Then shock number two happened during the second scan when we’d been told that they were boys. We’d agreed we wouldn’t find out the genders of the babies, but as she’d passed the wand over Baby A you couldn’t miss it. Admittedly, I’d tried to be sneaky and had looked up what a penis and vagina looked like during an ultrasound, but I didn’t expect to be able to see it like I had. I thought I’d still be guessing until they were born, but even Rose knew what we were looking at.
And now, I was holding my sons while she slept it off. They were the perfect mix of both of us. My nose, her mouth and lips, my ears, her jaw… they were the definition of perfection, and they were my whole life along with their mama.
“Can I go home yet?” she croaked, making me smile.
Seeing as how we’d been over this twice, I already knew the answer. “You know they said you had to stay in a little longer.”
“But they let Jose go home after she had Liv and Jack.”
“Yes, and as they said – she was allowed to go home after both births because they were single births, and both mother and baby were fine.”
I got it, no one wanted to be in hospital but she’d just had twins. Jose had been different, she’d had one baby and even though Liv had been her first, they’d allowed her home. Decisions like that were more common nowadays, and depended on factors like: the mom’s stats, the baby’s stats, the difficulty of the birth, existing health conditions, and the support they had at home. Granted, none of that was a problem for Rose, but seriously – two babies, one body, one vagina. I wanted her to stay in until they were happy that the three of them were ok.
Seeing that I wasn’t going to budge on it, she looked down at our sons, smiling when one of them made a noise in his sleep. “Do we know what we’re calling them yet?”
We’d gone through a lot of names in the last nine months, but none of them had seemed to fit. “What about doing what my parents did and choosing one Hispanic and one English name?”
Her eyes lit up as she held a hand out. “Pass me my phone.”
And for the next hour while we traded babies, and she fed them for the first time, we both went through lists online and wrote down our favorites. When it came time to for us to share them with each other and decide, it turned out we had the same favorite English name, Teo, and that her English name was better than mine, so we named him Ryan.
When I’d woken up this morning, I hadn’t banked on the day ending with me holding my newborn sons while I watched Rose go back to sleep, but it was the best night of my life along with the night thirteen months ago when I married her and had fallen asleep afterward holding my wife.EpilogueRoseEighteen months later…
“Ok,” I whispered as I closed the door to the boy's room behind me. “We need to get this set up as quickly as we can.”
Glaring at me from where he was leaning against the wall, Garrett repeated what he’d said when I’d told him my plan this morning. “Why am I always the one who has to help you out with this shit? I have a life, and I have a lot of things that I have to do in that life.”
“Because you owe me,” I said simply, walking past him to the stairs. “We agreed on this.”
“I asked you to hide the ring once. Once! How does that mean I still owe you?”
Waiting until I got to the bottom of the stairs, I turned around and growled, “Because of where I’d had to hide it. When someone throws a ring at you and says to hide it when the person’s walking into a room, it doesn’t leave you much time to find somewhere. I had to sit like that for an hour.”
Before you gag and think gross, no it wasn’t down there. I mean, it almost was, but fortunately I’d thought quickly and had shoved it down my bra. Unfortunately for me, it had hooked around one of the dermals that my husband loved so much and pulled it out. This meant it hurt, I had a sad husband, and that I went out and got it replaced and another one added because I was a sap. This had all only happened a week ago, too, so the memory was still fresh.
He fucking owed me and he knew it.
Realizing I wasn’t going to be swayed on this, he sighed and followed behind me. “Ok, what are we doing?”