by Bethany-Kris
Now.
He expected the same back.
“You do you, man,” John said.
Andino smiled. “Always do.”
“Andino!”
At the call of his name, Andino lifted his attention away from the cedar chest where he was dropping in the last armful of toys from the yard. The box was basically a mix of pink balls, purple and yellow jump ropes, a few dolls that had seen far better days and more toys that frankly, were well-loved by his girls.
Across the road standing on the sidewalk where he watered a row of small hedges stood one of Andino’s closest neighbors. And by close, he didn’t mean friends. The man’s four-level home was simply located across the road from Andino’s gated driveway that led up to his large property and mansion.
“Maxwell,” Andino greeted with a wave.
That was about all he cared to do in response to the neighbor. It wasn’t like he made an effort to be active in his upscale suburb. He liked the place for the safety it offered his children, the quiet nature of the community, and the fact he blended in considering who he was and all.
He didn’t want to make friends.
“Are you ever gonna get your boy? All that girl stuff must have you going crazy some days over there,” the neighbor called.
So loudly, in fact, that even John heard it on the call.
For the first time in longer than Andino cared to admit, he had nothing to say in response to that. He hated to say it, but that wasn’t even the tenth time someone had made an ignorant comment about the fact he had three daughters and no sons.
It never bothered him.
He’d never thought about it. Shit, had he only wanted boys when it came to kids, he and Haven would have stopped after their second girl, but surely after their third. It just wasn’t something that crossed his mind. And when people pointed out the fact that he only had girls, it made him think they assumed his girls weren’t worth as much or that he didn’t love them as much as he should because they weren’t boys.
They couldn’t be more wrong.
“Andi,” John started to say.
Andino turned his back to the neighbor where he stood on the porch, not even caring to respond to the man. He usually didn’t when nonsense like this happened. “Haven and the girls are waiting for me—we’ll chat tomorrow, yeah?”
John let out a hard breath. “He’s just another asshole, man.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Didn’t mean Andino wouldn’t get him back for it, though.
Someday.
Today wasn’t that day.
Instead of worrying about that, he hung up his call and headed inside the house. The second he opened the front door, three pairs of feet came stomping his way. His girls shouted daddy. He didn’t even get his shoes off before three little arms wrapped around him like bars.
Andino didn’t mind.
In fact, he loved it.
He greeted each of his girls—Lynn, Rose, and Emily—with a hug and kiss to the tops of their curly heads. He made sure to ask about their day and everything—each second—he had missed when he was away from them. The same way he did any other day. His little principessas. Perfect in every fucking way. Half of him and half of their mother. These girls were his whole world alongside their ma.
“Missed you, Daddy.”
“Love you, Daddy.”
Yeah, this was definitely the best part of his day.
FOUR
Haven just finished scrubbing her kitchen sink until it sparkled before she moved on to attacking her counters, too. Spraying them down with thick, foamy cleaner, she grabbed the rag and started wiping them down.
From the table, Andino cleared his throat in his captain chair. “Do you want me to help or—”
“You’re fine where you are.”
She didn’t even look away from her work. With the girls in bed and the day almost over, Haven needed to get all her energy and stress out of her mind, or she was never going to fall asleep. That’s just how her mind did things, and she wouldn’t apologize for it. After all these years being married, Andino knew how her nights worked.
“Okay,” her husband murmured. “How was your day?”
“Busy. My meeting at the club went well. The new policies went over pretty good with everybody, so that’s one less issue for me to worry about. The girls didn’t give your mother any trouble, and they tired your father out.”
“Did you miss the traffic at noon?”
“Hit the tail end of it.”
“Of course,” he muttered.
“Same as every other day. What about you?”
Andino grunted something she couldn’t understand. Glancing up from her wide wipes of the counter, she found him staring out the bay window of their kitchen. It wasn’t as though there was anything interesting to watch out there. A dark yard—a few trees.
Interesting.
Yet, she had to admit that he looked damn good sitting in his chair with the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up around his elbows, the top two buttons undone, and his tie lost somewhere. She would probably find it on the floor between this room and one of the girls’ bedrooms because he was the one who put them all to bed and read them their nightly stories.
They loved their daddy.
Haven did, too.
More than she could explain.
“What was that?” she asked.
Andino glanced over at her with a sheepish smile—something he rarely did, and she quite liked the sight of it all the same. “Sorry. I said my day didn’t go as planned, that’s all.”
“Oh?”
He shrugged. “But I like listening to you talk about yours more even if you are stress cleaning while you do it.”
Haven grinned.
That would be Andino.
Just calling her out like that.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, his tone soft.
“Well, nothing, really.”
He arched a brow. A good sign that he didn’t believe a single word that was coming out of her mouth and wouldn’t mind telling her exactly that, either.
“Okay, nothing,” Haven said, “as in nothing should be wrong, right? Look at our life, Andino. Look at everything we have and who we are and how lucky we are. Why would anything be wrong? I should be grateful, not—”
“Having privilege doesn’t mean you’re not human, Haven.”
She let out a heavy breath.
Why did he have to be right?
“What’s wrong?” he asked again. “The truth this time, you know?”
She made quick work of drying the counter before she tossed the rag aside and rested her palms along the edge. Staring at her husband across the room, she thought about every little thing that had been weighing on her mind since she received the call from the specialist’s clinic about their next round of IVF.
“We’ll be starting the final round of IVF soon—I got the call today.”
Andino’s smile grew. “Okay.”
“But we’re clear on this, right? It’s the last time, Andi. I don’t want to do it again.”
Sometimes, it was devastating in the way that they could be so sure it had happened—she had to be pregnant—only to find out that it didn’t take. Why, if her body was so healthy, and she had managed to produce three children—a fourth pregnancy had ended in a D & C because it was ectopic—without any medical intervention, was this so difficult now? It made Haven feel a lot of things about herself that hurt. And she didn’t want to keep struggling like that with every new round.
“It’s the last one,” he agreed. “Whatever you want, I told you that.”
She let out a slow breath, but stayed quiet.
Andino didn’t miss it.
“That’s not what’s wrong, though, is it?”
“No,” she admitted. “Part of it, I suppose.”
Andino waited her out.
Haven felt silly.
“I get in this headspace where I feel like I can’t talk about the IVF or
anything else,” she said.
“Why?”
How simple that question was. The answer was anything but. It went right back to what she already said.
“Because look at our life, Andino. We have three children. There are people who don’t even have one child. People who have struggled for years. Who’ve done what we’ve been doing for a lot longer than we have. And I just … sometimes I wonder if people look at us and think we should just be grateful for what we have.”
After her rant, Haven fell silent. Apparently, her husband didn’t like that because he stood from the table, slow and graceful despite his large size. Picking up his glass, now empty of water, he carried it to the sink and placed it inside before he came up behind Haven. He fit in at her back perfectly, the hard lines of his chest molding against her softer ones. His mouth found the back of her neck; he kissed the ink coloring her skin there, and the newest one under her right ear that was just a simple cursive A.
For him.
Because of course she would imprint him permanently on her body. He was already her entire heart and soul. What did a little ink on her skin matter?
“We wanted more children, didn’t we?” he murmured against her skin.
“Yes.”
“And we struggled after Emily to be able to do that without help, yeah?”
“Yeah, but—”
“We have the means to have another child, and more than enough love to share, Haven. We want another child, and we’re doing what we need to do to have that child. Nobody gets to make you feel guilty for that.”
She let out a shaky breath.
He smiled against her skin.
“Now, let me take you to bed.”
“You’re terrible.”
“In the best way,” he agreed.
Her heart thundered. “Take me to bed, then.”
He did as she wanted, cradling her in his arms as he carried her up the stairs and down the hallway to their master bedroom with ease. She loved nothing more than the sight of her husband undressing her with his hands and his eyes and his mind. It was like she could see in his eyes all the lovely, sinful things he planned to do to her the very second he had her naked and under him in their bed.
Her next favorite thing was to watch him undress while she spread her thighs wide and showed him every inch of her that was only his. He made her wet just by being close. She shivered and sighed when he came a little closer to see her fingers roving through her slit. That pleased hum of his when he kneeled between her widened legs with his cock hard under fast strokes of his hand had her vibrating with need.
He ate her first.
Hungry.
Crazy.
Until she was flying high.
And then he fucked her the way she loved the most—on her knees, her face and chest pushed to the bed by his hands, while he nailed her hard from behind until she was whining with another orgasm and feeling like she couldn’t breathe.
Nothing had to matter when they were like that.
Nothing at all.
FIVE
“Babe.”
“Hmm?”
Andino shot Haven a grin from the driver’s seat. “We’re here.”
For the first time since they left their home that morning, much earlier than they normally would to beat traffic and be where they needed to be with time to spare, Haven looked away from the passenger window like she had just noticed their surroundings. While she couldn’t see the tall buildings outside the parking garage, he knew she would recognize where they were well enough considering how many times he’d used this since they started coming to the specialist’s clinic.
“Oh,” Haven murmured.
“You good?”
Her gaze met his, and he swore that every emotion she felt stared back at him in those moments. No, he didn’t think his wife was one hundred percent okay, but who would be when they were about to go in to begin another weeks-long round of IVF that, so far, had yet to lead them down a path that ended with a baby.
It was exhausting.
Emotionally draining.
Even he knew that.
“I’m just tired,” Haven said, shrugging one shoulder.
He didn’t really need her to explain. Not when he knew exactly what she meant all too well. He also didn’t think his wife wanted him to list all the reasons why they could and should do this again, so instead, he leaned over in the seat after unbuckling to get closer to her. She turned her head more toward him when his palm found the soft warmth of her neck. The pad of his thumb traced lines over the colorful ink that peeked out beneath the collar of her jacket, and then up to the cursive A and the little star behind her ear.
Haven’s small shiver and sweet sigh from his touch had Andino wishing they’d spent just a little more time in bed the last week—but fuck, even that was monitored and dictated by doctors far more than he wanted to admit.
“I love you, Haven,” he murmured.
She smiled. “And I love you.”
“If you want to call this off—”
“I don’t.”
Andino chuckled. “Okay, but anytime you do, babe, you just say the word. The girls are always going to be enough.”
She dragged in a breath, and met his gaze before staring over his shoulder at the waiting bank of elevators. The middle would take them up to the clinic. Soon, they needed to be out of their vehicle and heading inside if they didn’t want to miss their appointment. The clinic didn’t make exceptions for those who were late.
“This is it—one last time, Andino.”
He nodded. “All right, one last time.”
“All right,” the doctor said, sitting back in the chair to flip another page in his folder while he crossed his legs. “And we went over everything, didn’t we, Joan?”
The nurse gave Andino and Haven a sympathetic smile from the side. “We did—policy, sorry. We know you’ve gone through this more than once before.”
“Ah, there was something else we needed to discuss.”
The man’s finger tapped on the top of whatever paper he found interesting before he looked their way again. He tipped the paper up for the nurse to see. She nodded and murmured her confirmation as well on it all.
The private room was comfortable and comforting, one of the things Andino liked about it. Like much of the rest of the clinic, it was stark white right down to the furniture inside it. The walls, like many of the others in the clinic, were covered with family photos and newborn shots. Some had notes attached, others had notes written right on the photographs. All from families who had come here for help.
Andino couldn’t say, and didn’t know, whether or not—if they were even successful—that his child’s photograph would join the ranks. It wasn’t something he gave much thought to, and he didn’t think now was the right time to do it, either.
“And what’s that?” Haven asked.
“For one—we have three frozen embryos left from the two of you. So, unless we’re planning to do another retrieval, which neither of you wanted, we’re left with them to implant on procedure day. So, I want to confirm you don’t want to go ahead with another round to store more embryos.”
Haven glanced over at Andino.
No, they did not want to do that again.
Besides, if this round was successful, that would leave the remaining embryos left to store or donate what they gained from a second retrieval process. He understood very well that there were people who needed donated embryos for their own infertility journeys, but he didn’t think that neither him, nor Haven, were willing to do that. They’d already talked about it. They also didn’t want to store embryos. They couldn’t just destroy them when it was all said and done, either.
“We’ll go with what we have,” Andino said for his wife. “And we won’t be doing another retrieval whether this round of IVF is successful or not.”
“Three is still a good number for procedure day,” the doctor assured. “Before, you hadn’t asked to know the sexes of t
he embryos, but do you want to now?”
Andino let Haven decide that.
He’d never cared.
“Sure,” she said quietly.
“All males this time. Most were.”
Huh.
“And one more thing,” the doctor continued, but this time, he only looked at Haven when he spoke. “Knowing that you’ve had three successful pregnancies on your own without intervention, and a fourth that ended up ectopic—which caused a removal of your right fallopian tube—and now this … With the unexplained infertility, if you’ve settled on the decision not to have more children, then you should seriously consider sterilization.”
The suggestion came kindly.
Andino understood why the doctor brought it up, too. Even the doctor who had handled the births of their other children and was the one to diagnose Haven’s ectopic pregnancy had said the same thing. It was just as much about preventing something from happening again as it was taking control of their life, essentially.
It still felt like a punch.
Haven told the doctor simply, “We’ll have to think about that.”
SIX
“What if the final round doesn’t work?”
Haven’s quiet question had her best friend falling into silence beside her. Well, one of her best friends. She’d already spent a good portion of the night before crying in the phone to Valeria who promised she was going to make time to come to New York during the upcoming week because they needed girl time.
Val wasn’t wrong.
Today, though, Catherine sat beside her. They’d invited Siena, but she ended up running Lucky to the hospital because he had a high fever. It was always something with kids.
Catherine reached over, and snuck an arm around Haven’s shoulders. She said nothing as the two of them leaned closer together and watched their kids navigate the park’s play equipment. For the moment, it felt like exactly what Haven needed. Usually, it would be Andino comforting her when she dared to show that little bit of vulnerability about their current IVF journey, but he was somewhere across the city playing boss.
Haven only had her friend.
Catherine wasn’t so bad.