Page 49 of Claimed By My Biker Daddies

Luca takes a tragic pause, considers the ceiling, and adds harmonies that would make a choir weep.

I scoop up Gabe first, because he looks righteous about his contribution, and carry him to the couch that has a permanent mother-shaped dent.

There’s a bottle with three sips left on the coffee table, a cold half cup of espresso next to it, and a stack of unpaid bills auditioning to be coasters.

My shirt wears a museum of formula splatters.

On the floor is a bakery tote holding six loaves of orange-almond stollen I baked after midnight, one-handed, with Gabe tucked under my arm and Luca swaddled in my lap like a pastry I refused to burn.

I strip Gabe with the speed of a woman who has learned that delays lead to disaster.

The wipes are cold.

He lodges a formal complaint.

“I know,” I tell him, kissing his damp belly, knees braced against the coffee table. “I will invent an affordable, heated wipe dispenser and make us rich.”

By the time he is in a clean diaper and a fresh onesie with tiny motorcycles on the feet, Luca has decided the world is ending.

I flip them like pancakes.

Gabe gets propped with a rolled towel and a pacifier he pretends to hate then adores.

I pick up Luca, his cheeks red, eyes furious, and hair sticking up like startled grass.

“You are very dramatic,” I tell him. He hiccups like a metronome. “You get that from your mother.”

He quiets when I hum.

I do not sing well, but I sing often.

Old Dean Martin, the Sicilian lullabies Nonna used to murmur when the dough rose.

Sometimes a tune I do not know the name of, something that sounds like guitar and hands in a kitchen that is not this one.

When they were smaller the sound calmed both at once, a magic trick I clung to in the soft blue hours when the city lifted its shoulders and I thought of the mountains.

It has been a year since I ran at dawn.

A year since I slipped out of that cedar-smelling room and the men who made my body feel like a cathedral and my life feel possible, and I told myself it was fantasy.

I have told myself a lot of things.

That it was one night.

That a woman like me is not built to be wanted at the edges and the center both.

That men like them have whole worlds to guard and no business taking care of mine.

I told myself I was protecting them from a mess that might not be theirs.

If I say it fast, it sounds noble.

If I slow down, it sounds like fear.

The radiator takes pity and coughs up a thread of heat.

I thank it out loud, because I reward good behavior.