Chapter 39
Matt
I knock lightly on Robbie’s door, not wanting to wake him if he’s asleep already. It’s been a hell of a week, and Robbie has disappeared with Chanda every chance he gets, so I just haven’t been able to talk to him, but I really need to know if Robbie can babysit tomorrow, and who knows if I’ll have a private moment to talk to him about it unless I make one, right here, right now.
The door cracks open, revealing about half his face. He looks disheveled like I might have woke him up despite trying not to. “Yeah?”
he asks roughly, yawning as he opens the door wider.
“Sorry, I didn’t want to wake you,”
I apologize.
He waves it off. “It’s fine. I think I’ve been asleep for like two minutes. Is there something you need?”
“Yeah. I wanted to ask if you felt comfortable babysitting the littles so I can take Deejay on a date tomorrow night,”
I explain quietly. “I want to take him to dinner and a show.”
I already have the tickets purchased and the reservation for the restaurant, but it all really hinges on whether Robbie is willing to watch the younger kids. I am actually going to be skipping my afternoon classes just to get prepared for this date, but only if Robbie is on board.
He blinks, surprised. “You’d be ok with me babysitting?”
“Of course.”
I make that a statement of fact. Robbie might have some difficulties, but he’s proven that he can handle an emergency, and if things get too much for him, Colt and Kendall will be here to take up the slack. I have no qualms about leaving my kids with him again. “You have your first aid license, right? I mean, you pretty much held me together until we got home last Saturday. And you’ve taken care of the babies on your own already. It’s not like you don’t know how to handle kids—the boys love hanging out with you.”
“I would love to babysit. I mean, if Deejay is ok with me.”
He’s hesitant but sounds like he would actually like to do this for us.
“Thank you,”
I sincerely appreciate. “Really. It was you or a sitter from some agency, and there’s no way I would ever leave the kids with a stranger. Thank you. I know you love these guys and will take care of them right.”
“Of course,”
he agrees. “They’re my family.”
“We are.”
He needs to know that all of us are family, not just the littles.
He smiles up at me. “True. Thank you for trusting me. It means a lot to me that you—”
he chokes on the thought, but soldiers through, “—would trust me after what happened this week.”
“I killed a person—a bad person, but a person nonetheless—with my bare hands last Saturday. I think that trumps panic on the danger-to-the-kids scale.”
He snorts a laugh, which I am glad to see. “Yeah, I guess.”
“I—”
I falter on what I want to say. I barely know him, but I feel like I know him pretty well at the same time. Living together with someone kind of speeds up the timeline on the get-to-know-you stage of a relationship. “I know you don’t like hugs, and I am definitely a hugger, so—”
Robbie halts my awkwardness with a hand. “I can hug, and I do like them, I just need to be prepared for them from anyone who isn’t a child. So, if you ask and don’t get offended if I can’t sometimes, I can hug you.”
Slowly, he puts his arms around my waist, giving me a brief hug before stepping back.
Progress is progress. “Thank you. And sorry again for waking you.”
He gives me a small smile. “No problem. Goodnight.”
“Night.”
I wander down to the kitchen for a cup of hot milk, satisfied with that whole conversation. Actually, I’m pretty satisfied with my whole life at the moment. Two months ago, I was dealing with the fallout of my old man passing, wondering what the hell I was going to do and worried the state would take Cary away from me. Now, I have a whole new family, a lover, and a life like a dream. Sure, I have to deal with some stressors like Tio, Erroll, and Loretta, but I have so much good going on right now. Like the impending DNA results for the twins. On Tuesday before shit hit the fan, Deejay sent their tests in for profiling along with mine and Cary’s to a site run by non-humans that works with all the popular family tree sites to make familial connections for non-humans with recent human ancestry. And the little things like that make life pretty fucking good. Regardless of the stressors, I wake up happy and fall asleep content; I couldn’t ask for a better life than the one I have now.
Deejay pads into the kitchen just as I pull the glass measuring cup of milk out of the microwave. Somehow, he seems to have a radar for when someone is making or in need of hot milk, and I’ve learned to just make enough for him too. He stands at the island quietly as I prepare the milk the way he does, then hand him his mug. “Veranda?”
he asks softly.
“Sure.”
We walk upstairs to his room and outside onto the veranda where I decided to make my move nearly two weeks ago. Such a short time, but again, living with someone fast-tracks the get-to-know-you stage of any relationship, including this one. I sit on one of the reclining tanning chairs, and spread my legs, inviting him to sit between them. He smiles softly as he gets comfortable, leaning against my chest.
“I adore my kids, but this is my favorite time of the day,”
he murmurs. “Everyone is in bed, it’s quiet, peaceful, and there’s nothing looming ahead of us.”
I hum my agreement around a sip of my milk. “Cary didn’t start sleeping through the night until he was about six months old. He wasn’t colicky, but something was off, and I had no clue. From the time he was about three weeks old until he was about four and half months old, he would scream from eight pm until midnight. Just scream. Nothing I did, nothing I offered, nothing at all could stop him. He wasn’t full of gas, he didn’t have to poop, he was dry, and fed, and warm. To this day, I don’t know what was wrong. After that nightmare, I really learned to appreciate the lulls in the day no matter what time they came, but the first time he slept all night I freaked out. I woke up in the morning and the sun was streaming in the window and I hadn’t had to get up to feed him or change him. I jumped out of bed and checked his crib, but he was there, sleeping like a log, snoring. I was so wound up by my bad wake up that I couldn’t go back to bed and appreciate it.”
I chuckle softly at that irony.
He laughs, nodding slightly. “Same. I didn’t know what to expect with Alex and Eren, so I read about a hundred books, and then had to learn everything from scratch anyway. When I was trying to teach them how to get through the night without waking, I would lay in my bed listening to them cry while I followed the process that I’d heard about from an author I know. It was so hard letting them cry it out, but after about three nights of that, it was like a fucking miracle. They learned to just roll over and go back to sleep, so to speak.”
“I can say without hesitation that I am glad you did that and it worked,”
I murmur, running my hand over his chest and down to the line of his pants, playing with the skin under his shirt.
He flinches and gasps, a little ticklish, a little turned on—I can read him, and we’re about to waste some perfectly made milk. He sets his mug on the ground, takes mine from my hand and does the same again, then turns chest to chest with me. He leverages himself up by grabbing the back of my neck and pulling until his lips aggressively clash against mine. The back of the tanning chair suddenly goes out from under me and we crash back hard, knocking teeth together. Deejay huffs laughingly. “Sorry, I didn’t realize it was going to do that. I don’t think I’ve laid it out since the day I bought it.”
I palm his ass, adjusting him to that we’re perfectly lined up. “I’m content with this development,”
I assure him, pressing my hardening cock into his.
He growls low in his throat, grinding into me. “I want you,”
he breaths.
“Same. Always the same,”
I rumble, pulling him back to my lips.
He takes possession of the kiss, sweeping his tongue into my mouth, exciting me, enthralling me, owning me. I don’t know when it happened, but somewhere between nearly dying in a river and nearly dying in a cage, this man’s heart became the prize. I know he already holds mine; I know that, and I am going to do everything in my power to make it a fair trade.