I start to laugh. “This is what comes after boob?”

Duff opens the refrigerator. Discouraged, he sighs. “Guess so. Mom’s really gonna have to get creative with the baby book. We got nothin’ here, Samantha. What’re you making for us?”

In the end, the Garretts’ dinner that night consists of English muffin toaster pizzas, boxed macaroni and cheese, and my mom’s lemonade and broccoli/sun-dried tomato and pecan pasta salad (less than a success), which I send Duff over to my house to get, explaining about the special ice cubes.

While I’m giving Patsy and George a bath, there’s a commotion from down the hall. Voldemort the corn snake has escaped again. I hear Duff’s footsteps thundering around, and Harry shouting excitedly, and then see this slim shape squiggling into the room, trying to coil itself into George’s dirty Transformer sneaker. I’m so proud of the way I reach out, scoop up Voldemort, and calmly hand him over to Duff. Without even screaming when Voldemort, evidently stressed, does what corn snakes will do, and defecates all over my hand. “Pooooooop!” Patsy shouts delightedly as I go over to the sink to wash it off.

Half an hour later, Patsy’s asleep in her crib, with the five pacifiers she insists on holding in her hands—she never puts them in her mouth. George stretches out drowsily on the couch, nodding over Animal Planet’s Ten Most Startling Animal Metamorphoses. Duff’s on the computer, and Harry’s building what looks like the Pentagon out of Magna-Tiles when the door slams. In comes Alice, whose hair is now a deep auburn with an inexplicable blond streak in front, and Jase, evidently fresh from delivering lumber, sweaty and rumpled. He lifts his chin when he sees me, his face breaking into a broad smile. He heads toward me but Alice blocks him.

“Shower before you smooch, J,” Alice says. “I rode in the Bug with you and you’re officially disgusting.”

While he’s upstairs, I fill Alice in. “Mom’s asleep?” She’s incredulous. “Why?”

I shrug. “Andy said she felt lousy.”

“Crap, I hope it’s not the flu. I’ve got three tests coming up and no time to play stand-in mom.” Alice starts taking the dinner dishes off the table and dumping leftovers into the disposal.

“Samantha’s done here now.” Jase, returning to the room, picks up a yellow plastic backscratcher that is on the kitchen counter, along with a pair of dirty socks, an empty Chips Ahoy! box, five Matchbox cars, Andy’s eyeliner, and a half-eaten banana. He taps the backscratcher on each of Alice’s shoulders. “You’re now officially Mom until Dad gets home. Samantha and I are going upstairs.” And he takes my hand, dragging me after him.

But all that urgency is apparently more about getting away from the chaos downstairs than about luring me to his bed, because once we get up to the room, he just loops his arms around my waist and leans in for a leisurely kiss. Then he tilts back, surveying me.

“What?” I ask, reaching back out for him, wanting more.

“Here’s what I was wondering, Samantha. Do you want to—”

“Yes,” I respond immediately.

He laughs. “Here’s where you need to hear the actual question. I was thinking, a lot, about what we talked about this morning. How do you…? Do you…want to plan it all out or—”

“You mean like the date and the time and the place? I think that would make me too tense. Like some sort of countdown. I don’t want to plan you. Not that way.”

He looks relieved. “That’s how I feel. So I was thinking we should just make sure we’re…well, uh, prepared. Always. Then see when things move there so we’re both…”

“Ready?” I ask.

“Comfortable,” Jase suggests. “Prepared.”

I give his shoulder a little shove. “Boy Scout.”

“Well, they didn’t exactly have a badge for this.” Jase laughs. “Though that one would’ve been popular. Not to mention useful. I was in the pharmacy today and there are way too many options just in, uh, condoms.”

“I know.” I smile at him. “I was there too.”

“We should probably go together next time,” he says, picking up my hand, turning it over to kiss the inside of my wrist. My pulse jumps, just at that brush of his lips. Wow.

In the end, we go to CVS later that night, because Mrs. Garrett wakes up and comes out of her room, rumpled in a sapphire bathrobe, to ask Jase to pick up some Gatorade. So here we are, in the family planning aisle with a cart full of sports drinks and our hands full of…“Trojans, Ramses, Magnum…Jeez, these are worse than names for muscle cars,” Jase observes, sliding his finger along the display.

“They do sound sorta, well, forceful.” I flip over the box I’m holding to read the instructions.

Jase glances up to smile at me. “Don’t worry, Sam. It’s just us.”

“I don’t get what half these descriptions mean…What’s a vibrating ring?”

“Sounds like the part that breaks on the washing machine. What’s extra-sensitive? That sounds like how we describe George.”

I’m giggling. “Okay, would that be better or worse than ‘ultimate feeling’—and look—there’s ‘shared pleasure’ condoms and ‘her pleasure’ condoms. But there’s no ‘his pleasure.’”

“I’m pretty sure that comes with the territory,” Jase says dryly. “Put down those Technicolor ones. No freaking way.”

“But blue’s my favorite color,” I say, batting my eyelashes at him.

“Put them down. The glow-in-the-dark ones too. Jesus. Why do they even make those?”

“For the visually impaired?” I ask, reshelving the boxes.

We move to the checkout line. “Enjoy the rest of your evening,” the clerk calls as we leave.

“Do you think he knew?” I ask.

“You’re blushing again,” Jase mutters absently. “Did who know what?”

“The sales guy. Why we were buying these?”

A smile pulls the corners of his mouth. “Of course not. I’m sure it never occurred to him that we were actually buying birth control for ourselves. I bet he thought it was…a…housewarming gift.”

Okay, I’m ridiculous.

“Or party favors,” I laugh.