Total pages in book: 94
Estimated words: 91461 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91461 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
“Is the smell overwhelming?”
“Yes,” he muttered miserably.
“Even with the fans on and the windows open?”
He nodded.
“Perhaps painting is more a daytime activity?”
“It’s all Finn’s fault.”
I enjoyed hearing Finn groan.
“Is there any more Thai food?” Harper asked.
“I ordered you all pizza,” Hannah reminded him.
“But nobody wanted that so it’s in the fridge,” Wick said sounding a bit bereft. “So… is there any more Thai yes or no?”
“Yes,” Sam answered. “Come on, let’s get you all fed.”
Later, Hannah led Jake up to her room, Wick and Harper took Jake’s old room, back to being our guest room, and Finn sacked out on the couch. Kola had been asleep for a while, and he didn’t want to wake him up. Knowing my son as I did, I opened the door of his room and leaned in to check on him before Sam and I went to bed.
“Pa?” he said sleepily.
“Yes, love, just checking on you. Go back to sleep.”
There was a noise halfway between a moan and a rumble.
“Finn is on the couch, just so you know.”
Beats of time passed. “Finn?”
“Yes.”
“Tell him c’mere, okay?”
“Okay,” I soothed him and closed the door.
I then walked down three steps from the second-floor landing and looked down at Finn, who smiled up at me. “You need to get upstairs, as my son would like you next to him.”
“What?”
I chuckled.
“He does?”
“Of course he does. Always think, from now on, ‘he sleeps best when I’m with him.’”
He threw off the covers, grabbed the blankets and pillow we’d supplied—I always gave people a lightweight blanket for underneath and a warmer one for the top—and charged up the stairs. Right before he closed the door to Kola’s room, I got a radiant smile.
“Everything all fixed now?” Sam groused at me when I shut the two of us in for the night. I noted that Dobby was in his bed on the wingback chair beside ours, and Chilly was curled up near Sam’s pillow, where he normally slept. Both of them were down for the night.
“Yes,” I told him. “Don’t be so cranky.”
“I wanna go to sleep,” he snapped at me.
“Well, go ahead.”
“I need you to lie down with me.”
All he actually needed was me to cuddle until he fell asleep. I could then sit up and read, but I could not, under any circumstances, leave the bedroom. Sam could stir from a dead sleep if the bed jostled at all or if I opened the door to our room. Those husbands that slept through their spouse getting sick in the middle of the night… Sam Kage was not one of them. I had not, thankfully, had food poisoning in years, but the last time I was very sick, he was there, rubbing my back, and then later, with a heating pad for my stomach, making sure I could sleep. You know someone really loves you when they will make conversation with you as you sit beside a toilet bowl and will clean everything up when you’re done. There’s really no one better, and so him needing me so he can sleep is really not so terrible.
As soon as I smiled, he growled, and I turned off the light and got under the covers with him. Once we were snuggly, he whispered in my ear that he loved me, which, of course, was always good to hear.
Kola had a wonderful day. Hannah made him his ridiculous special dessert, the one made from six different cookies that she whipped up for him every year, and I made him lasagna. It turned out that Aja brought the chicken marsala, and with Regina’s moussaka, Dylan’s yellow squash casserole and Caesar salad, the meal was pretty well-rounded. Most importantly, that Sunday, we had a nice cross section of people at his birthday open house.
Poor Sandra, who showed up with Michael, the whole people coming and going all night was a bit beyond her. She’d experienced our brand of party for Christmas last year, and I was fairly certain that she was still traumatized.
Finn’s parents were there, and Harper had put together a beautiful video of Kola growing up. Apparently, Wick had helped him, and it was basically the high points, thus far, of my son’s life. I, of course, loved it, but I was not nearly as spellbound by it as Finn’s parents were. They stood and watched the twenty-minute homage to all things Kola at least three times. In the kitchen, I cornered Harper and asked him what had prompted the trip down memory lane. It had taken time and effort to scan in pictures, pull video, and basically create the homage to my oldest child.
He smiled at me. “I think some of the issues they have with Kola are that they think Finn won’t have the life they want him to have, that they imagined him having, with Kola because he’s a man. But in all those pictures and videos, all they have to do is look to see that, even though Kola was raised by two men, his childhood looks a lot like Finn’s.”