Page 128 of Seizing Control: Part Two

The three babies in our life are the only babies we’ll ever be blessed with.

Noticing that Lazarus has remained silent since my husband offered his name suggestions, I place my hand over the top of the one gripping my left shoulder. My first love is struggling. I can feel his pride raging, the insult to his legacy overpowering the compromise that Slash has offered in a predicament where cooperation has been hard to find.

My son makes a snuffling sound, and I softly pat his little nappy-covered backside.

“What do you think?” I whisper at a level only my first love can hear.

Bending forward, he softly brushes the back of his knuckles along our son’s spine. “I think Ezra Miles suits him to a T.” After he strokes the perfectly form shell of Ezra’s ear, Lazarus presses a kiss to the top of my head. The hand still holding my shoulder squeezes lightly. “Will never be on board with the last name, but it’s a compromise I’m willing to make for our family’s safety.”

“Yeah?” I ask him a little louder.

“Yeah,” he repeats.

“And Asher Adeline?”

Lazarus grins. “Do you need to ask? My dad and your mum... it’s fucking brilliant.”

“Carter,” I call my husband by his legal name. “Looks like you’ve named the twins.”

A flash of disbelief settles in his handsome features. It’s chased away by a blaze of happiness. His grip is tighter than my first love’s when he takes hold of my shoulder, and the slap he lands on Lazarus’ back makes him grunt.

“Really?”

I open my mouth to answer, but my first love beats me to it. “Really.”

It’s the first rays of a rainbow that I’ve glimpsed on the horizon since I was wheeled into my hospital room last night and met with the worried stares of the two men I love. Their selfishness earlier this morning wasn’t confidence inspiring and the memories I hold of their recent violence doesn’t exactly fill me with faith in the continuation of their promised truce.

But this is a start.

A good start.

“Let’s update their name cards,” Deborah tells us.

She passes the pen to Lazarus. Since I’m holding Ezra, I expect him to hand it off to Slash. My first love doesn’t like his handwriting. He goes out of his way to avoid anyone seeing his penmanship, and has had me fill in paperwork for him since I was, maybe, fourteen. Between me and Everett, we ran the front office of the Shamrocks garage for Zeke. I completed his personal documents, and Slash did his bookkeeping. For years, he’s used invisible tactics to avoid reading and writing in front of people, and I was his main aide in the ruse.

The glimmers of hope that are appearing on the horizon are further buoyed as Lazarus pokes his tongue out the corner of his mouth and carefully prints our son’s name in block letters. I am wheeled closer to Asher’s incubator, and able to touch her tiny foot while holding my son, as my first love does the same on a fresh name card for our daughter.

“Did you?” Slash rasps, jerking his chin toward Lazarus.

I shake my head. “Nope.”

“Damn.”

When Lazarus is finished writing, Deborah urges his to remove his jacket and unbutton his dress shirt. Her eyes widen as she takes in his defined pecs and abs. Biting back my laughter, I watch her eat him up with her eyes, then almost pass out when he gently takes hold of Ezra and places him on his tattooed chest.

The companionable silence that settles between the three of us is comforting. It helps make the strange situation a little easier to cope with, alleviating the tension that we’re doing our best to ignore in the midst of this latest problem facing us. For me, ensuring that the twins thrive is paramount. I love Slash and Lazarus, but the main thing Garrett’s surprise arrival taught me is there is one thing that supersedes my heart’s desire.

Motherhood is it for me.

Not exactly a very girl power moment, but that’s my individual truth.

Nurse Deborah appears to be in her element as she assists my men. The veteran nurse is a no-nonsense professional, full of wisdom and tips to encourage Asher and Ezra to flourish in the NICU, yet she turns into a teenage girl the moment they bare their skin.

It’s much needed levity in a moment of worry.

“Lucky girl,” she whispers to me after she’s shown Lazarus how to use the portal holes on Asher’s incubator. It’s Slash’s turn to go skin-to-skin with Ezra, and he’s just stripped off his cut and Shamrocks t-shirt. Nurse Deborah subtly fans herself once she has my husband situated and has taken her fill of his wide, chiselled torso. “Lucky, lucky girl.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

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