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“Yes, you did!” Zion yelled from the living room.

“I walked past him!”

“You pushed me!”

“With what?!”

I closed my eyes for two seconds, spatula still in my hand.

It wasn’t even eleven yet.

“Both of y’all shut up before I turn this stove off and everybody eat cereal.”

Silence.

Exactly.

I flipped the pancake harder than I needed to and watched it slap back down into the pan.

We lived in Irvington, New Jersey, in a three-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a two-family house. Me, Xavier, and four damn kids squeezed into three bedrooms.

It wasn’t as bad as it sounded.

The apartment was actually a nice size. Old, but nice. Big living room in the front, dining room that had slowly turned into a place for backpacks, mail, Amazon boxes and shit nobody felt like taking upstairs, decent kitchen, and enough closet space that I hadn’t completely lost my mind yet.

Zion and Micheal shared the biggest room besides ours. Amari had the little room, even though she still found her ass in our bed whenever she felt like it, and Serenity’s bassinet was right beside me and Xavier because she was only four months old.

Eventually, we needed something bigger.

But we did okay for ourselves.

I worked as an ICU nurse at Newark Beth Israel, and Xavier worked construction. Between the two of us, the bills got paid. Rent got paid. Lights stayed on. Refrigerator stayed full. Kids had clothes and shoes. We could order food without checking the account first most times. We could go out every once in a while. Take the kids places. Do Christmas right.

We weren’t rich.

We weren’t struggling like that either.

But you know what the fuck was struggling?

My dying fucking libido.

I flipped another pancake.

Hard.

The date last night had actually been cute too. That was what irritated me.

Me and Xavier hadn’t had a real date in I couldn’t even tell you how long. Not us taking the kids somewhere and calling it family time. Not grabbing food and eating it in the car because Serenity was sleep and neither one of us wanted to wake her up. Not running to Target together and somehow spending three hundred dollars on everything except what we went in there for.

A real date.

Just us.

Avery had watched the kids for us. My little sister came over while I got dressed, and before we left, I had ran two houses down to Nesha’s because I hated what the fuck my hair was doing. Nesha fixed it for me real quick, I came back home, and me and Xavier finally got the hell out the house.

We went out, ate good, had drinks, laughed our asses off. Xavier was actually present too. Wasn’t buried in his phone all night. Wasn’t acting tired. Wasn’t rushing me.

We kicked back.