Page 90 of Sweet Twins For My Brother's Best Friend

“It’s calming! She smells good. Don’t judge me, alright? I can’t take it.” Hannah rolls her head over to press her cheek against Lucy.

Lucy stands and takes it, but her brown eyes look up at me with a tinge of concern.

“Look at her eyes, Hannah Banana, she looks so nervous about this.”

“Shhh, get out of here, Judgy.”

I sit on the ground next to her. “Listen, we don’t really have to tell him anything. I think he’s probably going to put it togetherwhen he comes over and sees that you’re here at night and we have a room with a crib in it. Don’t you think?”

She shrugs. “Well, maybe he’ll think that I’m helping you negotiate your finances because you got someone else pregnant.”

I laugh a little, pulling Lucy closer to me. “Well, let’s not tell him that, okay? We don’t need to dig the hole any deeper than it already is.”

She nods quietly, stands up, and walks back into the nursery to continue setting up the cribs.

We work on the first crib together for the next hour, eventually making enough headway that it really starts to look like something.

I try not to think about the fact that we have another unopened box with another crib in it sitting in the corner until Hannah groans, “Chris! We have a whole other crib to set up!”

Laughing out loud, I say, “Well, maybe we’ll get lucky and one of the twins will eat the other.”

“Chris, that isn’t funny,” she reprimands me, but I watch her turn around to hide her smile from me.

“I’m just saying, maybe we shouldn’t set this one up until we know for sure one isn’t hungry. We could return it later.”

“Stop!” She swats me in the arm, her smile wide, showing me her wide white smile that I always find so adorable.

Her smile drops a bit when there’s a knock at the front door, and she steels herself for Tyler to enter, pulling back her shoulders and sucking in a breath.

“You ready?”

“Ready.”

“Let’s do this.” I hold out my hand for her to take. She slips her palm against mine and her fingers between mine. We pull back our shoulders, breathe out slowly, and I lead her to the front door.

When I pull it open, Tyler holds up a six pack excitedly, a smile across his freckled face.

“You ready?” he asks me with all the frat boy energy he had back in college. His face drops after a moment of processing when he realizes Hannah’s here, and his eyes flick downward to our interlocked hands. “What’s…oh, no. Hell no.”

Tyler drops the six pack back down to his side, his shoulder bouncing with the force.

He pushes the door open to let himself in further and drops the six pack on the floor where one of the cans bursts open, spraying the sticky drink all across the floor. His fingers clutch the front of my shirt as his face slowly turns redder and redder.

“Wait, Tyler, let’s talk about this,” I tell him calmly, looking directly into his green eyes, the exact color of Hannah’s eyes, passed down from their mother.

I can’t see much affection for me in them right now, though; they have a glassy tinge to them, and his pupils are flat black like the bottom of a hole.

His response is to pull me even closer until we’re only inches apart. Hannah is still holding my hand, her sweat sticking our palms together. “Hannah, let go of him,” Tyler growls.

Hannah shakes her head but doesn’t say anything.

“Chris, be a man and step outside the house with me. Don’t make my little sister watch you get your face smashed in.”

“Come on, dude, you’re not gonna beat me up. First of all, I’m your best friend and you love me.”

I smile and try to move a bit, but he’s holding me so closely that I can barely move and he is definitely NOT smiling.

“Second, you’re an adult and a surgeon. You need your hands.”

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