“See that big body of water?” he said to the drowsy baby. “That is Lake Michigan. Your mother never used to be able to see it at night, but now she can say oyasuminasai to it every night before we go to bed. That’s Japanese for ‘good night.’”
Gracie, who had never known a life outside their penthouse and would grow up with this luxurious view, didn’t seem all that impressed.
“You can’t make us go to bed,” he heard Kenji say to his stepmother behind them in the living room. “We want to stay up until midnight.”
“You don’t have to go to sleep,” Lacey—now Tasha—told them. “But you can’t stay here.”
“Can we go to the music room?” Sparkle asked.
“No,” Tasha answered. “You promised your dad and me twenty-four hours music free. That’s our Christmas gift.”
“How about if we play really quietly?” Kenji asked.
“How about if you two get your butts upstairs like I told you to, before you end up with lumps of coal in your stockings instead of the gifts your dad and I got you?”
In the end, the two thirteen-year-olds, who Suro and Tasha had taken to calling “the twins” behind their backs due to their many similarities, negotiated Tasha down to a cup of hot chocolate and a few more pieces of her homemade peppermint bark before going to bed.
Though they hadn’t been able to get Spidey included in on the deal.
Tasha took him upstairs while they drank their hot chocolate. “He’s already hyper enough,” she said of the boy they hoped to adopt soon. “He’ll literally be climbing the walls if I give him candy before bed time.”
She already had plans to enroll him in a gymnastics program in two years, after she was done with her own course work. She’d be starting as a full time student at the University of Chicago in January, and though she claimed she would miss her job at their strip club, Suro knew she was ecstatic to finally be able to finish the degree she’d been pursuing thirteen years ago when her life got turned upside down.
Suro decided to also put Gracie down while the twins were eating their bedtime bribe. Their little daughter must have known tomorrow would be a big day, her first Christmas, because she only gave a little whimper when he placed her in her crib.
As he came back down the stairs, he met Kenji and Sparkle, who’d chosen to keep the name she’d had most of her life, running up them.
“Good night,” Sparkle said.
“Night, Dad,” Kenji said.
“Gussuri oyasumi—Sleep well, kids,” Suro answered.
He found Tasha waiting for him by their gigantic white Christmas tree.
She had protested when the delivery guys brought it in the day after Thanksgiving, but Suro had insisted. It was their first Christmas together as a family. Why not make it big?
Somehow the tree survived Spidey’s many climbing attempts and looked nothing short of spectacular, especially with his beautiful wife standing underneath it.
“So I was thinking, we should put Sparkle’s and Kenji’s new mini grand digital pianos over there, and Gracie’s gifts over here, and we might need half the tree for all of Spidey’s gifts. Before you give me a lecture, I know I got him way too much stuff, but he’s had a hard year and I think he deserves it.”
Suro nodded in agreement. After they’d returned to Chicago, they’d expected a long, protracted fight to remove Spidey from his mother’s care. But when they finally tracked them down to a small apartment on the North Side, they’d found Spidey severely malnourished and crying over the body of his mother, who’d apparently died of a heroin overdose.
Despite what Candy had done to her, Tasha wept bitterly for the former stripper. “We grew up in the same place,” she’d told Suro. “If I hadn’t had my dad growing up, that could have been me.”
“I’ll help you wrap,” he told her now, and he got down on the floor, ignoring the flash of pain in his knee.
It still hurt on cold nights and sometimes when it rained, testifying to the damage done to it when he’d followed through with his arduous mission as opposed to seeking out medical help. But the pain was worth it. He might occasionally walk with a slight limp now, but he’d smiled more in the past year than he had in his entire life.
Speaking of which... “Before we start wrapping all of Spidey’s presents, there’s one gift I wanted to give you now.”
He pulled a rectangle-shaped box from under the Christmas tree.
Tasha’s smile lit up her whole face. Then she tore off the paper, and gasped when she saw what was inside. “Just when I think you’ve settled down into the role of family man.”
She pulled the small, candy-cane-striped vibrator out of its box. “Now I have something to keep me company the next time you’re out of town on business for Alexei.”
“Why wait until then?” he asked. He stripped off her red robe and pulled her oversized t-shirt over her head, revealing the breasts he loved so much. “The kids are in their rooms, and the doctor has cleared you for sex. And you’re sitting there naked. Let me warm you up.”
She laughed as he covered her with his body. “And I thought last year’s gift was perfect.”
Suro smiled back, vowing to himself that before the night was over, she’d see how perfect a gift his love could be.