Page 112 of Sully

“Steady hands for all that crafting. You know, this might work,” I decided as we walked. “Could build some epic treehouses with bridges and shit up here when the kids get bigger. Bonnie said she’d feel better about an above-ground pool,” I went on.

“So the kids don’t accidentally fall in.”

“Well, she said me,” I admitted, getting a bark of laughter out of Valen. “But the kids will apply eventually.”

“Really thinking ahead, huh?” Valen asked.

What can I say? I loved the club kids. And the first time I saw Bonnie holding one of the club babies, it did something strange to my heart and gut. Ever since, all I could think about was putting one in her, watching her hold it, raising it up, teaching it to be wild and fearless and happy.

“I think you’re gonna need to hire that poor woman a full-time cleaning lady to put up with a horde of your kids.”

“You’re probably right on that,” I agreed, circling back to the back porch.

I could picture Bonnie sitting there, belly round, knitting a blanket for another baby while I chased the others around the yard.

It was a good fantasy.

One I hoped to make a reality one day.

“You think it has enough bedrooms?” Valen asked as we walked through a dated kitchen that needed some serious TLC. But I was excited to have something that we could put our mark on.

“Depends.”

“On how many kids you want?”

“On if the basement is as nice as it looked in the listing photos.” At his blank look, I shrugged. “Bonnie has to have a craft room. But I don’t want her sitting in a creepy, dark, spider-ridden basement to do that.”

Opening the basement door, we made our way down. It wasn’t promising right at first. But as soon as we rounded the corner, the space opened up.

The sun sparkled in through French doors and generously sized windows, chasing away any dark corners.

“The floor is hideous,” Valen decided, running his shoe over the dark blue and gold floral carpeting. “But this is nice.”

“Lots of wall space for built-ins,” I said. And floor space for workstations.

“Well, that’s everything you wanted, right?” Valen asked.

“It is.”

“You gonna buy it?”

“Fuck yeah.”

Bonnie - 6 months

“Zima! Leave the poor squirrel alone,” I called through the kitchen window, watching our dog chase a squirrel up onto the fence.

“Run, Petey,” Perish called to the squirrel that, yes, he’d named. He was crouched down, digging out broadleaf plantain weeds by hand because ‘if we didn’t get ahead of this, they would take over everything.’

I was still having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that this was my house.Ourhouse.

We hadn’t fully moved in yet. Pretty quickly after closing, a bunch of pesky little issues with the place popped up that needed to be handled.

The back porch that looked so gorgeous was just freshly painted rotted wood. There was a leak behind the tile in the primary bathroom, meaning it—and all the drywall and the floor—needed to be torn out and replaced. Oh, and we couldn’t forget the fact that literally every tap in the house was set up wrong, so the hot was where the cold was supposed to be, and vice versa.

So we’d been spending some of our free time at the house, but sleeping at the clubhouse at night. It was kind of nice. We got to introduce Zima to her new home while we worked on little projects. Then we went back to where she was most familiar to sleep.

Though, the clubhouse was feeling a little more cramped these days. What with the new prospects all trickling in within a few weeks of each other. New prospects not only meant less space, but a lot of parties. And I mean… a lot. All day and all night sometimes.

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