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The afternoonafter Darwin’s unfortunate spell as statuary, I drag all three boys to my hearth room.
Together, we remake our rings.
The last time, I didn’t consciously direct the forging. This time, I dig deep into our quaternion. I tug on the strings connecting us, and shape the feelings that connect us into four circlets.
I don’t need to pass out the rings. When I open my eyes, they’re on our fingers.
Gabe’s is a silver band of mist that twines around his finger. Charlie’s is a piece of jet-black onyx with a line of fire carved through the middle. Darwin’s is a spiral of gleaming crystal with a webwork of fire shimmering through its million facets.
And mine? Mine is a stack of all three rings: mist, onyx, and crystal, bound together with a copper webwork that looks like tree branches.
Charlie steps behind me and slides his arms around me. “Good cooking, bean.”
I slip my hand under his and hold our hands up, our rings side by side. “Like them?”
He kisses my temple. “Lacrosse lads are gonna shite themselves. They’re all gonna want one. Look at that.” He clenches his fingers and the fire in the center of the ring sparks and flares. “Sexy.”
I bump my arse back into him. “Nutter.”
“Dinner.”
“It’s not even six o’clock, Chaz.”
“Taco night, bean.”
“I’m cooking,” says Darwin.
We all turn our heads to look at him.
“You are?” I ask. We all take turns in the kitchen, but Darwin’s culinary repertoire so far is limited to cereal. He’s burned pizza heating it up. In the microwave. Twice.
Evidently, his patisserie skills are acquired sometime in the next decade.
“I’m, uh, grilling steaks. It can’t be that hard.” At my lifted eyebrows, recalling the pizza, he offers a sheepish smile. “Would you help me, Teddy?”
I step away from Charlie and take Darwin’s hands. “You’re asking for help?”
“You’re giving me shit about asking for help?”
I grin up at him. “Egalitarian shite-giving, remember?”
He shakes his head at me but his smile has become that unstudied, uninhibited, innocent grin I saw on the banks of the Seine. “Princes aren’t allowed in the kitchens. He’d hate the idea. Help me make something other than what my father would want me to be.”
“Potato salad?” I ask.
His grin widens. “And green beans. Gabe likes them.”
That’s true. My baby boy loves green beans and steak. Weird as shit.
“We don’t have any in the house,” Gabe says, stepping behind me and sandwiching me between two warm, firm boy chests. My favorite place in the whole world. “No steaks, either.”
I tip my head back onto his shoulder. “You and Chaz pick up the groceries while Dar and I cook the potatoes and fire up the grill?”
Gabe sinks his hand in my hair and tugs my head back to press a warm kiss across my lips. “Whipped potatoes?”
“Anything you want, baby boy.”
He waggles his eyebrows. “Anything? I’ll hold you to that.”
