Page 49 of That Defining Moment

From the corridor, Cassian’s voice floated in, high. “Why are you laughing? What’s happened? Has the baby done something funny?”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Diwa opened the door, and the first thing Lysander thought was: Christ, he’s young.

He’d known this, technically. The alpha was twenty-nine, just two years older than Lysander and Stephen, which made him twelve years younger than Colin. He’d spoken to the man on FaceTime hundreds of times, but the screens had smoothed the gulf between a twenty-nine-year-old’s jaw and a forty-one-year-old’s swollen hands.

In person, on the doorstep of a Notting Hill townhouse with an egg-yolk-yellow front door, there was nowhere for the arithmetic to hide. Diwa looked like someone who still got asked for ID at Sainsbury’s. He had thick, dark hair that fell across his forehead, and his arms, when they closed around Lysander, were dense with muscle.

His dad had really gone and got himself a toyboy.

Good for him.

“They’re all upstairs with the baby,” Diwa said.

Lysander dropped his luggage where he stood. The Samsonite landed on its side in the hallway, and he was already moving, his splinted ankle protesting on the first stair, then the second, then he stopped noticing because the smell hit him on the landing.

There genuinely wasn’t a word for what a newborn smelled like when the newborn was yours, a tiny creature that shared your blood. The scent of Max bypassed every rational faculty Lysander possessed and went straight to the base of his skull, where it detonated into a warmth that suffused his whole body.

He found them in the master bedroom. Stephen was sharing the bed with their father, back propped on the headboard in one of Ryland’s oversized hoodies, his legs stretched out on the duvet.

Ryland cradled a bundle so small that it disappeared almost entirely into the crook of his elbow. He glanced up when Lysander came through the door, and his whole body tightened around the baby. His shoulders drew in, and his chin dropped, angling his jaw over Max.

“Give him to me,” Lysander said.

“He’s sleeping,” Ryland objected.

“I don’t care. Give me my nephew.”

“His sleep cycle is forty-five minutes. We’re at minute thirty-two. If he wakes up now, the whole schedule —”

Lysander crossed the room, leaned down, and kissed Ryland on the cheek. It was brief and firm, aimed squarely at breaking his concentration. While Ryland sat there blinking, Lysander lifted Max out of Ryland’s arms.

He was warm, and the smell of him intensified until Lysander’s eyes were streaming before he’d even got the baby settled against his chest. Max’s face was still red and creased, and his skull had rounded out from the alarming cone shape of the photos but still retained a slight asymmetry that Lysander found endearing.

“Hello, you,” Lysander whispered. He pressed his nose to Max’s soft tuft of dark hair and breathed in, and the sound that came out of him was so embarrassingly close to a sob that he had to disguise it as a cough. “Hello, Max. I’m your Uncle Sander, and I’m going to be your favourite person in the whole world.”

Max did not respond to this, on account of being eleven days old.

“Stevie.” Lysander’s vision blurred. His twin was watching him with an expression of such tenderness that it nearly finished him off. Stephen’s eyes were ringed with the purple-grey shadows of a week without proper sleep, and there was a prominent stain on the front of Ryland’s hoodie that appeared to be baby sick.

He sat on the edge of the mattress, Max cradled in one arm, and leaned across to press his forehead on Stephen’s. They stayed like that for a moment, breathing the same air. Stephen reached out and gripped the back of Lysander’s neck, his fingers cold on Lysander’s skin.

“You look terrible,” Lysander told him.

“I pushed a human being out of my body, Sander.”

“Good job. He looks like a keeper.” He kissed Stephen’s cheek, then his temple, then the bridge of his nose, and Stephen submitted to the onslaught.

Max stirred on his chest, one fist uncurling and then clenching again around a fold of Lysander’s shirt. Lysander kissed the soft curve of Max’s cheek, then the ridiculous shell of his ear, which was so small and precious that Lysander almost couldn’t stop tracing out its shape with his fingertip.

“Daddy.” Lysander crossed over to Colin and sat down as carefully as he could, cradling Max. He leaned in and kissed his father’s cheek, then the corner of his eye where the tears were already running, pressing his lips to the thin skin.

Colin’s fingers trembled as they moved over Max’s blanket. He didn’t try to take him. He just touched him, mapping his grandchild through the fabric.

“He’s got Stephen’s nose,” Colin managed.

“And Ryland’s hair. Apparently.”