Happy Ending (Fisher Brothers 4)

The whole not having sex with my sexy-as-fuck girlfriend issue had been easier to adjust to than I’d anticipated, but the not-sleeping part sucked. People weren’t kidding when they said sleep would become a thing of the past after you had a baby. Hope woke up wailing every two hours on the dot, and Sofia was like a damn psychic, knowing exactly what the baby needed and tending to it, sometimes with her eyes half-closed. How she knew these things while I still fumbled a putting the diaper on properly was beyond me.

While I tried to spend most of my time at home, I also continued to check in at the bar. Since Hope spent most of her day sleeping, Sofia had made it a habit to force me out of the house every day. She said I was driving her crazy, sitting around staring at her all day long, but she didn’t realize how mesmerized I was by both her and the baby we created.

I wanted to help, to do everything, but realized pretty early on that there wasn’t much for me to do. Sofia breastfed our little angel and I changed her diapers—badly—whenever she let me, which honestly wasn’t very often. I think she’d been so used to doing everything on her own that she forgot I was there to help. Or maybe she was tired of fixing all my diaper mishaps. It was probably a little of both.

Matson and I tried to come up with a plan to steal the baby one afternoon so Sofia could sleep all day and not worry, but we failed. Sofia yelled, so Matson and I left and played at the beach until dusk. After that, I started bringing him to the bar with me so we could both get out of the house together, and Sofia only had to tend to one kid instead of two. Even though it wasn’t technically legal to have Matson in the bar during operating hours, it was worth the risk it posed if we got caught, especially if we were going to lose the bar anyway. What would it matter? We never stayed for very long, and Matson loved it there.

“When I grow up, can I work here?” he asked one afternoon, and my heart cracked in two inside my chest.

“Absolutely. I’ll teach you everything I know,” I said, hoping to God it wasn’t a lie, and that the bar would still be standing when Matson was old enough to work here.

“Cool,” he said as he spun on the bar stool.

“Are you going to make drinks like Ryan, or do you want to be a marketing genius like me?” Nick asked.

Matson put a finger on his chin as he pondered the question. “Probably both,” he said with confidence. “I can do both, right?”

Nick grinned at him. “You can do anything you want.”

When I grunted in frustration, Nick shook his head at me.

“How do you still not know how to do that?”

I glared at him, then stared down at the baby doll on top of the bar that I’d been practicing putting a diaper on. I lifted it into the air and watched as the diaper came undone and fell off. Nick and Matson both laughed.

“It’s not as easy as it looks,” I grumbled, dropping the dumb doll.

Nick waltzed over, grabbed the doll and the diaper, and within two seconds had it on perfectly. Why could everyone else and their dog put a diaper on a baby without any issues, and I couldn’t?

“You can’t be good at everything, brother,” Nick said, laughing at my dejected expression.

“But I need to be good at this. I need to be able to put a diaper on my daughter and not have it fall off the second she starts wiggling.”

“Mama said you’re not allowed to anymore,” Matson said, still spinning his bar stool.

My head swung in his direction. “What?”

He stopped spinning and looked up at me with wide eyes. “Uh, maybe I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.”

“It’s okay,” I said with a sigh. “She’s right. But I’ll figure it out.”

I

reached for the fake baby one more time and undid Nick’s diaper. I was determined to get it right, and I wasn’t going to stop until I did.

Reaching for my phone, I pulled up YouTube and searched for a tutorial. After watching it several times, I attempted the process again and let out a whoop of joy when I lifted the fake baby and the diaper stayed in place. I even shook the doll to see if the diaper would come undone, but it didn’t.

“I did it! I finally fucking did it!”

“Uh, bad word.” Matson stopped spinning and stared at me wide-eyed.

Crap. “Sorry, buddy. I just got really excited.”

“I won’t tell,” he said, and went back to spinning.

One Fisher Down

Ryan