Or realized how much I was enjoying it.
Jace approached me (eating a cookie…and yes, he was eating said cookie while I was cooking, and yes again, I had baked that cookie) and he slung an arm around my shoulders.
“Why is everything about you suddenly explained?” he asked.
“Takes a wiseass to make a wiseass,” Jess stated sagely, his face in the fridge.
“We’re going to eat in ten minutes, Jess,” I admonished (you will note, I didn’t say a word to Jace, I’d already given up on this kind of thing with him).
Jess came out of the refrigerator chewing on a stick of string cheese. “Yeah, it smells awesome.”
“I have wanted a brother all my life,” Fenn declared, gazing between them approvingly. “And look, now there are two.”
“Hey, gee, thanks,” Camille said.
Fenn looked at Camille. “When I was seven, you asked Mom to give me a penis.”
That did happen, Camille so badly wanted a big brother.
“I was four, I probably didn’t know what a penis was,” Camille shot back.
“She still doesn’t know,” Joan whispered to James.
James grinned.
“Can you not embarrass me?” I requested of my girls.
“How are we embarrassing you?” Fenn asked, seeming genuinely perplexed.
“I don’t know, maybe carrying on a conversation about penises is a topic for discussion pre-seventh or eighth dinner we share with my new man and his family,” I suggested. “I know!” I suddenly exclaimed. “Let’s save it for Thanksgiving.”
“No, please go on,” Jess said, leaning into one elbow on the counter of the bar, his other hand held another stick of string cheese. He bit some off and said through chewing, “I want to hear more about penises.”
“I have bragged outrageously about how perfect you are,” I declared to the girls. “Sadly, I forgot to warn you to pretend that’s what you were.”
“Aw, Mom, really?” Camille asked. “That’s so sweet.”
“I am truly perfect.” Fenn draped herself on a barstool in a manner James, Jess, Jace and Will watched very closely in one way, Celeste watched it closely in another, and I lamented for the first time how strikingly beautiful and lithe my daughter was.
She was addressing this to Bohannan, who was silently regarding all of this from his place, leaning with his ass against the sink and the apples of his palms resting on the counter behind him.
“The angels sang, and the doves cried when I was born,” Fenn went on.
“Barf,” Camille groaned.
“Obviously, as you can see,” Fenn drawled, “the trolls grunted, and the goblins danced when Camille made her way into the world.”
“Which is perfect, as a sorceress, that I’d find you,” Joan purred, nuzzling Camille’s neck with her chin.
“You’re actually mine, I don’t know where those two came from,” I said to Joan.
“I wish,” she replied.
Yes, Joan’s parents were rather a pill.
I blew her a kiss.
She smiled at me.
“Can you show me how to curl my hair like yours?” Celeste asked Camille.
“Totally. Beauty school at Mom’s tomorrow night!” Camille cried.
Celeste turned shining, happy eyes to me, and it occurred to me, in longing for a mother she never really had, she wouldn’t dare to dream what it would mean to have a sister she simply couldn’t have. And for obvious reasons, she’d never considered the impossibility of having several older ones.
But there it was, this cornucopia of female goodness laid out before her.
And it was something I’d had the privilege of giving to her.
As lovely as those thoughts were, they weren’t the only reasons my smile was softer for her.
“Baby,” Bohannan’s voice rumbled low. “You need me to do anything?”
“No, Cade, I have it covered.”
He gave me a look that was his neutral blended with warmth, contentedness and affection.
I tried to give that back, without the neutral.
His beard twitched up.
There you go.
I succeeded.
I turned back to the crew and noted that Jess, Jace and Celeste were paying no mind to this.
But Joan had her forehead on Camille’s shoulder, hiding her face, Camille was avoiding my eyes, but hers seemed to be shining with tears, and Fenn appeared to be deep breathing.
“You guys okay?” I asked.
Fenn’s gaze found mine.
And she replied, “We’re great, Mom. We’re freaking perfect.”
I held her look.
I read her look.
I loved her look.
And then I got busy finishing dinner.
Forty-Four
Confucius
The next night, I walked out of the bathroom, flipping off the light switch, while still rubbing serum in my face.
“I could have missed listening to all the Misted Pines ghost stories while sitting on my pier,” I told Bohannan, who was in bed, so obviously his bare chest was also there, as was his beard, and a recent delicious discovery, his thin, gold-framed reading glasses were on his nose.
He took them off and looked at me.
I was done complaining due to the fact I was having a sexy male librarian fantasy.
He set what he’d been reading on his nightstand and ordered, “Get in bed.”
I didn’t get in bed, per se.
I got on him.
Straddling his hips, he put his hands to mine, and I said softly, “I think maybe one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen was watching you, Jace, Jess and James hanging all those strings of lights up and down my back clearing.”
And they had. Maybe thirty sets of them. So not only my pier was hooked up with soft, romantic, safe, boogey-man-stay-away lights, the path down to it was. The deck outside the house was. They had section remotes, so I could go all in or pick parts. But house-to-pier, there was no place to hide.
They’d even started stringing some into the woods, along the path to Bohannan’s house. But they stopped when they ran out.
Note to self: buy more lights so what was mine could be connected to what was Bohannan’s in yet another way.
“Doesn’t take much with you,” he remarked.
“You did it because you wanted to make us feel safe in the light. You did it because I wanted them, and you knew they’d make me happy. You did it because it was your way to feel out James. You did it to give me some time to be with my girls without alienating the boys. That doesn’t seem to me like not much.”
He didn’t reply to all that.
He said, “If that’s the kind of guy who’s defending our freedom, I’m resting easier tonight. I probably would have punched Jace or Jess in the mouth the fiftieth time they said to me, ‘Talk to me, Goose.’ He’s good-humored and has the patience of a saint.”
My lips tipped up, because James was definitely that, but I reminded him, “The kind of gal who’s also doing it egged Jace and Jess on to tell more ghost stories after she’d collected some pebbles she surreptitiously started throwing into the water to freak us out.”
“Got no problem with that, because she’s got no fear.”