And then, “Why don’t they play poker in the jungle?”

“I don’t know, why?” I say.

“Too many cheetahs!”

I don’t know that I’ve stopped laughing since he started telling us jokes.

“Your turn,” Crew says.

“Mine?” I ask.

“Yeah, it’s your turn to tell a joke.”

Oh, God. I’m feeling pressure from a five-year-old. “Okay, let me think.” A few seconds later, I snap my fingers. “Okay, I’ve got one. What is green, fuzzy, and if it fell out of a tree, it could kill you?”

Crew leans forward with his chin in his hands. “Ummmm. I don’t know.”

“A fuzzy green piano.”

Crew doesn’t laugh at my joke. Neither does Jeremy. At first.

Then, a few seconds later, Jeremy releases a burst of laughter that makes me smile.

“I don’t get it,” Crew says.

Jeremy is still laughing, shaking his head.

Crew looks up at Jeremy. “How is that funny?”

Jeremy puts his arm around Crew. “It’s not,” he says. “It’s funny because it’s not funny.”

Crew looks at me. “That’s not how jokes are supposed to work.”

“Okay, I have another one,” I say. “What’s red and shaped like a bucket?”

Crew shrugs.

“A blue bucket painted red.”

Jeremy squeezes his jaw, trying to hold back his laughter. Seeing him laugh is probably the best thing that’s happened since I showed up here.

Crew scrunches up his nose. “You aren’t very good at telling jokes.”

“Come on. Those were so funny.”

Crew shakes his head, disappointed. “I hope you don’t try to make jokes in your books.”

Jeremy leans back in his seat and grips his side, trying to hold back his laughter as the waitress approaches with the check. Jeremy takes it from her. “My treat,” he manages to say.

When we return to the house, Crew makes it inside before we do. “Run upstairs and let April know we’re back,” Jeremy calls after him.

Jeremy closes the door that leads into the garage, and we both pause before moving farther into the house. We’re tucked away into an unlit corner near the stairs, but a stream of light from the kitchen streaks across his face.

“Thank you for dinner. That was fun.”

Jeremy pulls off his jacket. “It was.” He’s smiling as he hangs his jacket on a coat rack next to the door. He looks different tonight, like he’s less weighed down by his life than he usually is. “I should get Crew out more often.”

I nod in agreement, slipping my hands into my back pockets. The next few seconds fill with thick silence. It almost feels like that moment at the end of real dates when you can’t decide between a kiss or a hug.

Of course, neither would be appropriate in this case because it wasn’t a date.

Why did it feel like one?

Our eye contact is broken when Crew begins to descend the stairs. Jeremy’s gaze diverts to his feet for a moment, but before he walks away, I see him release a quick breath, as if Crew interrupted something Jeremy was about to regret. Something I’m not sure I would have regretted.

I sigh heavily and then go straight to Verity’s office and close the door. I need to distract myself. I feel an emptiness—an ache in my stomach that I don’t think is going to go away. Like I need more moments with him. Moments I can’t get. Moments I shouldn’t get.

I flip through the pages of Verity’s manuscript, hoping to find an intimate scene with Jeremy.

I’m not sure what kind of person that makes me in this moment, because reading this is wrong on so many levels, but it isn’t as wrong as crossing that line with him physically would be.

I can’t have him in real life, but I can learn what he’s like in bed to aid in all my fantasies I’m probably going to have about him.

So Be It

I was about to have a breakdown. I could feel it. Or at least a meltdown. A temper tantrum. A hissy fit. Any of them would have been inappropriate, though.

I just couldn’t take it anymore. If one of them wasn’t crying, the other one was. If one of them wasn’t hungry, the other one was. They rarely slept at the same time. Jeremy was a big help and did half the work with them, but if we’d only had one child, I’d at least have gotten a break. But there were two, so it was as if we each were full-time single parents of an infant.

Jeremy was still selling real estate at the time the girls were born. He took two weeks off to help me with the girls, but his two weeks were up, and he needed to go back to work. We couldn’t afford a nanny because the advance I had recently received for the sell of my first manuscript was small. I was terrified of being left alone with the babies while he was away from the house for nine hours every day.

However, once Jeremy returned to work, it ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me.

He would leave at seven in the morning. I would wake up with him so he could see me caring for the girls. After he was gone, I would put them back in their cribs, unplug their monitors and go back to bed. From the day he started back to work, I began getting more sleep than I think I’d ever gotten. We were in a corner apartment, and their room didn’t butt up to any other apartment, so no one could hear them cry.

I couldn’t even hear them when I put my earplugs in.

After three days of Jeremy being back at work, I felt like my life was returning to normal. I was getting so much sleep during the day, but before Jeremy would come home, I’d feed them, bathe them, and start on dinner. Every night when he would walk in the door, the babies would be calm from finally being tended to, the smell of dinner would be coming from the kitchen, and he’d be blown away by how well I was tackling life.

Nighttime feedings didn’t even bother me at that point, because my sleep schedule had shifted. I was doing most of my sleeping while Jeremy was at work. And the girls would sleep fairly well at night due to the exhaustion from crying all day. But the crying was probably good for them. I was able to write most nights while everyone slept, so I was even ahead career-wise.

The only place I was lacking was in the bedroom. I hadn’t been cleared to have sex from my doctor yet, as it had only been four weeks since their births. But I knew if I didn’t keep that part of my marriage alive, it could quickly spread into other areas of our marriage. A terrible sex life is like a virus. Your marriage can be healthy in all other aspects, but once the sex dies out, it starts to infect all the other parts of your relationship.

I was determined not to let that happen to us.

I had tried the night before to have sex with him, but Jeremy was worried he would hurt me. Even though it had been a cesarean, he still worried about the incision. He had read online that he couldn’t even so much as finger me until we got the okay from my doctor, and that appointment was still two weeks away. He refused to have sex with me until a medical professional approved it.

I didn’t want to wait that long, though. I couldn’t. I missed him. I missed that connection with him.

Jeremy woke up that night at two in the morning because my tongue was sliding up his dick. I’m almost positive his dick was rock hard before he was even fully awake.

The only reason I knew he was awake is because his hand moved to my head and his fingers snaked through my hair. That’s the only movement he made. He didn’t even lift his head off his pillow to look at me, and for some reason, I liked that. I’m not even sure he opened his eyes. He remained still and silent while I drove him mad with my tongue.

I licked him, teased him, touched him for fifteen minutes without ever putting him inside my mouth. I knew how much he wanted me to, because he was growing restless and needed that relief, but I didn’t want him to get relief from my mouth. I wanted him to get it by fucking me for the first time in weeks.

His hand was impatient, squeezing the back of my head, pressing me down on his dick as he silently begged me to take him in my mouth. I refused and continued to fight against the pressure of his hand as I kissed and licked him, when all he wanted to do was shove it into my mouth.

When I was certain I had driven him so crazy that his desire outweighed his concern for me, I moved away from him. He followed. I fell onto my back, spread my legs, and he was inside me without a second thought about whether or not it was too soon for him to be there. He wasn’t even gentle. It was as if my tongue had driven him to a point of madness, because he was pounding into me so hard, it actually did hurt.