Page 50 of Happily Ever After… Again and Again

“Grayson,” he says again. “Are these…” He looks up to gauge Grayson’s expression.

“Yeah. I hope you don’t mind. I used your ruined books. Paper isn’t that hard to make when you have the right materials, you know? And I knew you loved them, so I didn’t want them to just go into the recycling bin.”

“So you made paper, and bound them into leather journals? For me?” Finn sounds as incredulous as the rest of them look.

“Well, yeah. It’s okay, right? Do you like them?”

“I can see some of the words from the books. Look.” He holds the book out to the show Gideon. “And here…” he finishes in a whisper.

“I tried to preserve the ones you had notated—they’re all in there somewhere. And when you’re done with these, I can always make you more. I dried and bleached the old pages. They’re in preservation boxes in the Art House.”

Finn places the journal back into the box so he can put his hand into Grayson’s hair, sliding his other along his jaw and pulling him in.

“Thank you. So much. I love them. I love you,” he says before he places the softest kiss on his mouth. Grayson melts with a moan, opening his mouth so Finn can tilt his head and lick in deep. He pulls away taking Grayson’s plush lower lip between his teeth, before soothing the nip with his tongue. He’s unintentionally pumping out enough happy-horny black currant pheromones that Luca’s eyes are drooping.

“Puppy, you’d better dial that back. Luca still has his gift to hand out.”

“Later,” Finn says to Grayson, before laying one last kiss on Grayson’s slack mouth.

“Whoo,” Nix mutters beside him. “Those Finn kisses are…”

Yes, they are indeed.

“Okay, Luca, you next,” Gideon says, and after a few tries, Rowan hoists Luca to his feet.

Tsuki jumps down from the couch and disappears into the hallway, the two cats following her lead as usual.

“Fine. My person is Rowan,” he says, before he pulls out a large gift bag from under the tree. “I hope you know how special you are to me, Rowan. I can always count on you to do all the fun things.”

Byfun,he means spontaneous, impractical, and ill-advised. And—more often than not—naked. He pushes the bag toward him, and it tips to the side, making a rattling noise.

“Did you make me candy?” Rowan asks, before pulling out a very large jar. The lid has been painted dark pink, and the label says:For every day Luca has loved Rowan. “Holy dicks.”

“Rowan,” Gideon chastises.

“No, I mean, there are dicks in here. It’s a jar-o-jizzlers. A penultimate pack of penises. A magnitude of members.”

And sure enough, when he takes the lid off, there are tiny lifelike, hand-painted dicks: long ones and short ones. Circumcised ones and ones with foreskins. Some with balls, and some without. Some erect and some hang down. Rowan pulls them out one by one and admires each one with a huge smile on his face. “Hey, is this one Leo? It looks like it leans to the right.”

“Yes! We’re all in there. I made every single one, with my very own hands.”No doubt sculpted from sense memory.

Finn is laughing when he asks, one of his new journals in his hand. “What does it mean on the jar?”

“I made 2,483 dicks.”

That stops Rowan in his attempts to fish even more clay penises from the jar. “What?”

“Yeah…it’s what’s on the jar, silly. One dick for every day I have loved you up until today. But…I think I lost a few. They’re slippery little fuckers. But you get the point, right? You’re not going to miss a few dicks?”

Holy crap on a cracker. A few thousand clay dicks in a jar. Luca Wilde—who bores easily and who freely admits he cannot focus as long as he’d like—had made the effort to mold, bake, paint, and count over two thousand clay penises. Jay hopes for a moment that the tabloids don’t get hold of that tidbit. There won’t be enough cash to make that go away.

Rowan grabs Luca by the thighs and drags him down into hislap so Luca can pull out the dicks he wants to showcase. The alpha kisses Luca’s neck while making a pile of the enormous ones, which are as long as two knuckles of Luca’s finger.

Jay thinks this has to be the weirdest thing to happen yet today, when Tsuki drops Luca’s rain boot on the floor in front of Rowan. The impact tilts the boot to the side and out rolls at least another thirty or forty tiny dicks, skittering across the hardwood floor. Domino helpfully chases the ones that try to escape.

“Hey, Kooky-Tsuki found my dicks! Such a smart girl!” Luca praises, giving her kisses on her little black nose. Tsuki must have been collecting the runaway tiny dicks that Luca had been leaving all over the house and then putting them in Luca’s rain boot for safekeeping. With her task done, she slips through the right wing door, probably to enjoy the empty nest before Gideon makes her vacate.

And suddenly, they’re down to the very last gift.