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Juniper smiled. “I gettwomamas?”

Holy shit, this was a lot at once.

I absolutely broke down at the idea that Juniper might see me as one of her parents. It hit me hard, right in the chest.

“Don’t be sad, Jo Jo,” Juniper said, cupping my face with her hands.

“I’m not sad. These are happy tears, I promise. You don’t have to call me your mama, okay? But I do love you.” I think it was definitely too soon for Juniper to be attaching words like that to me. Larison and I were still so new, and I didn’t want to move too fast, even if we were already moving too fast.

“You can still call me Jo Jo.”

Juniper thought about that. “Okay. Can we have pancakes now?”

I’d been so engrossed in Juniper that I hadn’t seen Larison quietly crying next to me. Reaching out, I wiped some of her tears and she smiled at me.

“It’s not fair. You’re even gorgeous when you cry.”

That made her laugh.

“Mamaaaa, pancakes,” Juniper said, standing up on the bed.

“Okay, okay, let’s feed this one,” I said, grabbing Juniper and dragging her back down so I could tickle her.

“Jo Jooooo,” she giggled and I stopped.

“Okay. Pancakes.”

It was a different start to my morning than I was used to. Chaotic. Loud. But Larison handed me a cup of coffee and kissed my cheek and that was pretty damn great.

It was strange to have to send Larison off to work after being with her for pretty much two days.

The murals were being painted this week and I was dying to see the progress.

“How about if we stop in and bring you lunch?” Larison was running behind and needed to meet with the woman painting the mural.

“Could you? That would be amazing.” She chucked some snacks into her bag and rushed to make sure she had everything.

“Ugh, I’m going to be lateeee,” she said, coming over to kiss me.

“See you at lunch. I’ll hold the fort down.”

With one last kiss she did her little goodbye routine with Juniper and then she was gone.

“Okay, PJ, what are we gonna do today?”

“Everything!”

That was a tall order.

The next fewdays I barely went back to my apartment. Only to get more clothes and other things I needed.

Larison and I hadn’t talked about me moving in, but I’d basically moved in.

Our friends wouldn’t stop sending messages and asking how things were going, but we’d kind of stayed in our bubble, except for when I asked Sophie to watch Juniper so I could take Larison out on a date on Saturday night.

“My moms want us to come over this weekend,” Larison said, looking up from her phone on Thursday evening. “They’re both mad that they’ve been out of the loop about us, but I told them that everything was new and we were still figuring it out and didn’t want to go public, but that did not fly. So now we are requested to be at dinner on Sunday. No getting out of it.”

She rolled her eyes.