I press a button on the remote that came with our hotel room and grin like a little kid as metal shutters slide down over all the windows, sending the room into total darkness.

“Really, Tristan?” asks Stephanie. “We come to Germany for our anniversary and I swear you’ve been more entertained by the blackout curtains than the castles or cathedrals.”

I press the button to raise the curtains back up, then wrap an arm around Stephanie’s waist so I can pull her into my lap. “Germany, Rome, Norway… I don’t care where we go, I’m always going to be more interested in you.”

She smirks and gives me a kiss.

“But,” I say, “the blackout curtains are making it a tight competition.”

She tries to slap me but I catch her wrist and spin to pin her down on the bed. “Jamie isn’t going to be gone with Cole much longer, so you’re lucky I don’t have time to punish you for that.”

She makes a mischievous face. “So you’re saying I could get away with anything right now?”

“That’s not what I—”

I grunt when she drives her fingers into my stomach and starts ferociously tickling my weak spot. I’m forced to roll off her to protect myself, but she’s relentless, crawling after me and tickling me until I lose track of the edge of the bed and thump to the ground. Stephanie rolls right off the bed with me, grinning like a crazy woman as she tries to continue the assault.

I have no choice but to use my secret weapon. I reach my hand quickly between her legs and run my thumb over the spot that drives her wild on the inside of her thighs. It makes her pause as surely as if I pressed the pause button on a remote. She gives me a warning look that sends a message loud and clear: Don’t start what you can’t finish.

“Truce?” I ask.

She sighs. “Truce.”

Just as we’re both standing up from our scuffle, the door opens and Jamie comes in with Cole following close behind. He’s eight now, and tall for his age just like I was. In the years since the adoption was finalized, the three of us have come to feel like a real family in every way imaginable. The strangest part is how Cole doesn’t feel like a brother to me. Maybe it shouldn’t be strange when I fill the role of father for him in every possible way and there’s such a big difference in our ages. I also didn’t grow up with him, which makes him seem even more like my son than my brother, but whatever label I put on him doesn’t matter. I love the kid, plain and simple.

“Were you guys being weird again?” he asks.

“What?” asks Stephanie. “No.”

“Your mom was trying to—”

Stephanie reaches over and covers my mouth with two hands, laughing nervously.

“She was probably trying to get frisky,” says Jamie.

“Jamie!” snaps Stephanie.

“Gross,” says Cole. He makes a face, but recovers quickly because he’s used to Jamie and I embarrassing his mom like this.

I just can’t resist doing anything to make Stephanie blush that perfect shade of red she gets. I think Jamie’s motivation is that she feeds on chaos and disorder. I’ve come to appreciate Stephanie’s friend in the past few years as someone who can make a boring situation interesting by sheer power of crazy. The woman might actually be a sociopath, which is even scarier when I remember that she still works with Stephanie as a social worker.

I lean back against the wall and take it all in as Cole and Stephanie slip into what seems to be a weekly argument about him needing new shoes because his feet are too big for his old ones. It’s a simple thing, and the two of them are grinning as they argue because it devolves to a point where Cole has his shoe off and is holding his bare foot up while Stephanie compares its size to the sole of his latest pair of shoes.

Jamie plays her part by nodding her agreement with Cole. “Way too small,” she says. “If his feet were hermit crabs and those shoes were shells, they would’ve moved on to bigger shells by now.”

“Hermit crabs?” asks Stephanie. “That was the best comparison you could come up with?”

“Okay, how about this,” she says, furrowing her eyebrows like she’s really racking her brain for the perfect example. “Him trying to wear those shoes is like having size eight feet and trying to wear size seven shoes. How about that?”

Stephanie sighs dejectedly as Cole turns to high five Jamie. “See?” he asks triumphantly. “Jamie agrees.”

“Jamie agreeing with you is about as valuable as the homeless man down the street agreeing with you,” says Stephanie.

“Hurtful,” Jamie says dryly.

“It’s just the beginning of the hurt I’m going to lay on you if you keep trying to make my life difficult,” says Stephanie.

I can’t help but smile as I watch the three of them dive back into a new argument that I don’t think any one of them actually cares about, because I know beneath the surface, we’re all happy. I can see it in the small smiles and grins they flash even in the middle of their disagreement. Most of all, I can feel deep down in my chest how this kind of thing is just right. We’re a normal family. We argue and debate, but no one actually gets mad. No one is scared right now. There’s no drunken father pulling off his belt and threatening to beat somebody bloody. There aren’t dirty needles on the coffee table and there isn’t filth lining every available surface.

We’re a family. A normal family like I never thought I’d be a part of. Well, mostly normal. I don’t know if every normal family has a BDSM dungeon in their house, or if every normal husband and wife still use a babysitter so they can go to BDSM clubs. But we’re as normal as I want to be, and ever since Stephanie and Cole came into my life, I’ve been happy.