“Don’t—” she starts.
But she’s already crying.
“I want a baby with you, honey.”
“Archer, don’t say that just to placate me. I will lose it—”
My brush her cheek with my thumb. “I want a baby with you. I want all of it. Whenever you want.”
“You’re saying that because I cried.”
“I’m saying it because it’s the truth, and I should have made that clear from the start. Yes, I’d want another baby. Lily would be the best big sister, and imagine Luke as a big brother… he’d teach a newborn so much about cephalopods.”
She makes a noise into my collarbone that is half laugh, half hiccup, and she punches me lightly in the chest with the side ofher fist, frustrated, then clings to my shirt with the same hand as I pull her into me and hold her tight.
Her face is wet against my throat.
I tip her chin up and kiss her. Slow, this time. Her hands slide up to my jaw. She kisses me back, still half-crying, and laughs once into my mouth, and that laugh undoes me more than the tears did.
I press my mouth to her forehead, the bridge of her nose, and the corner of her jaw, where her pulse is racing beneath my lips.
“For the record,” I say into her hair, “we don’t have to wait to start trying.”
“Arch.”
“I’m just saying. The twins are at Bree’s. We have the whole house to ourselves. I’m a flexible guy.”
“We’re about to go to dinner.”
“I’m a goalie. We can be patient. But, uh—not, like,thatpatient.”
She laughs into my neck.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Three Months Later
Sydney
I’m at the counter cutting strawberries when Archer comes downstairs in sweats and no shirt, his hair still wet from the shower. For a moment, I forget what I’m doing.
I’ve lived with this man for months. We’ve shared a bathroom, a bed, and a coffee maker. I’ve watched him brush his teeth approximately four hundred times.
He still does this to me.
“Morning,” he says, walking past me toward the coffee.
“Morning.”
His hand brushes against my lower back as he goes by—casual, automatic, the way he touches me when he’s moving through a room I’m in. He does it all the time now: a hand on my hip in the kitchen, fingers at the nape of my neck while he reads something on his phone, his palm flat between my shoulder blades when we walk through a door. Like he can’t quite stop checking that I’m where he left me.
It’s sweet.
“Twins up?” he asks.
“Lily’s been up for an hour. She made me draw a unicorn before I’d had any coffee. It was rough.” I slide the bowl of strawberries across the island. “Luke is reading in his bedand refusing to come out until you confirm that the new fish encyclopedia he wants is, and I quote, ‘on the way.’”
“It’s on the way.”
