Epilogue
I always mean what I say, even if I don’t mean to say it out loud.
— Cutter to Milena
CUTTER
I came inside, sweat dripping from every inch of my skin, and found my wife at the window.
“ Watching me?” I drawled.
She raised a brow. “ If there’s ever a time that I don’t watch you chop wood up outside with an axe, you should probably make sure I don’t have a brain tumor or something.”
This woman.
I grinned. “ I’m gonna go shower.”
She licked her lips. “ You do that.”
My hand brushed her hip as I passed, and I tugged on the tiny belt loop.
Her “hey” made me smile, and while she was distracted I snatched a fish stick off the plate in front of her—one that was likely for our kid—and popped it into my mouth.
I immediately did the hee-hoo-hee-hoo thing people do when they eat something incredibly way too hot.
She caught my face in her hands, brought my open mouth down to hers, then blew in it.
I closed my teeth around the food to keep myself from spewing it in her face, then started to laugh.
“ That was new.” I chuckled after swallowing the still-piping-hot fish stick.
“ I’m sorry, I panicked.” She blushed. “ Those were like fresh out of the air fryer!”
I pulled her into my arms, careful of her plate of fish sticks, and said, “ It turned me on.”
She rolled her eyes, uncaring of the sweat that was now covering her, and said, “ It doesn’t take much, hubby.”
I pressed a kiss to her nose, then pulled away.
She rolled her eyes at the sweat left behind, but didn’t react more than that.
It was likely one of the cleaner things on her body right now.
With three kids under five, one of which was an infant, bodily fluids were her jam.
I headed up the stairs of our home—we’d decided to stay in the home that Shasha built for her, but added onto it—and stopped in the doorway of my daughter’s room.
She was playing with the toy kitchen that I’d made her for her third birthday.
“ Where is it?” she asked, I’m guessing, herself.
Or possibly her bear.
It was definitely possible she was talking to the bear.
The bear that we’d gotten her the day that she was born, and she carried with her everywhere.
She bent down and opened the “oven” door and said, “ Ah -ha!”
She pulled the colander out of the oven, sniffed it, then turned to her bear and narrowed her eyes. “ Did you piss in this?”
I snorted out a laugh and kept walking, letting her play since she was doing it without tearing the house down around her for once.
I moved farther down the hall to where I could hear the water running.
Dima was on the floor in the hallway outside of the bathroom. He had his phone out and his face buried in one hand as his shoulders shook.
I was just about to ask him what he was laughing about when I heard it.
“ If you’re happy and you know it wash your penis!” my son sang. “ If you’re happy and you know it, make your balls show it. If you’re happy and you know it wash your penis!”
I glanced down at Dima’s phone that was recording the whole interaction, though the closed door was all you could see.
Shaking my head and kicking his foot as I passed, I kept walking down the length of the hallway to the master bathroom.
I took my own shower, and because I was happy, I , too washed my penis.
I got a whole lot happier when my wife joined me in the shower.
“ I have a babysitter, and I’m using him,” she breathed as she jumped at me. “ God , do you know how turned on it makes me when you go out and do those manly things like that outside my kitchen window?”
“ Yes ,” I answered honestly.
“ Well , then,” she stated. “ You better get to work.”
I got to work.
And since I was so good at working, I went ahead and made her another baby while I was at it.
Nine months later, we added another baby to our crazy life.
Four kids under six.
Some might call us crazy—hell, I might join them—but there was no one else in the world that I would rather do life with than Milena .
She had no clue that she was about to walk into my life and turn it upside down, but I’d known from the moment that I saw her that it would never be the same.
And I was right.
She’d rocked my world, tore it apart, then built it back up around me.
There Milena was, building me a goddamn world, and she didn’t even know it.
To say that love was a miracle would be an understatement.