Page 94 of Sweet Twins For My Brother's Best Friend

“Okay, noted, the art doesn’t talk.” I mimic sealing my lips with a key and throwing it.

“That’s better,” she tells me, pushing herself off the wall.

“Hey, baby, when you’re ready you meet me at the office, okay?” She walks over to me and pecks my lips.

“Okay, I might get in a run after I finish building this.”

“Good, I’m glad. I’ll see you soon then. Thank you for putting this together for me.”

I look up at her from the floor. “Of course, Hannah Banana. It was easy. I’ll put anything together for your little…plantains.”

I flash her a genuine smile, pleased with my joke, before returning to working on the crib. I’m so close, and I want to be the first person to see it set up.

I want to stand in the middle of the empty room and turn off the lights and see how it would feel to rescue a crying baby at night.

“What’s that serious face?” Hannah asks me, smoothing my hair down and wiping curls out of my eyes and off my forehead.

“Oh, nothing.” I smile at her and pull her face down close to mine with my hands cupping her jaw. I kiss the crests of her cheeks.

“Go on, I’ll see you at your office later.”

“My office,” she sighs happily, “I get toleavemy place andgoto my office. How fancy.”

I toss my head back and laugh. “I don’t know if we can trust you as the arbiter of fancy considering you thought baking carrots was fancy.”

“Wow, my boyfriend’s mean!” Hannah says in a jokingly whiny voice, looking down at Lucy, who wags her tail excitedly, looking up at her with adoration.

Hannah blows me a kiss and leaves out the front door with Lucy at her side and a hash brown patty between her teeth. She is the picture of a young, busy mom.

I hear her outside the door as she pulls out her key ring to lock the front door.

Butterflies flutter in my chest at the realization that she’s going to use her new keys not because she needs to since I am home, but because she wants to have the feeling of ownership, of living here, of it being her home.

I listen with tender affection as she inserts the key and turns the lock.

As her footsteps fade down the hall, I get up quickly and hurry to the door to unlock it and open it.

With large strides, I rush toward her and pick her up around the waist to kiss her, feeling her melt backwards, her mouth softening against mine.

I set her back down, and she asks, “What was that for?”

“Nothing special.” I shrug.

I know today’s the day that Hannah wants me to think about what I want out of an expansion for the gym.

Truth be told, I’m not sure. I always thought I wanted to expand to another country, but with the addition of two little ones, it seems not like a dashed dream but just impractical at the moment.

In fact, lately, I’ve been thinking more and more about the man at the farmer’s market, with his off-kilter mustache and kind eyes.

At one point, he’d talked about his life off in rural California, and while that’s not exactly what I want, I could imagine something like a waterfront gym, a little town where I could learn to sail and fish and come home smelling salty.

Maybe that’s too big a dream for all of us right now. There’s still a lot to do here.

But it’s a nice thought.

It would be even nicer if I could get Tyler on board, I think to myself as I put together the stroller and the car seat that we bought with Mrs. Jackson.

If I could get Tyler to look at me with a genuine smile and tell me that he likes the idea of me moving to a countryside town with his sister, that’s all I would need to pull the trigger on the idea.

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