And the dancing. Lord, I couldn’t even begin to count the amount of times I’d walked in to find her dropping down to the ground and popping back up again as she swung her hips around. Now that I thought about it, just last week, I’d taken Toby down to get a jar of her homemade marinara sauce, and she’d been practicing twerking in front of a mirror. Oops!
“Um, that might be my fault. I kind of had to go down to get some sauce last week, and Mrs. V was practicing twerking. Toby must have seen it, too.”
It was hard to hate or be angry at Mrs. Valtolina. She was the funniest woman I’d ever met and was just as awesome as my mawmaw, which said something.
“Maybe put a blindfold on him next time?” Remy suggested, not sounding pissed about it at all. “And why’s your dog asleep on the ground in front of him?”
The question wasn’t asked like it was a problem. In fact, he sounded amused by it and almost like he approved. The new Remy King was a far cry from the stressed one with the weight of the world on his shoulders, and I kind of liked him even more now. I also found that I was letting my guard down around him more, and it felt like we were growing closer because of it.
Toby seemed more settled, too, but I couldn’t say for sure if that was because of the change between us or because I was staying with them for a while.
Did it suck that they had to knock my entire house down to rebuild it because it wasn’t structurally sound? As in, it was a miracle it was even still standing it was that unsound? Yeah, but it wasn’t the end of the world. I was enjoying being able to spend more time with Toby and spending time with the new Remy.
“He does this every time Toby takes a nap. I think he’s trying to protect him.”
Remy huffed out a “Huh.”
“Dada!” Toby squealed, causing both of our heads to snap around to look at him as he said his first word.
“Holy shit,” I breathed at the same time as Remy.
“Did he- Did he just say ‘dada?’”
Pushing the door all the way open, I skipped toward him with my phone held up in front of me. “Who’s a clever boy? Well done, Bub.”
The grin he threw back at me for my words was cheesy, to say the least, but it was also adorable.
Feeling Remy walk up behind us, I smiled at him over my shoulder. “I caught it on camera, too, because I was going to video him twerking.”
His eye heated as he looked at me, but then his son started chanting his new word, and they flicked back to him.
“I hear you, boy, but you can keep saying it all you want.” Reaching in, he picked him up and shifted him, so their fronts were pressed against each other. “Can you say Tana, too?”
“Ana!”
“That’s close enough for me,” I squealed, excitedly clapping my hands.
Listen, it wasn’t a case of beggars can’t be choosers. The kid was this close to saying the version of my name my family had called me my whole life, and Hart had started off calling me Ana, too. It could only mean the real version of my name was coming soon.
“Send that video through to Mom for me, will you? And ask her to forward it to Clarice. They’ll love it.”
Clarice was Carrie’s mom, and I made sure that I regularly took photos of big moments in his life so that Remy’s mom, Marie, could forward them to her. I figured it’d be a kick in the heart if I sent them to Clarice myself. I never asked Marie to forward them out loud because it wasn’t my place to do that, but there was no missing what I was doing, and she’d thanked me for it the last time they’d come to visit Remy and Toby.
On his way past me, with his son babbling out a story for his daddy, Remy stopped and kissed me on the side of the mouth. I’d just looked up from my phone, the shock almost making me drop it, when Bub leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, too.
Yeah, not having a house right now really wasn’t the worst thing to happen in the world. In fact, it may well have been the best thing that could have happened to me.
And that was definitely my way of thinking when, later that night, I heard a noise in the hallway and opened the door to check on it, just as Remy walked out of Toby’s bathroom.
He’d obviously just had a shower because his skin shone in the moonlight coming through the window above the stairs. It transfixed me for a moment, but then I took in how the towel only just covered his ass and the way the muscles in his back bunched and relaxed as he walked…