“Mommy! I can’t find my socks, and Daphne is hogging the bathroom again!”

Evan forced her eyes open, the bright sunlight hitting her face and blasting any thoughts of sleeping in from her mind. Melody groaned beside her and turned, pulling their thick comforter around her and stealing it from Evan. “The hellions are up,” she said, turning over and curling up against Melody’s back. Her wife was silent, and years before, when they’d first started dating, Evan might have believed she was still sleeping. Now, though, she could tell her wife was faking it with her uneven breathing.

“Am not!” Daphne, their oldest, called back.

“Come on, you,” Evan said, pulling Melody’s shiny black hair away from the back of her neck and giving her olive skin a light kiss. “Time to get up.”

Stubbornly she shook her head and pulled the comforter further over her shoulders. “Think it’s too late to sell them to the circus?”

Evan laughed. “You’re not going to win mother of the year like that.”

“Who the hell cares about mother of the year?” Melody grumbled, turning over onto her stomach. Evan smiled at her mussed hair and smudged mascara. She’d missed a bit washing her face the night before. “I’ll be proclaimed mother of the decade for not skinning them. It’s not even seven. Why are they already up?”

Shrugging, Evan forced her tired body to move as she sat up. “Wasn’t this supposed to get easier as they got older? I distinctly remember one of the books we read saying that. I’m thinking they lied.”

“Me too.” Melody sighed and sat up, too, fluffing the thick white comforter around her lap. The strap of her violet chemise fell off her shoulder and Evan lifted it back up, following the trail of her fingers with a gentle kiss on her wife’s silken shoulder.

“Mom!”

“Don’t yell at us through the door!” Melody called back to the younger of their cretins, Josie. “You open the door and come in here. Talk to us like you have some sense instead of waking up our poor neighbors. All warm in their beds, curled up with their pillows…” She sighed loudly right before a head full of midnight black curls poked around their slowly opening bedroom door.