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The house is oddly silent when Laurel steps in the front door.
“Frank?” she calls out, kicking off her heels and looking around. “Girls?”
Still, nothing. A moment passes in silence, and then-
“Mommy! Mommymommymommy!”
The pitter patter of little footsteps erupts out of nowhere, followed by the appearance of two small girls, with identical dark pigtails and huge blue eyes. They totter in, all but pouncing on Laurel, and Frank appears shortly afterward, looking amused and exhausted.
Laurel melts and scoops them up into her arms; which is no small feat, since they’re getting bigger by the day and she’s not getting any stronger.
“Hello hello!” she sing-songs. “How was your day?”
“Good,” Mia answers in her high-pitched, squeaky little voice.
“We missed you,” Nora chimes in, as she reaches for a stand of Laurel’s hair to play with.
She kisses their foreheads with an exaggerated ‘mwah.’ “I missed you too. Were you good for daddy?”
They nod in tandem, their pigtails bobbing up and down.
“Hey,” Frank greets, placing his hand on her back and leaning over to peck her on the lips. “Good day at the office?”
She smiles. “Not really. It’s better now, though.”
If you had told Laurel in her first year of law school that this would be how she’d end up one day, married and settled down with a stay-at-home dad Frank and twin girls, she would’ve laughed and called you crazy. Even now, there’re times it strikes her how strange – and how amazing – it all is.
They’d gotten back together during the second semester of her first year at Middleton, and dated all the way through graduation. She’d moved in with Frank, decided to accept a position at a firm in the city instead of going back home. A year after that he’d proposed, and a few months later, she had found out she was pregnant.
She’d been happy, of course. Who wouldn’t have been? But she’d planned on working for a few years at least – and, well, getting married – before leaving her job to have kids. Surprisingly enough, it had been Frank who put forth the idea of him quitting instead, “because no kid of mine is gonna grow up in daycare, okay? I don’t wanna miss anything. I wanna be there. For first words and steps and everything.”
So he’d left Annalise. They had moved the date of the wedding forward a few months, and when they’d found out they were having twins, they went house-hunting.
That had never really been what Laurel had wanted, the cliché white picket fence. Then suddenly, with Frank, it was.
“We made you a birthday surprise, mom!” Mia pipes up suddenly, drawing her from her thoughts.
Laurel raises her eyebrows. “Did you really?”
“Yeah! It’s a cake!” Nora exclaims.
Mia pouts. “You weren’t a’posta tell her!”
“A cake?” Laurel furrows her brow. “Did daddy help you make it?”
Nora nods. “He said we weren’t gonna show you ‘til he cleaned the kitchen.”
Laurel peers sideways at Frank, and finds him giving her a very obvious guilty look, like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
“Why don’t you guys go draw for a while?” she suggests, setting them down. “I’ll be there in a sec.”
They nod and scamper off in a chorus of ‘yeah, mom!’ and ‘but I get all the purple crayons, ‘cause purple is my favorite color.’ Once they’re gone, she turns to Frank with a sigh.
“What’d you do?”
He hesitates, then takes a step toward the kitchen. “Look, before you get mad, just know that they worked really hard, and had a ton of fun, and I’m gonna clean it up-”
“Oh my God.”
She freezes in the doorway of the kitchen, her hands clasped over her mouth. The room is a disaster, with boxes and bags of ingredients and bowls strewn about haphazardly. Almost the entire counter is covered in flour, and so is most of the floor. Clearly they’d made a rainbow of different colored frostings too, because the cabinets have been painted with those as well.
“Frank!” she exclaims. “You let them do this?”
He looks like he doesn’t know quite what to say. “They were really into it, babe. And they wanted to make you a cake – which they did, by the way. A pretty freakin’ awesome one.”
He walks over to the other side of the counter, and returns with what can only be described as a deflated, oddly-shaped blob; half-frosted, with candles jammed into it from every direction. Laurel can’t help but laugh at the sight.
“See?” he says, setting it back down. “So don’t yell at ‘em or anything. I’ll clean it up and make us dinner, okay?”
“Yeah.” She relaxes somewhat, folding her arms. “Okay. All right.”
After changing out of her work clothes, Laurel follows the sound of laughter down the hallway into the girl’s bedroom – and that’s when she finds herself confronted by the sight of the two of them, giggling and scribbling away.
But not on paper. On the wall.
“Mommy!” they cry almost in unison, as soon as they notice her. “Look! We drew you a picture!”
–
It’s nine-thirty by the time she finally coaxes the twins into bed for the night. Her eyelids drooping with exhaustion, she makes her way into the master bedroom, where Frank lies under the covers, book in hand.
“Finally got them down for the night,” she yawns, collapsing down next to him. “I swear, they’re like two bundles of endless energy, and – oh God, Frank, the wall. What’re we going to do about the wall?”
He shrugs, setting his book aside. “I’ll paint over it. They were just having fun. It’s not a big deal.”
“It is a big deal! You have to start being more of a disciplinarian with them,” she tells him with a sigh. “We can’t keep doing this good-cop-bad-cop thing, or they’ll never respect your authority, and they’ll just hate me.”
Frank raises a skeptical eyebrow, leaning over to place a kiss on her shoulder.
“And how, exactly, am I supposed to discipline them, when they’re both the spitting image of their mom?”
Laurel rolls her eyes, but can’t keep a smile from playing at her lips. “They’ve got you so wrapped around their little fingers it’s not even funny.”
“No, they don’t.”
She laughs. “Yes, they do. And it’s only a matter of time before they figure that out and start to use it to their full advantage against you.”
“They’re three years-old. They’re not that diabolical yet.”
“Yet. They will. Mark my words.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because,” she tells him, resting her chin on his chest and meeting his eyes. “That was what I did.”
He chuckles. “Did you now?”
“Mmm hmm,” she hums contently. “What can I say? You’re a real pushover sometimes.”
Frank seems to remember something just then, and reaches over onto the nightstand, grabbing a piece of paper and holding it out for her to see.
“Almost forgot. I told them to draw you another picture, since the last one didn’t go over so well.”
Laurel snickers as soon as she sees it. They’d drawn the four of them in stick-figure form, next to a house and something Laurel thinks must be a dog. Frank is very obviously twice the size of everyone else, and Laurel is in what looks like her work attire, holding a briefcase.
“Look,” she giggles, pointing to a cluster of purple squiggles near Frank’s chin. “They drew your beard.”
“And it’s the best artistic depiction of the beard I’ve ever seen.”
“What about the dog? We don’t have a dog.”
“They wouldn’t quit bugging me all day to get them a puppy. Saw one on TV, or something.”
Laurel narrows her eyes. “What did you say?”
He hesitates, before admitting, “I told them we’d think about it.”
“Frank!” She smacks him lightly on the chest. “You’re going to spoil them rotten.”
“Oh c’mon. Do you have any idea how hard it is to say no when there’re two little girls with your hair and your eyes and your everything batting their eyelashes and begging me to get them a puppy? It’s like I spend my days with two mini-Laurel’s.”
“Frank…”
“And there’s no way I can say no,” he murmurs, moving his lips closer and pressing them to her neck, “when I love their mom so much… that I’d do absolutely anything for her.”
She sighs happily, running her hands through his hair. “Yeah, well, you’re still in trouble, mister.”
“Mmm,” he acknowledges lowly, before pulling back all at once. “Let’s have another kid. Four.”
Laurel blinks. “Four more or four total?”
His only answer is a shrug. She laughs.
“Well, shouldn’t I get some say in this? I’m the one who’s going to be popping them out, after all. That’s no walk in the park.”
“You get all the say,” he purrs. “So what do you say?”
“Well…” Laurel flushes. “I don’t know about four, but… I think I could handle one more. Maybe two.”
He captures her lips again and makes his way on top of her, “Then we got no time to lose. Let’s start trying.”
“What, like… right now?”
“My little guys are Olympic swimmers. We’ll have you knocked up in no time.”
“How romantic,” Laurel quips. “I’m swooning.”
“Oh, I’ll make you swoon. All night.”
“Not all night,” she corrects him. “I have to be up for work at six.”
“Fine,” he concedes, glancing over at the clock on the nightstand. “’Til eleven then?”
She smiles. “Yeah. ‘Til eleven sounds good.”
He kisses her and tugs her shirt over her head before she has the chance to say another word.