Chapter 21
OLLIE
Time seemed to move too fast and too slow at the same time. I wanted to meet our cubs, but I also wanted everything to be perfect before they arrived.
I loved my basic cream-colored walls, but the babies needed more color in their lives.
The wall behind their crib would look so good with a mural, but my artistic skills were sadly lacking.
Blake was the better painter between us, but even non-toxic paint made him nauseous.
We settled on pretty wall decals instead.
The best part about them was their versatility.
We could trade them out when we got tired of looking at them.
I'd heard of bird shifters, and even dragons, succumbing to the nesting urge during pregnancy, but I didn't know it also applied to humans.
Blake dragged me to every furniture store in the Windy City, looking for the perfect matching rocking chairs.
I appreciated the effort. If we would have gone with the ones I found online, we would have smashed them to bits the first time we sat on them. They were far too small for us.
Along the way, we splurged on half-price or buy-one-get-one decorative pillows everywhere we went.
I thought Blake had gone mad when he started buying them in all colors of the rainbow, and then some.
Then, he showed me the pretty blue and gold marble swirl pillow covers he'd found on clearance.
He bought their entire remaining stock, and we had a gazillion matching pillows.
"You should save the pillows for the babies," I teased when he shoved two of them behind his lower back. He sat in his rocking chair with a sketchbook. Instead of poised to jot down ideas, he held a mechanical pencil sideways in his mouth.
"Uck-oo." His words came out garbled around the pencil.
I took the hint and headed to the kitchen to start dinner. While the rice cooked, I rinsed some beans for burritos and chopped up some tomatoes, peppers, and onions for pico de gallo.
While I finished sweeping them into a bowl, Blake stomped into the kitchen and threw himself down on the bench. He had another stack of pillows there, too, so he arranged them under and around him until he looked like a king ready to attend court.
"How's it going?" I asked.
"Not well." He'd removed the pencil from his mouth, but it left pressure marks at the corners.
"It can wait, you know." He'd been working on a design for a toy box, and it would be awhile before our kids were interested.
"I hate to tell you this, but we already have a pile of toys so high, we'd need to build another room to fit them all."
"Your sister is the worst culprit," I reminded him. "Did we really need her entire stash of beanie babies?"
He rested his arms on the table and leaned over as far as his bulging belly would allow. "She would have forgotten all about them if you hadn't stored all her stuff in our basement."
"You were losing money on that storage unit." First, he'd been upset that I'd gone with pre-made shelving units from the home goods store. Then, he'd yelled at me for sticking my nose where it didn't belong when I called the storage company and asked how much they charged per month.
Blake smirked at me, his anger long forgotten. "I know."
Cassie had been the one to break through to him. "Ollie did something really sweet for us," she said when he showed her around the basement on the Friday before Memorial Day. "Stop fighting him and relax. It's safer here, and you have everything at your fingertips instead of miles away."
Cassie stayed with us for a couple weeks over the summer, but she'd already returned to her summer internship at a Minneapolis daycare.
She was getting her degree in elementary education.
Despite Blake's fears, she would most likely graduate a semester early, after the fall semester next year.
That's why I'd put up the temporary shelves.
Once she had her own place and took her share of the stuff, he could build all the permanent storage he wanted.
"I want to build something sturdy, something that will hold up when we move them to their own rooms."
We planned to finish the basement together when the kids outgrew their room. We'd already sketched the floor plan for the kids' rooms, a playroom, and space for another bedroom, if we chose to expand our family even more.
That was for much, much later. Now, I served up our burritos, since the rice was ready, and watched Blake eat for three. His appetite had been spotty recently, but when he finished both burritos, he accepted my offer of a bowl of cherries jubilee ice cream with gusto and ate the whole bowl.
At bedtime, we were both too tired to do more than kiss goodnight, but I loved spooning around him and listening to each breath he took as he fell asleep. He was so precious to me. I hugged him close, careful not to wake him. My hand rested on his belly, where our children grew larger every day.
Blake sometimes resented the changes to his body, but I loved them all. I loved the rounded curve of his abdomen and the light swell of his pecs. He looked positively radiant when he woke in the morning, though he claimed that was from the extra heat the babies generated inside him.
I kissed his nape and nuzzled his neck, needing to be closer to him. He arched his back, slotting his ass against my cock. When he settled against me, our bodies were even closer together. The press of his body against mine released the tension in my chest I hadn't known I was holding.
My mate was here with me, carrying our twins. He loved me, and I loved him. The world was still a giant, uncertain place where nothing stayed the same, but we would grow together, the four of us. Of that, I was certain.