’s staying over at Shelly’s.”

Juliet gives a little hum, glancing toward the road. “You know Javier will be there.”

(of course Javier is there. the boy who started dating your daughter three months ago. her age and sweet enough in Andrew’s opinion…after background checks for a juvenile record and days of stalking. he wanted to be certain that the boy who would step foot in the house for dinner and went to the cinema with his youngest wasn’t hiding something.)

“I know, I know…” You make a vague helpless gesture with the jacket in your hand before placing it on the coat rack. “I asked her to wear protections.”

Juliet snorts while triple-checking the front door latch, then the deadbolt, and the chain. “Mom, I think she knows. She had the talk with Dad, you, and even Craig. Uncle Craig, mom!”

“Well, at least she’s informed!” At your daughter’s amused face, you shake your head and laugh, giving up entirely. “Fine. Fine. She knows.” Changing the subject, you glance at the hallway and add, “How about a movie tonight? You go take a shower and I’ll ask your father and Ollie to join us.”

“Deal!” Juliet exclaims while heading toward her room by the time she finishes the word, straightening the picture frame on the wall as she passes it and adjusting the rug by the baseboard right before she closes her bedroom door with one push and one extra check on the latch that you can overhear from the end of the hallway as you head for the back door, where you know the boys have been skateboarding earlier.

Instead of finding them on the ramp, it’s at the backyard table that you notice them, sitting side by side and backs turned to you, their voices sufficiently low that you can tell that the conversation is serious. At first, you only catch fragments of it. “-and I don’t know what to do,” Oliver bemoans, voice thin with frustration and embarrassment. “Every time I try to speak to her, I feel like the words just…vanish. She’s my best friend and now I look like an idiot!”

Andrew, with his elbows braced against his thighs and his attention fixed so completely on his son that he looks like he is holding the boy together with his stare alone, replies without judgement, “You don’t look like an idiot.”

Oliver lets out a groan and scrubs a hand over his face. “I wanted to throw up this morning before I even talked to her! She asked if I was okay and the only thing I managed to do was a thumbs-up. A thumbs-up! And the next thing I knew, my head ended up against a locker.” He drops his forehead onto the table with a long expiration. “Why is it so hard to ask someone on a date? I mean…I know her so well it should be easier, right? Not- Not so messy.”

Your husband’s answer comes after he has searched his son’s face by tilting his head until meeting his gaze, like he perpetually does when he wants his sentence to be heard loud and clear. “It’s messy because you think of the bad,” he declares slowly. “But what if it’s good?”

Oliver blinks at him, pensive, and after a beat, he asks, “How was it?”

“What?”

“For you,” your son wonders. “With Mom. Was it difficult?”

Looking down at his hands and rubbing them four times over his thighs, he answers honestly, “I was scared. Not your mom. And you know her, she is…”

“Stubborn?” Oliver offers with a small grin.

Andrew’s mouth twitches, revealing the corner of a smile and its dimples that he struggles to contain. “Yeah. She saw right through me.” His eyes drift to the sky for a moment, to the starts that commence to show in the early dark. “She’s the one who kept making all the first steps.”

Oliver is silent for a while after that answer, and you can tell by the way he leans forward that his next question has been lying in wait inside him for some time, growing roots. “When did you know?” he enquires at last. “That she would be…the one?”

Turning back to him with a gaze that makes the rest of the garden disappear, he responds, “Honestly?” and Oliver nods once. “The moment I saw her.” Despite already knowing the story, hell, despite already living the story, your heart stutters. “Your uncle Craig had told me that he wanted to introduce me to one of his friends. But the house was not clean, so…” ────────── (Craig should have warned him beforehand. Like the previous day. Fuck, even the morning would have been ample. Just enough time to scour the whole house three times until he was appeased. Until he felt like his pulse wasn’t hammering in his throat. But no.)

Last night there had been one of his brother’s infamous parties, and Andrew had spent most of it stationed at the back door that connected the kitchen to the backyard, cataloguing every water ring on the wooden tables, every muddy footprint threatening to ruin the floor, which guests wandered too close to a breakable object. And by every measurable standard for a ‘Craig’s party’, the night had gone fine. Yet now, all he could brood over were the mistakes.

(He shouldn’t have retreated so soon after the last person left. Should have scrubbed more. Or vacuumed. Instead he had lied rigid beneath the covers of his bed, staring at the ceiling while the ghosts of Smurf and Baz prowled near him in the dark. Now this guest would notice the uneven number of apples in the fruit bowl. That the labels in the cupboard weren’t facing the same direction. Would see that the outdoor carpet still showed traces of footsteps from the preceding night. Think that they’re slobs. Lazy. That he was useless. One. Two. Three. Four. He breathed while attempting to forget how much his brother should have told him earlier.)

But of course no, Craig had simply strolled shamelessly into the kitchen during lunch, hangover and naked except for a towel slung low around his hips, hair tied up, announcing as if discussing the weather that he had invited a friend over to meet them. When Andrew had inquired – with all the patience in the world he could muster – at what time that friend was coming, his brother had merely shrugged and continued drinking orange juice directly from the carton to make the oldest grind his teeth.

“Soon,” he had replied. (But soon was a useless term. It could signify right now or in an hour or not at all considering Craig’s ‘buddies’.)

So, Andrew did the most rational thing in his mind, and put on his gloves. At one o’clock he was outside the backyard, brushing leaves around the pool, cleaning the waterline of it with a sponge and chlorine, rubbing the springboard. By two he relocated inside, steam vacuuming Smurf’s bright red couch until he was certain there would be no germs, then dusting the television, the coffee table, wiping fingerprints from every flat surface…

And by three, he was in the kitchen, washing dishes that were already clean, wiping the island until even the gloves smelled like the lemon cleaner, realigning bottles in the refrigerator and turning the labels outward in the cupboard, all of that to lead to 3:59, when he heard the gate opening and his brother shouting from somewhere near, “It’s her!”

Andrew went still, as if his bones had frozen in place.

(Her? He had presumed Craig would invite another one of the coke-snorting idiot who temporarily orbited around him. One he kept close because he was bored or lonely or both. A guy he would later laugh about while smoking outside with the two other Codys. He had not prepared for a woman. Not at all. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. He counted the apples in the bowl. Uneven. Wrong, wrong, wrong.)

He sat at the kitchen counter, straightening his spine, placing both hands flat on his thighs, trying to recall what to do with his face, his body, even with his breathing. Craig’s warm voice echoed from the front door, welcoming the woman inside and teasing her for a thing Andrew didn’t understand with the sort of tone he perpetually used with the people he felt sufficiently comfortable to embarrass for jest. Footsteps approached across the parquet, each one landing closer to the kitchen until a sentiment prickled all along his spine.

There were some arrivals that didn’t feel ordinary even before they occurred, some presences that announced themselves via gravitational force rather than sound, like an irrational trajectory that always led back to the same thought. This morning, Andrew wouldn’t have grasped this notion, but now that his eyes found yours in the kitchen entrance, holding a greasy paper bag in both hands, he knew for certain that such forces existed, and that somehow they had directed you straight to him.

Craig, standing beside you with a grin, gestured toward Andrew and commented, “My brother Pope. Don’t mind him, he almost doesn’t bite,” but the oldest barely heard it – all cognitive function had deserted him the very second he took a look at your face.

Not beautiful. Beautiful was too common of a word, too diminished by overuse and too insufficient to explain the spear that just pierced underneath his clavicle to end right in his heart. You resembled a deity masquerading as a woman, the kind sculpted in marble and worshipped with blood sacrifices, the sort whose existence alone could alter the trajectory of history by the mere accident of being noticed.

It was right at this moment that Andrew comprehended why an entire city had burned, why Paris had looked at Helen and decided the world was disposable compared to the privilege of being blessed with her affection, for if even a fraction of Helen’s beauty had carried what you held so effortlessly before him, then Troy had deserved the flames and the Gods had been merciful in limiting the destruction to only one city and the war to two decades.

(He would have burned kingdoms too for one second of your smile.)

His throat constricted as his gaze traveled greedily over all the details his mind could gather before the moment vanished: the way your shoulders rounded as though attempting to make yourself smaller in an unfamiliar house, the nervous shifting of your weight from one foot to another, the parting of your lips around a breath you hadn’t yet released, and those eyes… (Jesus.) Those eyes were so impossibly alive that Andrew found himself staring while each and every violent instinct and dark impulse he had ever possessed readjusted themselves around a new unrestrained and terrifying truth: he would die for you.

Worse, he knew he would kill for you just as readily. Afterall, he had killed before, and for way less. If Achilles himself descended from Olympus, he would walk forward barehanded without hesitation, indifferent that he was to fight a man protected by gods – because what was fear measured to this? Measured to the realization that he had been waiting for you his entire life without knowing it?

(He would recognize you even if the world were plunged into the obscurity. Would perceive you were darkness absolute, silence eternal and were death itself foolish enough to separate you. In another lifetime, beneath another name and inside another body entirely, or in centuries not yet born and worlds not yet formed…he would know you still. And he would spend each borrowed existence falling in love with you over and over again.)

That thought struck Andrew with embarrassment, sharp enough that he nearly grimaced at himself.

(Craig wanted to introduce him to his friend. Friend. He shouldn’t look like the weird brother. But Craig being Craig he couldn’t cease thinking…maybe he sought for more? Was it the reason why he brought you here? Because he intended on something later? Would he have to listen to this? See you kissing and touching? One. Two. Three. Four. Friend. Just friend. He counted the blinks of your eyelashes for the seventeen seconds that had just passed since you entered the room.)

Slowly, almost timidly, you extended your hand to him, a simple gesture that made his pulse pound against his ribs so violently he became convinced that Craig could catch it from where he stood. “H-Hi,” you stammered, quickly followed by your name – emerging as the most valuable word he had ever heard.

(He wanted to repeat it right away. To memorize the shape of it. To hold the name in his mouth somewhere private and examine the sonority from every angle.)

The problem was that he stared at your hand for so long that your breathing changed and you pulled it back, clutching the bag of pastries to your chest. The sight of you retreating made him understand with horror that he had been too slow to answer, forming the worst kind of first impressions with his grim silence and jaw locked so stiffly that the muscles in his neck twitched.

You threw a look at Craig, then back at him, struggling to rescue the awkwardness of the meeting. “I brought pastries. I didn’t know what you all would like so…I kind of…guessed.”

“Thank you,” he finally managed, voice low, almost raw.

Craig, noticing his failure at being social with the friend he had brought, hissed, “Stop being weird, bro!” while Deran stepped inside the kitchen, all easy confidence and cool detachment, nodding once at you in introduction before handing beers to the three of them.

With his skin feeling too tight for his body, Andrew held the bottle with a strong grip, feeling the glass threatening under the pressure of his palm while his younger brother started to make conversation with you. “You fuckin’ with me? You live in Oceanside and can’t stand on a board?” Deran laughed, raising a brow in mock disbelief. “No worry, me or mister El Craigo here will introduce you to it. You’ll only swallow, like…a gallon of water before you get it.” You shook your head silently but politely, awaking in him the urge to tell his brothers to stop talking to hear what your voice sounded like uninterrupted.

Too focused in the impulse, he almost didn’t catch your face turning to him with a smile, turning the blood in his veins into lead and setting his nerves alight underneath the epidermis. It was a small thing perhaps – at least for most – but for Andrew, to witness that smile gave him the sentiment of being at perihelion: so close to the sun that his fingertips could have reached out to skim the edge of your light and returned gilded.

“Um…Pope,” you stumbled in a quiet voice, the sound of his nickname in your mouth so wrong that it made him feel physically ill, something hot and sour climbing up in his throat. Everyone called him that, most out of fear of what the ‘crazy Cody’ could do, but fear was the last thing he wanted you to feel.

He interrupted you before you could finish your sentence. “Andrew.” Ignoring his brothers’ shared looks, he kept his unblinking gaze on yours. He had no ability for pretending and no appetite for justifying to them why he dragged his true name from the bottom of his past, where it had sat ever since Smurf died, like a coin gathering rust in a fountain. He knew that if he were to tell his thoughts or ask his questions to Craig (Was he playing friendly only to get you in his bed? Was there someone else already?) he would sound insane – at least more than his brother thought – which was probably true.

He had only heard a few words from you and already, he wanted to hear you talk for the rest of his life. So, when you lowered your eyes to complete your earlier sentence, he flew before he could halt himself, standing too fast and, without another word, walking straight out of the kitchen and down the hall to his room.

(Closed the door. Walking in circles. One. Two. Three. Four. He counted the creases on the bedcover. Rearranged them. Then counted the steps between the door and the bed. The door and the window. The bed and the window. One. Two. Three. Four. Again. And again.)

Later that night, after Deran and Craig went on with their lives and the house quietened, Andrew lied on top of the covers, staring at the ceiling in the dark and struggling not to think of your face…which only meant he thought of it more. In the end, he surrendered, for the darkness allowed what the daylight wouldn’t, whispering your name into the bedroom, again and again until the syllables grew strange and it no longer felt like a word. Murmured it until his mouth went dry. Until he felt drunk on the sound of it.

He kept pronouncing the loveliest word language invented even as he wondered guiltily, desperately, if from wherever you were sleeping, you envisioned him too.

When sleep finally claimed him, your name was the last thing he tasted. ────────── When sleep finally releases you, your name is the first thing you perceive.

It’s exhaled against your face in the softest manner, – sensing more the feathered warmth of it rather than the sound – succeeded by an unhurried procession of kisses laid one after another with devotion across your cheek, your temple and the corner of your mouth while his weathered hands, calloused with the decades and the veins more pronounced than they once were, come to cradle your face as if committing to memory the shape of your features like it’s the first time.

“Mm,” you mutter drowsily, prying your eyes open to find Andrew studying you, silver hair mussed from the pillow and the lines around his mouth and eyes deeper, yet impossibly dearer. Without a word, he reaches to your collarbone where your necklace sits twisted, centering the heart shaped pendant before depositing another kiss on your cheek.

“My angel,” he whispers, the words going straight through you.

Grinning, you brush a curl away from his forehead, answering him with the same tenderness. “My Andy.”

Something boyish flickers in his expression, and it reminds you that loving someone for this many years means learning that time alters the body without ever truly brushing the soul. Particularly one like Andrew’s. You inch closer beneath the blankets until your foreheads meet, sharing the same air for a suspended moment before he exhales, reluctant. “I should start soon.”

You groan. “Everyone is bringing something. And I thought we said no cooking for you today?”

He sits up, seizing his glasses on the nightstand. “I know.” Mouth twitching at your stern look, he adds. “It’s for safety.”

“For safety?” you repeat, struggling to hide your amusement. “You’re impossible.”

“You married me.”

“True. Terrible decision.”

He dives for your lips once more, only pulling back seconds later to study your half-lidded eyes. “Tragic,” he smirks.

You help each other up slowly, getting into the choreography perfected over the thirty-six years that made your marriage, his fingers zipping up the back of your dress meticulously, you fastening his shirt button by button, brushing the crease flat on his shoulder simply because you can. Because it has never mattered whether either of you required aid to do these things…what has always mattered is that you chose to do them anyway.

Breakfast is occupied in its familiar domesticity, with coffee warming in the mugs, bites of toasts stolen from the other’s plate with a grin, the fruit divided for two into the same neat sections he insists on. Andrew, then, retreats into the kitchen where he begins preparing two separate dishes for lunch to accommodate everyone’s diet and appetite and texture issues. In the time that he measures the quantity of spices to place into the lamb koftas, you sit on the couch with a book open in your lap, throwing him quiet looks over the top of the page, amused at the way he checks the ladle twice before moving to the curry where he strives to get the proper consistency for the rice.

Every so often he glances back to catch you staring, trying to maintain an air of seriousness, which fails catastrophically when you wriggle your eyebrows at him after he stretches to get the cumin, blood running up in his cheeks and collar. At some point, to ease his stress for the incoming day, you go set the table outside, placing plate after plate beneath the oak trees until fifteen of them await there for the guests with cutlery and flowers you pick from the garden – gardening being one of Andrew’s favorite activities now that he can’t skateboard that much anymore.

By the time you return to the kitchen, voices are already arriving at the front door. You cross the room to slip behind your husband at the stove, kissing the soft spot behind his ear, whispering, “They’re here,” with so much delight in your voice that he looks up, listening to it too as the small line between his brows smooths out.

The door opens to Oliver, carrying bags in one hand and a foil-covered plate in the other, broad-shouldered and kind-eyed – the spitting image of his father. He pecks your cheek with a grin, hair falling over his forehead in careless waves. “Hi, Mom.” He looks around. “Where’s the man of the day?”

“In the kitchen,” you answer.

Oliver sighs as though betrayed while heading past you without missing a beat. “Dad! I thought we agreed we were bringing the food.”

“Nonsense,” Andrew replies and you hear in the edge of his voice that he is determined to be helpful today (as if he isn’t any other), whether anyone asked for it or not.

A pause. And softer, “Happy birthday, Dad.”

“Thank you, son.”

Interrupting your eavesdropping, Shani, your son’s wife, rolls into the house in her wheelchair. (there had once been a teenage Oliver, sitting at the backyard table, nearly throwing up over the possibility of asking his best friend on a date. and now here she is. the same girl from prom night. the one who had been beside him through every fertility treatment and every moment of doubt. the woman your son loves with the exact same devotion Andrew loves you.)

Across her lap naps Ava, their youngest, mouth open and head resting on her mother’s shoulder. “Let me guess,” Shani chirps quietly to not wake the three-year-old when she comes to you. “Andrew cooked?”

You shake your head, helplessly fond. “Good guess. I told him everyone was bringing something, but you know him.”

Mia, their oldest, emerges at the threshold and throws herself into your arms with the full force of a six-year-old tornado and a shrieked “Grandma!”.

“There she is,” you smile, holding her close with a hand on the small of her back. “You are the first to arrive.”

Shani arches a brow, maneuvering in the room. “Really? I thought it would be Jules.”

“No,” you reply. “She had to meet the new farrier and then stop at Craig’s to drive him here.”

That earns you a snort from the woman, who knows well that once Craig’s eyesight began to fail a few years ago, paired with the passing of his wife, it became Juliet’s personal mission to keep him from setting his house on fire and chauffeuring him whenever she was not too busy at the farm – the one that had once belonged to Rhonda and Diana up until they retired and sold it to Juliet.

Andrew comes forth behind you, wiping his hands on the towel and halting when he spots Ava, still asleep on Shani, the little girl stirring just enough to blink up at him, grin, and declare in sync with her sister Mia. “Happy birthday, Grandpa!”

Bending to kiss the crown of their heads, his face carries the same open and warm expression he wore the first times he held his children to his chest at the hospital. “Thank you Plums.”

Shani hugs him too, exchanging easy smiles with her father-in-law, shaped by twenty years of memories. “Happy birthday, Andrew.”

The front door fills with a voice you know as well as your own heartbeat. “Yeah, what’s it like turning eighty, old man?” Craig is there with a pack of beers, long hair graying in disparate patches and smirking. “How are you doing, brother?” he asks, holding his older sibling’s hand and side-hugging at once.

“Good,” Andrew replies, looking him up and down. “You even showered.”

Craig presses a hand to his chest, feigning injury. “That hurts me, man. Thinking I wouldn’t shower for this?” He crosses a few steps to wrap you in a bear hug. “There’s my favorite sister,” he says in your ear, before lowering his voice with a slight conspiratorial edge. “He cooked?”

You snort and nod. “Yep.”

“Incorrigible man.”

Juliet arrives shortly after, stepping in from the front with a quick hello to Shani – whom with her daughters head to the backyard. You ask your daughter, “How was the road? Craig wasn’t too annoying?”

She throws a look toward Craig with a deadpan tone. “Oh, he was only very annoying for the…what? Four minutes drive?”

“Hey!” he points at her immediately, scandalized. “Reminder that if you exist it’s because I introduced your mom and dad, so-”

Juliet gives him a long-suffering look. “Fine. Only annoying.”

“Much better,” Craig smiles.

She kisses her father’s cheek while he bends a little to receive it, his hand on her back. “Happy birthday, Dad.”

Andrew’s answer is almost too soft to hear. “Thank you, my little bug.”

Soon, everyone empties the house to get to the backyard, Oliver already there to set Mia and Ava on their chairs. Spotting Juliet, he practically barrels toward her, wrapping both arms around his twin with enough force to lift her half off the ground like they haven’t seen each other in a year when in reality, it has been six days. Despite living an hour away, your son comes back every week, partly to see the family and partly so that Mia, obsessed with the animals, can spend time in her aunt’s farm.

But the little girl has never known Arthax, who passed seven years ago. Juliet had cried for four consecutive days, requiring the help of her family to go on with the daily tasks of the place before waking up one day, ready to devote herself in caring for his foals with the same tenderness she had given him. She never sought more than that, no romance, nor partnership. And the day she told all of you, a decade ago, that a love of that kind simply didn’t exist inside her and never would, that children were not part of her future either, nobody questioned it. Nobody mourned what she didn’t desire. Love had always existed abundantly within Juliet…it simply lived elsewhere: in her family, her animals, in the fields – the life she has assembled herself.

The rest gets there in layers, with Deran and Adrian first, equally silver-haired and sun-kissed from the decades passed under the Santa Barbara sun and ocean, the second already shaking his head at whatever nonsense Craig is about to say.

“Still alive?” he indeed calls.

“Unfortunately,” his younger brother answers with a fist bump.

Twenty minutes later it’s Nick’s turn, transporting a cake box with his husband Yaseen by his side, one hand resting casually on the shoulder of their teenage son Sami, who quickly disappears toward the patch of grass where his younger cousins are inventing games. You smile whenever you observe Nick and who he has become – how a few months after Evie’s seventh birthday, he had moved in with Craig for good, never once returning to Oceanside.

(you have forever suspected that Oliver and Juliet told him everything they knew about Her. about what She had done to the Cody brothers. to his father. you never said Her name aloud. you know now that no one ever will. and Nick, just like everyone else, moved on from Her existence and grew up in Ojai. learned to cook and opened a bakery on Main Street. and one day, a young man named Yaseen began stopping in every morning for apple pie. at first Nick had assumed he simply liked the pie…turned out he liked Nick’s smile considerably more.)

“Sorry everyone!” The words cut you mid-thought as Evie steps through the backdoor, one hand braced on the underside of her stomach, six months pregnant and radiant. “We had to make two stops because this little bean,” she point to her bump with a helpless laugh, “had decided to make my life hell.”

Javier comes in right behind her, steadying his fiancée by the elbow and helping her into a chair before greeting Andrew with a handshake. Once everyone is finally settled, it’s easy to fall once again into the usual affectionate banter that has long defined the gatherings in this house, the backyard filling with overlapping voices and laughter while Andrew goes quiet – not the uneasy or overwhelmed one, no, the watching one. The kind where he sits back in his chair and simply absorbs everything surrounding him.

Instead of disrupting his cataloguing gaze, your hand searches for his underneath the table until they find his warmth. His reaction is immediate, thumb brushing across your knuckles and whispering numbers under his breath. Counting. And when the eighty candles arrive, you know without a doubt that your husband has no wish that he wants fulfilled, not when all he ever needed is already here, around the table with him.

Afterward, when your children and grandchildren are chasing each other across the grass, Craig and Deran recounting old stories while Adrian laughs into his glass, you sit down beside Andrew on the old lounge chair – the same one where he once asked you shakily to marry him, the one who was there when Oliver and Juliet took their first steps and there when Evie announced she was pregnant.

Your fingers slide into his, making you beam when he turns his hand over to lace them together fully. “I think we did a good job, no?” you ask.

His thumb brushes over the back of your hand four times, nodding. “The best.” He looks at you with that steady, unblinking expression you recognize so well whenever he desires to preserve an image forever, to press it into himself and not let time take it from him. You don’t need him to explain what it means. Thank you for this life. Thank you for staying. Thank you for letting me in when I thought no one would.

So, you answer the only way that feels large enough for a man like Andrew, lifting his hand to place a kiss on his knuckles. Thank you for loving me through it.

No other words ensue – none would feel sufficient to cover the extent of all that has made your life so full. Instead, you place your head on his shoulder and, hand in hand, surrounded by everything that you had both been hoping for when you were young back in Oceanside, you let yourself relax at the absolute certainty that if there is another life waiting beyond this one…

You will find him there too.

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Disclaimer: YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO REPOST MY WRITING ANYWHERE ELSE WITHOUT MY CONSENT. REBLOGS ARE ENCOURAGED THOUGH. YOU MAY NOT FEED MY WORK TO ANY AI DATABASES OF ANY KIND, USE MY WORKS TO TRAIN AI OR USE AI TO TRANSLATE MY WORK. FUCK AI.

You don’t bother knocking, it’s always more satisfying this way.

You can hear the strangled moan get caught in his throat, the way his muscles tense as you step into the room, suddenly alert and ready to kill whoever just dared to interrupt him. But instead, his eyes land on you and his facade drops even lower, to one of shame, like a little boy being caught doing he isn’t supposed to.

“Kindly let Miranda get off her knees and go back to her desk, her lunch break is almost over and I would really like to take mine at my agreed upon time.”

Your voice is as unkind as you can possibly make it. Not towards Miranda, never towards her. It’s all venom thrown at him. He knows you don’t like it when he does this, knows it takes her those exact fifteen minutes to make herself presentable and rush all the way to the other side of the floor to where her desk is, knows, deep down, that she’s not the one he craves to have sucking him off at 12:15 pm on a random Tuesday.

You count the seconds in your head as your stare off extends itself. It’s never lasted more than 28 seconds.

It’s exactly fifteen seconds later that he relents.

He always relents.

He doesn’t even break eye contact as he, presumably, pulls her off him finally.

You’d had to learn really early on that he likes to be watched, gets off on it and you would not be surprised if his staring is directly linked to how long it takes him to cum once you’ve entered his office. 

You’ve never been able to prove it, however, for he doesn’t show it on his face.

He’s always calm and composed, unbreakable.

You fucking hate it.

You wait, impatiently, as Miranda makes herself presentable enough to do her walk of shame back to your side of the floor, to Ursula’s side.

Titus slowly rolls his chair back, the imposing mahogany desk the perfect size to hide a full bodied person underneath it, the leather chair just adding to the old money aesthetic of it all.

The model looking second assistant finally gets up on shaky legs, gaze cast directly towards the carpeted floors as she scurries out of the room, not daring to even cast a glance in your direction.

You simply step aside, letting her flee, knowing fully well you both know this will be her last day working with you. Such a shame, she wasn’t completely useless, not like the girl you had the misfortune of working with two assistants ago.

You shiver at the memory as Titus fixes up his slacks, his unforgiving hazel eyes still on you.

“So,” he begins. “Lunch?”

You roll your eyes, stepping into the room as he sprays cologne all over him. To mask the scent of sex on him or within the room, you don’t know, but you’re soon enveloped in a smokey, honeyed scent that instantly has you just a little more pliant than you were mere seconds ago.

You sit across from him, as is routine now, and the door to the service elevators swings open to Anthony, his private work chef, walking into the office with your usual chicken Caesar salad and his borderline still alive, rare stake. Diet cokes for you both, a rare indulgence that you share.

You don’t say anything as his desk is set up to resemble a dining table. You don’t spare “the help” any kindness, not since the first time you dared utter a thank you in his direction and he came back with a purpled eye the next day.

No, Titus is absurdly particular when it comes to who you address and how you do it. He’s fully aware you don’t belong to him, that claim is his sister and his sister’s alone, but that doesn’t mean that he can’t hurt those that do work for him to reprimand you.

So you don’t even breathe in the young man’s direction, you simply wait, patient and kind, the clock on the wall ticking quicker than it ever has before.

Titus knows you’re cutting it close, knows he shouldn’t be pushing his luck, but that doesn’t matter. You’ll be on time, he’ll make sure of it even if he has to shut down the elevator when Ursula’s one o’clock shows.

He doesn’t bother you with small talk. He doesn’t have to, you both know he knows exactly what you got up to over the weekend.

You know what kind of man Titus Danforth is, know his quirks and…questionable desires, know just how tight of a leash he likes to keep his playthings on. 

And that’s exactly what you are.

Not in the "traditional" sense, Ursula would have your head for it.

But you are…entertainment.

He has your location.

He has cameras in your apartment.

He has vetted every single one of your friends and even…taken care of those he didn’t approve of.

He’s met your parents. Met every single romantic interest you’ve had in the two years you’ve been working for his sister, always disapproving.

Titus Danforth takes up the other half of your life unapologetically.

It’s in your contract, actually, but he doesn’t need to know that.

He’s never once asked why you don’t push back against him, why you let him get away with so much. In his eyes, he’s entitled to it, much like every spoiled child is entitled to their every whim.

He’s gotten into a new habit as of recently, however.

It had started whenever you left the office late. A text message lighting up your phone when you made it home safely and didn’t let him know right away. If it were up to him, he’d be sending a car to pick you up and drop you off every day, but alas even he could not force you to accept the offer.

So instead he settled for you telling him you’d gotten home.

But then…he started messaging you all the time.

If he saw you struggling to find your lipstick because you’d forgotten where you’d put it

It’s on the coffee table.

If he saw you walking out for your morning jog without a proper jacket.

It’s flu season, do not make me send a carrier over.

If you put on a lingerie set he didn’t necessarily love while getting ready for work.

Wear the white one I got you last week.

And the worst part?

You do exactly what he tells you.

Every.

Single.

Time.

Without question. Without fuss.

It makes Titus’s blood buzz with excitement each and every time.

He knows he can’t have you.

But he can have this.

“I won’t be going straight home after work tonight.”

You tell him suddenly, breaking the gentle hum of a spell that has fallen over your meal.

His brow furrows slightly, leaning forward in his chair, as if assessing a request for time off from an employee.

“Where will you be?”

You’ve done this dance with him before. There’s even a pre-approved list of people and places you’re allowed to go and be with, which is why you know he won’t be too happy with what you’re about to say to him.

“I have a date.”

If you didn’t know him as well as you do, the intensity of his stare would’ve definitely made you pee your pants. It almost had the first time he looked at you this way, like a child being scolded for setting fire to the family home.

“No you don’t.” He hisses, looking down at his calendar and finding the day’s square absolutely empty.

You shrug, trying to keep your cool as much as you possibly can. 

“Spur of the moment.” 

You keep eating as if you’ve done nothing wrong but you know the man before you is seething.

When you finally swallow, “He texted me a few hours ago. I said yes.”

The scowl on Titus’s face is piercing as he holds out his hand expectantly and you swiftly move to hand over your phone.

He doesn’t even have to ask for your password anymore. It’s his birthday, he’d chosen it.

You watch, a little masochistic, as he goes through your recent texts. You don’t save their names, there’s no need to give him more information, he’ll know everything about him from the number alone five minutes after you leave the room.

“No,” he says simply, setting your phone down next to his.

“I wasn’t asking for your permission,” you reply, soft yet firm. “Ursula already gave it.”

The mention of his sister having agreed to this is what pushes him over the edge. He stands up abruptly, causing the desk between you to almost tip over your drinks.

You don’t flinch, you’ve honestly lost the ability to when it comes to Titus. You simply stare up at him, devoid of any care or emotion, almost daring him to go against his sister’s wishes.

He doesn’t give you his consent. You don’t back down.

The clock ticks in the background, ominous, haunting.

There’s a knock at the door.

You both know who it is without having to turn, still stuck in that exhausting staring contest.

“We’re starting in five,” Miranda’s voice is meek now, almost a whisper. You cringe at just how much her confidence has plummeted in the past half hour. “Ursula asked me to get you.”

You set your empty plate back on Titus’s desk, wiping the corners of your mouth demurely before you stand back up, smoothing your pencil skirt against your plump thighs and picking up your phone from where he left it.

“I’ll be home around nine,” you tell him, matter of fact.

“I’ll know if you’re not,” he says through gritted teeth. “And there will be consequences.”

You nod, once, curtly, turning towards a practically tomato red Miranda and walking past her as if nothing has transpired.

“Um…sir?” Miranda tries, she desperately tries to be normal about what transpired earlier but fails miserably.

He casts her a glance, stone cold and intimidating, the one that used to have an effect on you but now doesn’t even chip away at your icy exterior. She practically leaps in fear, closing the door swiftly and running after you.

At least he still has an effect on someone.

You’re back home at exactly 8:59 pm.

Titus watches as your body sways lightly, your legs shaky beneath you. You didn't change after you left, still in that sinful skirt. Your hair is a little rustled, your lipstick just barely smudged, your shirt open just one more button than normal.

That's when he spots it, a tear in your sheer black tights, a gaping hole near the inside of your thigh, intentionally made.

It makes his blood boil.

He picks up his phone, calls you. He leans in, pupils dilating as he watches you search your bag, cursing pathetically as you fail to locate your phone.

You're too drunk for this and he has half a mind to make his way over to your apartment to reprimand you for it. How could you have let yourself go this way? Don't you know what men are dangerous, especially in the presence of a beautiful thing such as yourself?

After a few more seconds of futile searching, you give up, tossing your bag to the floor like a fussy child and letting the phone continue to ring into the night as you clumsily make your way to your room.

Titus switches the camera, following you along until you flop onto your bed and seemingly pass out.

He's seething now, morning cannot come fast enough, your punishment hot and delicious on his tongue.

He find himself waiting, impatiently, by your desk for ten minutes after you're supposed to be in. Last he checked, you were getting on a car and driving towards the office but that was twenty minutes ago. Even accounting for traffic at this hour, you should've been here by now.

He has half a mind to call, to scream, to let you know what's waiting for you, but he doesn't. No, his victory will taste sweeter is he can just wait—

"Mr. Danforth?"

A male voice snaps him back to the present. His thunderous gaze meets that of a lanky man in a suit holding out an iPad. Weird, he's never seen this man before in his life.

"Are you waiting on something?" he asks Titus, checking the device in his hands for something to explain the younger Danforth's lingering near his sister's office. "Your sister just departed for Barcelona but if you're having trouble getting a hold of her I can—"

"What?" he hisses.

To his credit, the man keeps his composure, but that doesn't stop Titus from catching the slight flash of panic that crosses his face.

"For the conference?"

Titus doesn't think, he just leaps, grabbing the pad forcefully as he looks through the shared calendar on it, one that he doesn't have access to, one that you've hidden from him.

Barcelona. Resort conference. Five days.

Five fucking days.

You have got to be kidding.

You don't answer a single one of his messages.

Your work email is in constant do not disturb mode.

Out of office.

Yeah, now he fucking knows.

Instead he's been forced to endure the ungodly display of affection your mystery man—Jackson Cooper Jr, heir to the Cooper Media empire—is determined to show, practically turning his office into a fucking flower shop.

Every morning when you're supposed to be getting into work and every night when you're supposed to be leaving, in comes a courier with the largest floral arrangement that he's ever seen.

He catches them walking in from the elevator, almost always making a bee line for his office, to his assistant, before they're redirected to the other side of the floor.

It's absurd, it's ridiculous, it's—

Why the fuck does he care so much?

It's not like he wishes he were Jackson Cooper. Why would he ever want to spend thousands of dollars in flowers?

What a pathetic sight indeed.

And yet...Titus can't help but linger in the obnoxious display of affection. Can't help the way his blood boils every time he thinks about what your reaction will be when you come back to this.

He selfishly hopes, deep down, that you'll find it weird and borderline psychotic, but he knows in his heart that you will be elated. And Titus hates that you'll have such a visceral reaction to another man's affection that isn't his.

So much so that he plans on not being at the office when you do return.

But because everything is about him and the universe is set on torturing him, you're back a day early.

He can hear your angelic voice echo through the empty floor, your excitement and glee, the little shy giggle that escapes you because you think no one is there to hear it.

"...no, I'm sorry. Work just got the better of me," you sigh into your phone. "I do love them, wish I could take them all back to my apartment—no! No, you don't have to, you've already—fine, thank you."

Titus has never seen you give into an argument so easily. Whatever jealousy he's been harboring triples at the mere thought that someone other than him has made you submit with such ease.

He steps further into the room, a selfish thought crossing through him as he weighs his options.

He should take you now, throw your phone in a ditch, carry you by force back to his apartment and keep you hidden there until you're just as addicted to him as he is you.

"It's really no trouble, beautiful."

Titus's blood runs hot with anger as he hears his voice creeping up from the elevators up towards where he's hiding.

Jackson Cooper, in the flesh.

Titus instantly steps into the shadows, a hunter making sure his prey falls into a false sense of security, yes, definitely that.

"Are you still at the office?"

Titus can't hear you answering, far enough away now that your voice is no longer the main course. He can only imagine what's going on now as you squeal loudly, excited and joyful. Can only imagine the type of kiss you're engaged in as the silence goes on for more than a few seconds.

He can only imagine where you're going as the two of you walk out of the office, hand in hand, sporting similar sheepish expressions on your faces.

Titus watches you go, let's you get away, because now he's got only one thing on his mind—

Jackson Cooper is a dead man.

The muffled screams of agony tickle every nerve in Titus's body.

He's never felt this fulfilled in his life, no drink or drug could ever make him feel as high as he's feeling right now.

The blood has soaked through the carpet, definitely; the rope has chafed through the woof of his antique chair.

The curtains are drawn, the office settled into a sensual warm hue of secrecy and comfort.

Jackson Cooper had come to pick you up for lunch and suddenly, all the planning and stalking and fantasy had gone out the window.

He doesn't even bother explaining, he simply put him in a headlock, incapacitating him as Ursula's new second assistant, as he's come to accept, watches in horror.

A shame, really, he was the first one that he hadn't gotten to have his way with before he got fired. Oh well.

He revels in the fear, the thick and heavy fog that has settled into his office, the pungent smell of iron and definitely other bodily functions. All normal, nothing to be ashamed of when you're being tortured.

And yet Titus soaks it all in, doesn't dare make his prey feel any kind of comfort.

Only the inevitability of death. Slow and painful.

"Titus?" the door to his office opens then, the freshness of your perfume blending into the pungent darkness from within his office. "Have you seen—oh."

Titus stiffens, his hunting knife suddenly feeling heavy in his hand, the leather handle uncomfortable for the first time in his life. He watches as your face falls, dread overtaking him without reason.

But then you don't devolve into hysterics, don't start screaming, instead, your face contorts into one of annoyance?

Your head falls back, a groan escaping your lips as you step into the room, closing the door swiftly behind you.

Titus watches you in awe, mouth barely hanging open as Jackson Cooper begins to scream against his gag and thrash against his restraints.

You turn to him and scowl, such an evil sight directed at such a pathetic man. Titus beams.

"Shhh," you tell him, holding out your hand to stop his squirming as you take out your phone and dial.

On his desk, Jackson's phone begins to ring, loudly.

No one mores, confusion causing the delirious man to settle into silence.

And then, his voice mail message fills the room.

You wait, impatiently now, as it ends.

The beep blares, definitive. You open your mouth—

A sob escapes, fake and pandering, your expression remaining as unbothered as ever.

"Um...okay, I see how it is. It's okay, I just...I didn't think—get it together, fuck. I'm not used to being ghosted sorry. I'm..." you swallow, catching Titus's gaze from across the room, entranced and practically salivating. You shoot him a sly smile. "I guess I'm gonna go have lunch with Titus then—you know, you could've just told me you didn't want to see me again, it's...it doesn't matter now."

With that you end the call.

The room settles back into a heavy silence, the only sound being Titus's obnoxious grin and Jackson's distressed panting as they both realize what you've just done—

An alibi.

"Little dove—" Titus starts but you stop him immediately.

"Don't even start," you've never been this short with him. "I'll deal with you in a second."

To pretend like his pants don't tighten, a thrill of excitement shooting down to settle in his stomach, causing his already painful erection to twitch against the fabric.

You dial again. It rings once before the call connects.

"Mistress," you speak again, completely dry and composed, the voice Titus knows you have reserved for his sister. "There's been a change of plans."

Titus doesn’t hear whatever his sister says in return, the impatience ringing in his ears. Even now, even when he’s got a man strapped to a chair, bleeding to death, you’re still not giving him your undivided attention.

You nod along to whatever is being said. "Yes, he...got ahead of schedule..."

You wince, it’s subtle, minuscule, but Titus catches it.

“Do I have to?” You shiver. “Yes, ma’am.”

You reach out swiftly, like pulling off a bandaid. Barely shaking hand pulls open the table side drawer of the piece of furniture next to his couch.

His eyebrows raise in silent knowledge as he watches you pull out his gun, a sleek, silver 9mm, point it and shoot all within a single breath.

Jackson Cooper never even had a chance to battle with the knowledge of death, not when the bullet had already gone through his skull and dented the bulletproof glass behind him, all before the sound had ene processed through the room.

Blood splatters over whatever whiteness remained of Titus’s button down, the hot speckles of crimson tantalizing against his skin.

It’s only when the body tips the chair backwards and the stain spreads that you end the call, tossing both your phone and the gun onto the couch beside you.

Titus licks his lips then, savoring the taste of your first kill as his gaze glosses over with a carnal need to devour you.

He doesn’t wait for the shock to wear off, for you to start screaming at him for his impulsiveness.

No, he won’t waste another second.

He pounces, crossing the room swiftly and enveloping you in his arms. His lips are on yours, the remnants of iron and a taste so uniquely his invading your taste so easily you can't help but lean into it.

You whine into his mouth, opening your lips in search for more. He obliges instantly, tongues and teeth clashing against each other aggressively.

You bite down hard on his lower lip, drawing enough blood to startle him. Titus whines into your mouth, his eyes shooting open like a kicked puppy.

And then you do...kick him.

He falls to his knees, pathetic and broken, eyes practically fully dark as he watches you pant above him.

"You—you fucking asshole," you practically spit. "You couldn't have waited a few more weeks before you decided to kill him?"

Whatever confusion that lingered burned up into blinding anger.

"Who the fuck do you think you're talking to?"

You scoff, running a hand through your hair, throwing it back over the crown of your head.

"I just needed him alive for a few more days."

Now it's Titus's turn to scowl, deeply offended. "How dare you!?"

He goes to stand, bending his knee to get up but you stop him by stepping forward, your crotch dangerously close to his mouth now.

"Don't."

Oh.

Oh.

A terrifying smirk curves Titus's kiss-swollen lips.

He catches the slight quiver of your mouth, the way your breath catches in your throat, the way your legs shake ever so slightly.

He's dizzy with excitement, his ego growing the size of his bank balance.

"Oh little dove," he coos, condescending and pitying, his large, warm hands grabbing at your ankles and slowly making their way up your legs.

He watches as your body tenses, as you clench around nothing. He hums contently, grabbing at the hem of your skirt and slowly rolling it up your thighs neatly.

Your hands shoot down to settle on his shoulders, steadying yourself as you swallow back a needy sigh.

In response, Titus leans forward, placing a kiss over your clothed mound.

"Ursula must be so...disappointed in you, huh?" he leans back enough to finish rolling your skirt, his hands now sliding to cup your ass. "Don't worry, you'll always have a job with me when she inevitably fires you."

That little entitled piece of shit.

His words light a fire throughout your body.

Defiance.

He's not the only one that can play dirty.

You step forward slightly, kicking his bent knee with your stiletto and sending him off balance back down on his knees. Before he can even process what you're doing, you press the sole of your shoe against his crotch.

He whimpers deliciously at the contact, shifting you closer to him, his fingertips digging into your soft flesh.

"Shut the fuck up, Titus," you sigh. "I'm never gonna work for you," you're heaving, panting, so strung up you just—"Now make yourself useful and make me cum."

And for the first time in his life, Titus doesn't get offended by the command. He simply does.

His hands rip through the sheer fabric of your tights, carving a hole bigger than the one he'd noticed a week ago.

You moan at the sheer roughness, his possessiveness always having been something that never made you uncomfortable but rather—

"I can smell how wet you are, little dove," he leans into your damp underwear, inhaling deeply. "My sweet girl, so turned on by all this carnage."

He chuckles, the vibrations making your head fuzzy already.

"Don't worry, I'll take care of you."

And unlike Jackson Cooper, he doesn't torture you further. One hand pulls your legs apart, shifting himself so that he can settle comfortably between your legs and hump your shoe while he pulls your underwear to the side and bury his face in between your glistening folds.

The sinful noises that explode from you suddenly make everything worth it, your taste a sweet wine against his tongue. He doesn't take his time, no, he goes straight for the kill, mouth latching onto your clit, tongue lapping aggressively.

You buck your hips against his face, not worried that you'll suffocate him, he's got a deal with the devil anyway, he'll be fine.

Titus chuckles against you, reveling in the way your slick drips onto his chin and travels down his neck. Just when you clench around nothing again, he lets you go, a heaving cry leaving your lips then.

Before you can complain, he's trailing his tongue up and down your slit, finally relenting to lazy discovery and appreciation.

"Titus—" you mewl. "Please."

His cock twitches against your stiletto then, his hips bucking into you needfully. Your hands tangle into his hair, scratching at his scalp in response, a treat to show him just how good he's making you feel.

"That's it..." you whisper. "Right there, please, I need—"

He knows exactly what you need. He doesn't even have to ask.

He lets go of your soaked underwear, no longer needing to keep it out of the way himself. He swiftly licks two fingers sloppily before he thrusts them inside of you, your warmth swallowing him whole with no resistance.

He groans against your heat, gasping for air as he looks up at you through his lashes. He's so far gone, so beautiful like this, actually doing something worthy of his time.

You reward him by rubbing his raging erection in tune with the movements of his fingers, slow, steady, sharp.

Your chest heaves, air difficult to process as he speeds up, hooking his fingers against that little spot inside of you that makes you see stars.

You clench around his fingers, the fit now incredibly tight, only spurring him forward.

Your foot stops its movements, mind more concerned with the pleasure building within you to bother to keep up with his.

It doesn't matter though, as Titus takes it upon himself to keep up for the both of you.

"Don't you dare cum before I do."

Your voice isn't your own anymore, it's feral and broken, demanding yet desperate. Titus nods his head, lips returning to your clit to speed up the process.

The room explodes into a symphony of moans and screams, the absolute debauchery of your wetness spraying out between his fingers as you come undone, your legs snapping shut over his head.

He drinks it all up, every shiver, every breath, every sharp tug of his hair.

He's gotten a taste now and it's even better than he could've ever dreamed of.

His fingers slow down, working you though your orgasm as he detaches from your clit, his expression of pure adoration and satisfaction one that will definitely remain etched into your memory forever because...

Titus Danforth does not beg.

And yet...his eyebrows quirk in question, silent and heavy, directed towards you.

You nod feverishly, your entire body still buzzing as you watch him use your leg to get himself off.

To say the sight is unholy would be an understatement, even for a devotee of the devil himself. He doesn't dare break eye contact, doesn't dare pretend like he's not cumming desperately in his pants, doesn't hide his own pleasure from you.

You're so overcome with emotion your vision blurs with tears, your hands soothingly raking over his scalp and down his neck as he holds you so tight against him that you're unsure exactly what just actually happened.

You remain stuck like that for a while, your own fluids reminding you that you're alive, a stark contrast to the death that permeates the other side of the room.

The spell is broken when your phone rings, a shrill that sends a shiver down your spine as Titus begrudgingly allows you to detach yourself from him so you can reach over for the offending device.

You answer, nodding along hazily to whoever is on the other side of the call.

"Yes, I'll be there in twenty," you blink away the fantasy of it all, the coldness of reality weighing heavy. "Please call Pernilla and bring myself and Mr. Danforth a change of clothes. Thank you."

a/n: this will most definitely turn into a series. he's just so damn bad and there's so many more places they can come into contact muejejejeje. if you've got any thoughts or requests hit me up!!