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“You’re the one who ruined my life, Dad!” she cried, jumping to her feet, cradling the cat surprisingly gently. The angry expression contorting her face almost had its intended effect, but I caught a glint of the tears flooding her eyes as she turned to storm off.

Art blew out a long slow stream of air and reached up to squeeze my hand, which was still resting on his shoulder. Then he straightened up and shook himself before taking in another deep breath.

“Merry! Time to get ready for bed!” he called upstairs to where both of his children had vanished.

“I want Meg to read me a story,” Merry called back.

“Is that okay with you?” Art asked “It’s fine if it’s not. It was already a lot before that.” He waved at Viv’s empty seat, lifting his eyes to the ceiling and sighing. “I would one hundred percent understand if you wanted to cut and run now.”

“I’m not sure what it says about me, but that actually made things less weird,” I said. “I’d be happy to read to Merry.”

Since Art hadn’t had a chance to inflate his own air mattress, let alone put sheets on it, and we couldn’t all fit on the kids’ air mattresses, we piled onto the double bed in my bedroom. Merry snuggled down between Art and me, brandishing a far thicker book than I’d expected to be reading. We’d invited Viv to join us if she wanted, and, despite not initially acknowledging the olive branch, she slunk into the room, Pipsqueak tucked happily into the crook of her arm, a few minutes after I’d started on the first chapter of The Sword in the Stone. With barely a glance in my direction, Viv placed the cat on the bed and curled up around her, resting her head on her father’s leg, and settled in to listen to her brother’s favorite book.

Already half asleep, Art reached down to rest his hand on his daughter’s head, and I braced myself for another outburst, but instead of shaking him off, she shifted slightly to push her head farther under his hand. He sighed, and some of the tension that he’d carried into the room bled away.

“I like this,” he muttered, just before his breathing shifted to soft snores.

“Me too,” I whispered back as I resumed reading.

My place in the cuddle pile made for an awkwardly angled photo, but when I looked up after finishing the third chapter and realized I was the only being awake in the room, I couldn’t resist fishing out my phone.

Moving as gently as possible so I didn’t wake anyone up, I stretched up my arm to capture the moment to the best of my abilities and shot the photo to Mac with no explanation. He replied almost instantly.

Cute family.

Ignoring the longing spiked with fear that shot through me, I sank back into the pillows and allowed myself to escape back into Merlin and Arthur’s fictional world, leaving my complicated feelings behind.

FIFTEEN

“What was going through your head at dinner?” Art asked, pulling me a little closer to him.

He’d woken up not long after I’d sent Mac the photo, and together we’d somehow gotten Merry, Viv, and Pipsqueak up the stairs and into their respective beds. After picking out clothes for Merry to wear to his first day of school, he’d followed me back down the ladder stairs to the kitchen, where we’d finished tidying the dinner mess and getting things ready for breakfast.

Like at dinner, the dissonance between barely having spent any time together yet feeling like we’d known each other forever was dizzying, and the realization that this was what I’d been missing all those years left a void inside me that I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to fill.

“I feel bad making you sleep on that air mattress,” I said opting to keep my more complicated feelings to myself. Rather than the double mattress he'd ordered, the company had sent over a third single. I had no idea how he was ever going to fit on the tiny thing, let alone get any sleep.

“Somehow, I think the couch would be worse,” Art replied with a laugh, taking the dishcloth I’d already folded three times out of my hand and hanging it on the oven door handle.

“You could… you know…” I started, then let my voice trail away, hoping he’d fill in the blanks on his own.

He laughed again.

“While I would far prefer sleeping in your bed with you so I can hold you in my arms all night, just in case I wake up convinced this is all a fever dream I cooked up.” He placed a finger on my mouth to forestall the words he could see brewing. “I am going to sleep upstairs with my children as we agreed. Because that’s the right thing to do on so many counts.”

The not so chaste kiss he punctuated his statement with almost made me suggest that we throw all that propriety right out the window, but I somehow managed to restrain myself.

He lifted his mouth and rested his forehead against mine with a small sigh. “We’re already doing this all sorts of backward by moving in together so soon. It’s already putting tons of pressure on us. The last thing we need is to rush into this even faster. There are… things we need to consider.”

“You mean like figuring out the whole perimenopause, intimacy-after-forty thing?”

Art laughed. “Yeah, that. Though I have a hunch that when the time is right, we’ll figure it out just fine. But I meant the kids, too. This is already a lot for them to adjust to. Finding their dad in the bed of a woman they barely know might be a little much to ask for. Plus, as I’ve said before, I don’t want to rush any of this.”

He cupped my face with his left hand and ran his thumb gently over my cheek before brushing his lips over mine in a kiss that lit an inferno in my abdomen.

When I pulled his face closer to deepen the kiss, he pulled back with a soft groan.

“You sure about that?” I asked, laughing softly.