“It wasn’t his fault.”

“He needs to say his piece.”

“Okay, maybe we should have him over for dinner on one of my nights off.”

“He doesn’t need to say that much of a piece.”

I started laughing.

Oh yeah.

Snap loved our little cloud as much as I did.

“Right, then we’ll meet him for a drink or something.”

“That’ll work,” he muttered.

“Is that it?” I asked.

“No,” he answered.

Man!

I’d had a tough evening, on my feet making drinks, worried about Beck, now all was good (or goodish) I just wanted to finish my beer, make love to my guy, and go to sleep.

“What?” I prompted.

“Shy made an approach. He and Tab want things settled with all of us.”

This confused me.

“Settled how?”

“Shy didn’t do you right,” he began to explain. “And by extension, Tab was involved in that. They feel that and have for a while, but definitely now that you’re back in the fold. They want to make sure all is copasetic in the family.”

“Well, I suppose we can all have a drink too, but that’s still absurd.”

“Sorry?” he asked.

“I dated Shy for what? A month or so? He broke it off with me, started it up with Tabby, they got married and had a baby. Sure, it hurt back then but back then was back then and I’ve moved on. It’s not like Adam chucked Eve aside for a biker princess and they have to apologize to God. People get together. They break up. They move on. It is what it is and that was what it was and we’re all someplace else now. No need to make a big thing about it.”

“Fuck, how much more can I love you?”

I felt every one of those words sink right through my skin and make a beeline to my heart.

“That’s so weird,” I replied. “All the time I ask myself the same thing.”

At my words, Snapper’s entire demeanor changed and I had a feeling they’d found their way to his heart too.

And that made me happy.

“Time to finish your beer, Rosie,” he declared.

I knew it wasn’t time to finish my beer.

It was time to go up to bed.

Together.

So I did something I hadn’t done since I was twenty years old.

I chugged an almost full beer.

Then I made out with my man in the kitchen with both of us smiling through it because Snapper clearly thought watching me chug a beer was funny and I was happy he thought I was funny.

I tossed my bottle.

Snap and I shut down the house.

And we headed up to bed.

Epilogue

“Master of my fate:

Captain of my soul”

Snapper

“Hey, honey.”

Snap turned from marking the wall where he and Shy were going to mount the cupboard to see his Rosie strolling in with Kane, better known as Playboy since the kid, not but a few months old, was a damned flirt. The baby was on her hip.

He was Shy and Tab’s little boy.

Tabby was following her toting a diaper bag, Tab’s eyes going to her man, but Rosie’s eyes were on Snap.

His woman looked seriously fucking good with a baby on her hip.

And she just looked seriously fucking good always.

Shy moved to Tab.

But Snap stood still because Rosalie was moving to him.

When she made it, he gave her a lip touch then gave Playboy a tickle to which the kid wobbled and gurgled but mostly just hung on to Rosie (this hanging on meaning grabbing onto her tit, freaking little flirt) and he looked back to his woman.

“What do you think?” he asked.

She took her eyes from him and looked to the cupboards Shy and him were installing.

It was his condo, where he lived. Or now, where he used to live.

Before Rosie, he’d spent most of his time in his room at the Chaos Compound, but if he felt the need to have quiet, get some space just to himself (which was not rare), he came there.

But since he now spent all his time with Rosie, he wasn’t a big fan of having a property that he wasn’t using that was also not doing anything for him. Seeing as he’d moved into the place as is and didn’t do shit to update it when he did, but the building was a nice one and he could get decent rent if he fixed it up, he was putting in a new kitchen, new bathrooms, painting the walls, and tiling the floors.

And he’d been able to gut it and start doing that because the week before, he’d full-on moved in with Rosie.

Snap moving into their carriage house had been a hiccup in their lives, something that wasn’t the same as every day before had been, but each day wasn’t much different. Not to mention it hadn’t taken much since most of his stuff he sold on Craig’s List because with Rosie’s stuff, and the extra she’d bought, the crib was sweet and they didn’t need his shit messing with her mojo.

But all in all, that was the way they were. Each day bleeding into the next, nothing new (except a dining room table, garden furniture and his “reading nook”—something he thought was hilarious and cute—hilarious because the words were goofy as shit, cute because she thought of him, even if he still read most of the time camped on the couch because she could stretch out beside him).