Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 70485 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70485 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Shit. When he said it like that, I felt it too. Found family was the correct term.
“Found family. I like that.” I nodded. “I reckon that’s what LA is about—in the background. When you’re not chasing your next career goal, you gotta find the people you wanna spend the holidays with if you can’t go home. Or if you don’t want to.” It was my turn to smirk. “No offense to my lovely folks back home in Virginia.”
Roe chuckled, probably thinking about the conversation we’d had the other week about Thanksgiving and Christmas. I was staying in LA by choice since my sister was coming out. Roe was flying home for Thanksgiving but would spend Christmas with us and Nikki.
“On that note, I’ve received a bunch of newsletters from our favorite food trucks, and some are doing holiday menus,” Roe mentioned. “Do you have a recommendation for this episode?”
Right. That was gonna be one of my tasks.
“I do.” I cleared my throat and reached for my coffee. “Since Roe bought me hangover breakfast this morning, it’s only right I buy him dinner tonight, so I propose The Copper Pot. I think they’re in Santa Monica tonight. They sling some of the best carnitas this town has to offer, and if you ask for a Roe Special—yeah, that’s a thing—they’ll give you extra lime and pickled jalapeños on their carnitas soft tacos. Unbelievably good.”
“My mouth is watering, I fucking swear,” Roe said.
“You gonna edit that out too?” I smirked.
“No, maybe we should just fucking curse like we always do.” He huffed. “I don’t know what I was thinking with the appropriate language. We ain’t appropriate.”
I laughed.
*
“Dada, bow! Bow!”
“I don’t know what bow means, baby,” I groaned through a chuckle. The boy had been at it all day—bow, bow, bow. But we had no clue what he meant. It couldn’t be Roe, it wasn’t his blanket or any of his stuffies, it wasn’t his sippy cup, and it wasn’t food.
“Is this bow, Colin?” Roe held up Colin’s stuffed giraffe, and I watched the interaction in the rearview. Traffic was a mess, so it’d be a minute before we got to the airport.
“No!” Colin batted away the plush toy. He got huffy and stubbornly looked out the window instead.
I stifled a grin and exchanged a look with Roe in the rearview. Colin learning how to speak was fun. It’d taken Nikki and me a week to figure out that Woe—or whoa, as we’d initially interpreted the sound as—was Roe and up-up was a toy at his day care.
To be fair, we would’ve connected the dots between Woe and Roe a lot faster if he’d been around when Nikki and I had started pointing at things. But he’d been in New York for Thanksgiving, so realization hadn’t dawned until Colin and I had picked up Roe at the airport.
Now we were on our way to pick up my sister. She couldn’t possibly be bow. We hoped. There was zero resemblance.
Not that many words stuck at this point. He’d be babbling incoherently for a while to come, with his favorite addition of “No.” Mama, no. Dada, no. Nooooo.
“You wanna get In-N-Out on the way back?” Roe asked. “I’m hungry.”
Yeah, so was I. “Sounds good.” Haley liked that too.
Roe and I had spent the morning cleaning our place. We just couldn’t have the whole bedroom go to waste as a podcast studio slash office, even though we used it in some capacity every day, so we’d bought a guest bed for one of the corners. Haley would sleep there, and we could use it for Colin’s nap time too. The living room was still a squatter’s haven, though we’d turned the pullout back into a couch.
It was a drag to fold and unfold every day because we’d bought the damn thing knowing full well we’d sleep in it often, so it had to be real comfortable. But we needed the space too. Leaving the mattress extended when Colin was around made him cranky as soon as he’d tired of jumping on the bed. He had to be able to run around a bit too.
We couldn’t fucking wait to move, to be honest. We’d loved the place when we’d moved in, but now it was a tight fit. Roe and I kept investing in equipment for future productions, Colin was growing so quickly, and now with Haley moving in with us… Yeah, the next paycheck couldn’t come soon enough.
“By the way, since you’re dating again, I just wanna say hands off my sister,” I told Roe. It wasn’t me being a chauvinistic asshole; I just didn’t want drama in my own home. In my own, very tiny home. “Haley’s already expressed you’re hot as fuck, so not only does she have poor taste in men, but you wouldn’t have to work for it.”