Page 66 of Claimed By My Biker Daddies

The water has warmed.

I pour some into a small pan, test the heat at my wrist, and the muscle memory of early fatherhood comes back like a favorite song.

The house is quiet except for the stove and the wind.

Roman has not spoken a full sentence since last night and I do not ask for one; talking is not the same as care.

Deacon is awake somewhere, the way men like him are awake, counting faults and batteries and ghosts in the wire.

Marisa is asleep.

It feels like a sacred thing.

I swear to God this house will collapse before I let anyone knock on her door before she is ready.

One twin stirs.

I hear it in my spine before my ears catch up.

A soft break in the silence, not a cry, a pre-cry stretch that says hunger has tapped the shoulder.

I tuck a sling across my chest, step into the room, and lift the first boy with two hands like I am making an offering.

He blinks, frowns, and considers whether we are at war.

We are not.

I tell him so.

“Hola, pequeño,” I whisper. “You are safe and I am large. We will do this together.”

I settle him into the sling so his ear lays over my heart.

The other one, offended to be left out of a plot, begins to wind up.

I scoop him too, and for a minute I am warm and full of purpose and completely ridiculous. Most of my best moments feel like this.

In the kitchen I set one boy in the crook of my elbow and hold the bottle to his mouth.

He latches with a seriousness that makes me laugh under my breath.

The other fusses because he also exists. I sway without thinking. The stove ticks.

The window fogs with our breath. Isla sings through the phone on the counter, making up a song about snowmen with motorcycle boots.

“You, mi caballito,” I tell the hungry one, “will be the loud one. You will run the house with your opinions. You will be forgiven because your mouth is pretty.”

He kicks as if he agrees.

“And you, Señor Thoughtful,” I say to the one tucked in the sling, “will be the architect. You will disassemble every cabinet in this kitchen by the time you are two. Deacon will cry on a Tuesday and call it sweat.”

Speaking of, Deacon ghosts in, boots silent on wood, hair damp from the kind of shower men take when there is work to do.

He looks at the bottle, then at the sling, then at me, and nods like I have done something correctly in a very large blueprint.

“How is the world?” I ask him.

“Power held,” he says. “Cameras at north and west are frosted, I will fix them when the wind takes a breath. Generator is primed. Lines are humming. I do not like the hum at the south eave. Roman is on the roof.”