First time?

That’s a fat happy baby.

Eunbi had the thought before she could stop it, which was a little embarrassing. Still, the baby in question was currently beaming up at her from the hallway with the full-body joy only toddlers could manage — cheeks round as persimmons, a little fist shoved halfway into her mouth. Eunbi crouched down instinctively.

“Well, hello there, little miss.”

The baby — Mira, though Eunbi didn’t know that yet — responded by babbling something that might have been a greeting or might have been a declaration of war. Hard to tell with toddlers. Either way, she was very committed to it.

Eunbi was in the middle of babbling back when she heard movement behind the stroller and straightened up.

She was not prepared.

The man was big. That was the first thing. Not just tall — she was used to people being taller than her, that was most of the population — but large in a way that filled the hallway, broad-shouldered and solid, the kind of frame that made the standard apartment corridor feel like it had been built slightly too small. He’d clearly been juggling groceries and a diaper bag and whatever else, and he turned around with the distracted energy of someone who had not expected company.

Neither had she, for that matter.

Eunbi looked up at him. He looked down at her. Mira continued her political speech.

Oh, Eunbi thought, with a clarity that surprised her. Just oh. Something in her chest did something she didn’t have a word for.

“Hi,” she said, because she was a grown adult and capable of speech. “I’m Eunbi.”

The man blinked. Then, from somewhere in his arms, a small voice piped up.

“Mommy?”

Mira was staring at Eunbi with an expression of profound hope. Eunbi’s heart did something catastrophic.

I could be a mommy, said a voice in the back of her brain, completely unprompted and deeply unhinged.

Excuse me? said the rest of her brain.

She had no time to investigate this further because the man was already turning to the baby with the practiced patience of someone who had explained this before. “No, baby. Not mommy.”

Mira considered this information, deemed it unsatisfactory, and looked at Eunbi again as if waiting for a second opinion.

The man turned back with a tired but genuine smile, the kind that deepened the corners of his eyes. “Sorry about that. She meets a woman, and she decides it’s her mommy. Every time.”

Eunbi had her mouth carefully closed over everything her subconscious was apparently willing to volunteer. “It’s fine,” she said. “Really. No big deal.”

He looked grateful in a way that felt like more than politeness. Like maybe he’d been braced for something worse.

“I’m Ozymandias,” he said. “But you can call me Ozzy.”

“Ozzy,” she repeated, like she was filing it away. “You just moved in?”

“Three weeks ago.” He shifted the grocery bag to his other arm. “Wanted to be closer to Mira’s grandma.”

Mira, having apparently decided that the conversation had gone on long enough without her participation, leaned out of his arms toward Eunbi with both hands extended. It was less of a request and more of a demand.

Eunbi accepted her before she’d consciously decided to. The baby settled against her shoulder like she’d done it a hundred times.

“She doesn’t usually—” Ozzy started.

“It’s okay.” Eunbi adjusted her grip, and Mira made a small satisfied sound and grabbed a fistful of her hair. “I don’t mind.”

They stood there for a moment. Down the hall, the elevator dinged.

“She doesn’t look like you,” Eunbi said carefully, not quite sure how to phrase what she was trying to ask.

Ozzy’s expression shifted — not hurt, just familiar with the question. “She’s adopted. Technically my goddaughter.” A beat. “Both her parents passed.”

“Oh.” Eunbi looked down at Mira, who was now examining her earring with the focused intensity of a jeweler. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

He nodded, quiet about it.

The elevator ride up was four floors and mostly silent in a comfortable way rather than the awkward one, which surprised Eunbi a little. Mira dozed off somewhere between the second and third floor, going heavy and warm against Eunbi’s shoulder with the sudden totality that only babies could manage, like someone had flipped a switch.

Ozzy watched this happen and said nothing. He looked like a man trying not to disturb something fragile.

At the door, he fished for his keys one-handed, eased it open, and turned to take Mira back. The baby woke up just enough to realize what was happening and registered her objection immediately — a low, building sound that was about to become something much louder.

Eunbi and Ozzy both froze.

The sound subsided. Mira’s fist tightened in Eunbi’s hair.

Eunbi met Ozzy’s eyes over the baby’s head. He looked exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with tonight specifically and everything to do with the past however-many months. She recognized that look. She’d seen it on her sister after the first year of motherhood — that particular flavor of love that was also just barely holding on.

“I can stay for a bit,” she heard herself say.

He exhaled — not quite a sigh, more like something releasing. “I’ll make dinner.”

“You don’t have to—”

“You’re holding my kid.” He was already moving toward the kitchen. “Minimum I can do.”

Eunbi looked down at Mira, who had gone back to sleep with absolute conviction.

“Do your worst,” Ozzy said from around the corner, which she realized after a moment was aimed at her, not the refrigerator.

She almost laughed. “That’s my line.”

The kitchen smelled incredible within twenty minutes.

Eunbi had expected something serviceable — bachelor-dad cooking, the kind of meal that got the job done and didn’t ask for applause. What she had not expected was Ozzy moving through the kitchen like he actually knew what he was doing, pulling ingredients with the casual confidence of someone who cooked because he liked it, not because he had to.

“My dad’s recipe,” he said, without looking up from the roux he was building. “Chicken Alfredo Mac and Cheese. It is the only thing that guarantees a clean bowl.”

“High praise.”

“From a 22-month-old? It’s basically a Michelin star.”

Behind her, the living room had become a disaster in the best possible way.

Mira had apparently decided that the short nap had fully restored her and was now conducting a comprehensive tour of her belongings. She produced items from a fabric bin with the energy of a host unveiling auction lots — a yellow ball, a red ball, a ball that was technically a cube but that Mira called a ball anyway and Eunbi didn’t have the heart to correct, two small wooden figures, and then a vinyl Ultraman about four inches tall, paint worn at the edges from handling.

“Auraman,” Mira announced, holding him up.

“Auraman,” Eunbi confirmed seriously as she flexed her muscles. “Very strong?”

Mira nodded with her whole body.

Then came a collection of small wooden sticks that Eunbi turned over in her hands, genuinely puzzled. They were smooth, slightly tapered, and notched at one end. Some kind of puzzle pieces maybe, or parts of something she didn’t recognize. She tried fitting two together. Nothing happened.

Mira watched her struggle for a moment, then took them back with the patience of someone who had seen this before, and slotted four of them together into a shape that Eunbi still couldn’t identify but that clearly meant something to Mira, because she held it up with quiet pride.

“Okay,” Eunbi said. “You’re smarter than me.”

Mira seemed to find this reasonable.

They went through the rest of the bin. Eunbi named things when she knew them and asked questions when she didn’t, and Mira answered everything with a mix of actual words, sound effects, and gestures that Eunbi found she could follow more often than not. It had its own grammar. She just had to listen for it.

I could get used to this.

The thought arrived the same way the last one had — quietly, without asking permission, already halfway settled in before she noticed it.

We are going to have a very long conversation later, said the rest of her brain.

Sure, said that part. Later.

“Ready.” Ozzy set a bowl on the table and pulled off his apron. “I’m going to put Mira down and come back — please, help yourself. Don’t wait on my account.”

Eunbi got up and served herself a portion that she told herself was moderate and that was probably not. The first bite confirmed what the smell had promised.

She was halfway through when she heard Mira’s protests from down the hall, then the low register of Ozzy’s voice talking her down, then quiet. Five minutes later he reappeared, picked up the scattered toys with the automatic efficiency of someone who’d stopped seeing it as a task, and dropped into the chair across from her.

He looked at her bowl. She looked back at him, unashamed.

“Dad’s recipe,” she said. “he’s right.”

Something in his face relaxed.

He served himself and they ate in easy quiet for a moment before Eunbi set down her fork and looked at him properly.

“You do the whole single dad thing pretty well, you know.”

Ozzy shrugged, the way people did when they wanted to accept a compliment but couldn’t quite get there. “I try.” He turned his bowl slightly on the table — a thinking habit, maybe. “We were at the doctor's today. Mira got diagnosed with ADHD.”

Eunbi waited.

“They want to talk about medication options.” He said it evenly, but she could hear what was underneath it. “She’s 22 months old.”

“She’s 22 months old and she’s walking and holding full conversations.”

“Conversations are generous—”

“Ozzy, she gave me a twenty-minute briefing on every toy in that bin. She has opinions about Auraman.” Eunbi pointed toward the living room. “She told me which ball was fastest.”

He laughed at that — a real one, surprised out of him. “The yellow one, right?”

“Obviously.”

“Yeah.” The laugh faded into something softer. He was quiet for a moment. “She’s technically ahead on a lot of milestones. The ADHD diagnosis is early, the doctor said it might shift as she gets older, but they want to stay ahead of it. Which I understand. I do.” He pushed food around his bowl. “It’s just one more thing on a plate that already has too much on it.”

Eunbi watched him. That wasn’t the whole of it — she could tell. The spiral underneath had a different shape than a medical diagnosis.

“She needs to learn English and Spanish and Korean,” he continued. “So she can actually talk to both sets of grandparents. I have to figure out how to build that in early enough that it sticks. And then there’s the developmental stuff, and the appointments, and—”

“Ozzy.”

He stopped.

“What’s actually going on?”

He looked at her. She looked back, patient, not letting him redirect.

A beat. Then: “Mira’s maternal grandparents don’t think I’m a good fit.”

The air in the room changed slightly.

“They keep saying she needs a mother and a father.” He didn’t say it bitterly. That was almost worse — it had the sound of something he’d already processed down to something flat and factual. “They’re not wrong that she’s missing something. I know that. I just—” He stopped. “I don’t know what they want me to do about it.”

“Are they trying to contest the adoption?”

“They’re implying things. Nothing formal. Yet.”

Eunbi was quiet for a moment. Then, before she could catch herself: “Can I help?”

Ozzy blinked. The question had clearly not landed where he expected.

“With what?”

“I don’t know. Whatever needs helping with.”

He looked at her for a moment with an expression she couldn’t fully read — somewhere between grateful and careful — and then said, in a tone that was trying to be lighter than it was: “If you can find me a woman who’s okay with a single dad with a toddler, an ADHD diagnosis pending, a grandmother who will absolutely cook for her, and a stolen Ultraman figure—”

“Auraman.”

“—an Auraman figure, then sure.”

I am literally right here, heck I’ll marry you right now said the traitorous part of Eunbi’s brain, with remarkable calm.

“I’m sure we can come up with something,” she heard herself say.

He smiled at that. Tired, real, the kind that didn’t try to be more than it was.

Eunbi looked at him — the set of his shoulders, the way he was holding the bowl like he’d forgotten it was there — and got up from her chair.

He looked up, slightly startled, as she crossed around the table and put her arms around him from behind. It was a hug that said I see you more than anything else. She felt him go still for a second, like he didn’t quite know what to do with it.

Then some of the tension went out of him.

“You’ve got this,” she said. Resolute. No qualifiers. “You hear me, big guy? You’ve got this.”

He didn’t say anything. But his hand came up and briefly covered hers on his shoulder.

That was enough.

Eunbi’s apartment was quiet in the way that only registered after the noise. Geumbi excitedly scampered through the apartment.

She set her keys on the hook by the door and stood in the entryway for a moment, doing nothing. Through the wall, distantly, she thought she could hear something — or maybe she was imagining it. The building had decent insulation. She was probably imagining it.

She moved through the apartment on autopilot, filling a glass of water, setting it down without drinking it, drifting toward the window. The city outside was doing its usual thing. She wasn’t really looking at it.

She was thinking about the way Ozzy had looked at the dinner table.

Not sad, exactly. Something more specific than sad — the expression of someone who was genuinely trying to carry everything and had gotten good enough at it that most people wouldn’t notice the weight. She’d noticed. She wasn’t sure why she’d noticed, or why it had sat with her all the way through saying goodnight and walking twelve feet down the hall to her own front door, but here she was.

He looked cute, she thought, and then immediately made a face at herself. Very helpful, Eunbi. Very mature.

But he had. Objectively. There was something about a man who was clearly exhausted down to his bones and still got up and made his father’s Chicken Alfredo Mac and Cheese and picked up all the toys after — something that was difficult to be neutral about.

She stopped in front of the hallway mirror without meaning to.

Looked at herself. Looked back at herself.

“Could I actually help him?” she asked.

Her reflection didn’t have a useful answer. Her reflection just looked like a woman who had spent the evening on a stranger’s floor playing with wooden puzzle pieces and a small child named Mira, and who had somehow felt more at home doing it than she had in her own apartment in recent memory.

The traitorous part of her brain, which had been warming up all evening, chose this moment to go completely off-script.

Yes, it said, with a confidence that was frankly alarming. Look at you. “Mom” is basically stamped on your forehead. You have mommy written all over your body.

“Okay—”

Ozzy and you could handle three more kids, easy.

“What?”

Her reflection just looked back at her, unhelpfully.

She pressed her fingers to her temple. Three more. The number had arrived with such specificity that it was almost funny. Not two. Not one. Three more. Names, even — she could feel them forming at the edges of the thought as her brain had already done the paperwork. Doyun. Jisoo. August.

She tried to shake it off and her brain simply… showed her something instead.

It arrived the way good daydreams did, fully furnished and already in motion.

A house that was real in the way houses are real in dreams — solid walls, light coming through in the afternoon way, a yard that was somehow always the right temperature. Mira was at the table with cereal, but she was definitely not eating correctly. Jisoo in her school uniform, is opinionated about something. Doyun and August in the background, at that indeterminate sibling-chaos stage where it was impossible to tell if they were playing or fighting.

Eunbi is at the door.

Ozzy, coat on, lunch in hand — and pausing, because she’d said something, and he turned around and she kissed him like it was something she’d done every day of her adult life.

He walked out looking slightly more like a person than he had when he woke up.

She watched him from the doorway.

Eunbi blinked.

She was still in her hallway. The mirror was still there. She looked, if anything, worse than she had thirty seconds ago.

“You have lost your entire mind,” she told her reflection.

Her reflection appeared to be in a relationship with a man she had known for four hours and was raising five children in a house with good natural light.

“We just met him,” she said.

Her brain offered no rebuttal. It had made its case and was apparently comfortable resting on it.

Eunbi exhaled, turned away from the mirror, and went to go find something to do that wasn’t this. Her glass of water was still on the counter, untouched.

She drank it.

Through the wall, she thought she heard something that might have been a door closing, or might have been nothing at all.

She was smiling, a little, despite herself.

She spent the rest of the night playing and taking care of Geumbi.

When she yawned she decided to wind down for the day.

Eunbi couldn’t find sleep that night…she would just toss and turn waiting for someone or something to take her.

Eunbi lay in her bed alone the window open as she lay trying to find rest until she heard the door open she turned and their Ozzy was naked His cock standing at attention for her. Eunbi licked her lips as she said, “Are you gonna make me a mommy,”

Ozzy walked closer to Eunbi her body on fire as he did.

She opened her legs lewdly and said, “Please fuck me!”

Ozzy got into the bed with her and slid inside her.

“Fuck you’re so big,” she moaned as he barely could get in despite how slick she was. Her cream covered Ozzy’s cock as he slowly thrust in and out of Eunbi for the first time.

Eunbi wailed in delight. She grabbed her bloated bosom and presented it to Ozzy with perverse glee. “Can you imagine it? These filled with milk for our children” she moaned as Ozzy picked up the pace his thrust going deep inside her. She moaned as her walls clenched around the main.

“Claim me!” Eunbi moaned close. Ozzy kept thrusting into her as he did she repeated

“Make me a mommy. Make me a mommy,” until she came.

Eunbi’s eyes opened and she was in her bedroom naked Ozzymandias was nowhere to be found. She turned to her clock at 1:45 am. She groaned in an annoyed way. Her sheets were wet, and she got up to clean them.

“Fine,” she told the traitorous part of herself. “I’ll make him mine,” she added.