I blink. “Well. Yeah. It’s….” I squint over at Otter. “Are we having three children now?”
Otter grins crookedly. “Just getting that now, are you?”
“I don’t…. Are you fucking shitting me?”
“Oh boy,” the Kid says. “Here we go.”
“You know what?” I huff a breath out my nose. “No. Not even going to worry about that right now, because if I start to think about the fact that there is a little girl in our house with nowhere else to go, then I will probably start to freak out even more than I already am. So. No. Not even concerned. I’m fine. I’m fine.”
They don’t look like they believe me.
I hate them both. “I am. So yes. Izzie will stay here, and we’ll figure it out. There’s a woman inside that I’ve knocked up with my super jizz—”
“Do you have to keep saying it like that?” Otter asks with a wince. “Because you really don’t have to keep saying it like that.”
“And we’re having twins now, so yes. This is your home, and our home, and Izzie’s home, and home to Thing One and Thing Two—”
“Absolutely not going to call them that,” Otter says. “So let’s stop it now.”
“—and it’ll be fine.”
The Kid nods. “Except.”
I shake my head. “No. No except. You take your except and you shove it.”
“Except this is a three-bedroom house,” Otter says, picking up on what the Kid was going for. “And we’ve already made a nursery.”
“That better not have been my room,” the Kid says with a scowl. “I had so many important things in there.”
“Bullshit you did,” I say. “You don’t need a PETA handbook from 2002. Or that poster of Anderson Cooper I caught you kissing when you were twelve.”
“You swore we’d never talk about that again!”
“I lied!”
“I was practicing.”
“For who?”
“Dom,” he says smugly. “And look at where that got me.”
“This is your fault,” I tell Otter.
“How is it my fault?”
“You bought him that poster! If you hadn’t, he’d probably still be a virgin!”
“Um, no,” the Kid says. “Corey saw to that.”
“I am going to murder him.”
“He’s not going to murder him,” Otter says. “He’s all talk. Most of the time.”
“I bet there are plenty of places to hide a body in the desert,” I say. “Like oodles of places. And then I’d—wait, how is Corey, by the way?”
The Kid shrugs. “Good. We thought we were going to see each other over spring break, but that weird guy Paul he’s friends with was getting married, so he stayed there for that. Maybe I’ll go see him before I have to go back to school in the fall.”
I blank a little on the name. “Paul? Isn’t he the one you don’t want me to meet for reasons you won’t explain to me?”