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“Is that a…horse?” Zane asked.
He felt Avi shrug. “Maybe a dog?”
Avi clicked on the caption. “It’s apparently a potato.”
“Why does it have legs?” Zane asked.
“Why does it have five legs…and three eyes?”
Zane laughed. “Maybe the third ‘eye’ is a nose? Or a mouth?”
“Which, once again, begs the question, why do our children think potatoes have legs or mouths or eyes?” Avi asked. “Do you think they might be stupid?”
Zane elbowed him again, harder this time. “Avi! Don’t talk about our kids that way. Of course not. They’re just being creative.”
“They painted a potato. How creative can they be?”
Zane reached back and pinched his side, making Avi flinch hard.
Avi slapped his hand. “Bad Zaney. No more orgasms for you.”
“Liar,” Zane said, shaking his head as he stared down at the kids’ happy faces.
Felix’s face. They looked so much like him, only with Lola’s curly hair and radiant skin color.
Sometimes, Zane looked at them and still couldn’t quite believe they were theirs. That they got to raise these tiny humans together. That somehow all four of them had built this life from the wreckage of everything that came before.
“Do you want more kids?” Zane asked.
He felt Avi shrug once more. “I’m down. We have the room. Do you want more kids?”
“I miss when they were the size of potatoes,” Zane admitted. “Remember when they were just little blobs waiting for us to help them become little people?”
He missed the midnight feedings and the sleepy cuddles. The way Oscar used to curl his entire fist around one of Zane’s fingers. The way West would fall asleep on Felix’s chest for hours.
“Have you told Asa this?” Avi asked.
Zane shook his head. “I don’t know if he actually wants us to have kids that are biologically ours.”
“Of course, he does. I mean, if you do. He wants whatever you want. If you told him you wanted to start a goat farm and dress them all in designer baby clothes and push them around the city streets in a five-thousand-dollar stroller, he’d hand over his black card and start calling around for places that sell goat-sized baby clothes. My brother would do literally anything for you.”
Zane snickered at the idea of dressing up goats in Felix’s baby line and parading them around the city.
Felix would be horrified. Or charmed. One never knew with Felix.
“You know you have the right to want things, too, right?” Avi asked in that same nonchalant way he talked about anything. “Like, you’re a part of this family. If you want more kids, we’ll have more kids. The boys would love siblings. Asa would secretly love pretending he somehow knocked you up. If they had our DNA, even better.”
“I don’t want to stress him out,” Zane admitted.
“Stress out Asa? He’s a psychopath. He became an architect because he likes having thousands of lives in his hands. He’s a megalomaniac. If you tell him you want his babies to raise, he’ll probably lock you in the bedroom and physically try to impregnate you.”
“If I could get pregnant, this house wouldn’t be big enough for all the kids we’d have,” Zane said wistfully.
“You and Freckles are both such freaks about babies. You both have crazy breeding kinks.”
“You think it’s hot,” Zane countered.
“On you, yeah. On Freckles, it’s just fucking weird. Like, that’s my brother. I don’t need to know that he secretly dreams about Jericho impregnating him.”
