morning to find him tearing sheets out of his sketchbook and crumpling them up.
“Lu, what are you doing?”
He holds his arms out to me. I close the door and walk across the room, thinking he wants a hug, but he just sniffs at my shirt and keeps ripping out pages.
“Hey, there are drawings in there,” I say, trying to get the sketchbook from him.
He yanks it away from me. “They’re wishes. I want our baby to be born in a bed of hope.”
Usually this stage of the nest is completed with pillows. I wonder if something is wrong.
“Do you need some pillows? I can bring you some.”
He rolls his eyes. “We don’t need any more pillows. Kevin put them in the bathroom. The fluff is wrong. It smells like soap. These wishes smell like paper. Like new books.”
I walk over to the bathroom door and open it. Inside is a huge mountain of pillow guts. There have to be at least thirty destroyed pillows in here.
“If you didn’t want the pillows, why did you cut them all open?” I ask.
Lu shrugs. “I had to see if they would work.”
Okay. I don’t know if he needed to destroy all thirty pillows to figure that out, but Lu is far enough down the rabbit hole of his nesting that it isn’t useful to reason with him anymore. I close the door on the huge pile of fluff.
“Do you need anything from me?” I ask. Allen would have asked me to do strange things like roll in the pillow fluff or scatter his nest with lavender. He collected cleaning supplies for his first nest, bath salts for his second, and dried flowers for his third. Lavender was always a theme.
“Put your wishes in the nest,” he says, as if it were obvious. He scribbles onto his sketchpad, and tears out the page.
“Wishes, huh? How do I do that, exactly?”
He points to a notebook on the desk Axe brought for him two weeks ago. There’s a pencil next to it.
“Oh. Am I supposed to draw things I want to happen?”
He raises his eyebrows. “You? Draw? Sam, you can’t draw to save your life. Write the wishes down and put them in.”
Lu sketches an outline of Mary and Scooch with a small penguin chick, then rips off the paper, and tosses it in with the rest.
Wishes. What could I want that I don’t already have?
I pick up the notebook and open it to the first page. I’ve always wanted to travel Europe with the kids. I write that down and tear out the page, tossing into Lu’s pile.
Lu pulls off one of my shirts, and keeps drawing. It looks like he has five layers, so he’s not to the point of getting naked yet. As I think of my next wish, I watch Lu sketch. His next sketch is… graphic. It’s of us having sex, and my knot is very detailed.
I pull out my phone and send my omega father a quick text, warning him to not bring the kids.
My wishes are all over the place: a healthy birth, a successful book release, and for Mary to call me “alpha daddy” instead of “pancake daddy.” Lu’s wishes are all very similar. He draws us having sex in various positions. I am quite the acrobat in some of his wishes. He removes a shirt with each drawing, depositing them around the bed.
“Lu, if you want me to join you on the bed—”
“We need more wishes,” he says, even though the scent of his slick is becoming more powerful with every minute.
He draws us in a sex swing. I didn’t even know he was interested in that.
“Focus!”
Right. I should be writing my own wishes, instead of looking at his. Even though this exercise is proving to be very educational.
I add “Make love to Lu in a sex swing,” in case he was wondering. I flash the words to him before ripping the paper out of the notebook and adding to his pile.
He yawns. “I’m so tired.” He removes the last shirt and lies down on the pile of papers. “Go get the fluff.”
“But you said the fluff smelled like soap.”
He closes his eyes. “You’ll have to come on it, obviously. It will be like a cloud of your cum all around me.”
That sounds kind of disgusting, but I smile as convincingly as I can. “Alright. I’ll go get it.”
Something primal takes hold of me as I bring the fluff over. It’s strange. I always thought Allen’s preoccupation