Of course, the room that had been intended to be a large playroom for the girls would now have to become a nursery for the new babies. The girls were really too young to realize that they were losing any space, so it wasn’t a big deal and there was an entire floor in the new house with empty bedrooms that would remain so for a while until all of the children got big enough to inhabit them on their own. There was one other room on their floor, but Marla was currently in it.
Leslie had only recently discovered some plans in Tucker’s office he had been working on with redesigns of their floor for once the children were in their own rooms. One was a larger study for himself and the other was empty, waiting to be worked on. She had been looking at them when he walked in and caught her.
“Spying on me,” he asked, coming over to kiss her and wrap his arms around her waist as he looked over her shoulder.
“Admiring your new study,” she told him.
“Our new study,” he corrected her.
“Yeah? You’re going to share a study with me?”
“Absolutely. It’ll be our own little safe haven from our brood of screaming kids.”
“What about the other room? You’ve not decided what to do with it yet?”
“I have thought we might make it another study, but this one for the kids. I thought about going back to the original plan of making it a playroom, but they will be entirely too noisy and disturb our tranquility. If we make it a library, they will sit in there and read rather than run amok.”
“You have a lot to learn about kids, Tucker,” she laughed.
“How so?” he asked.
“I imagine we’re going to have five children very close in age. Even in a library, they are going to bicker and argue over who is reading this book or that book. There will be a grand fight over who saw the Horton Hears a Who book first. There will never be tranquility in this house once they are all talking and mobile, not for years to come.”
“Well, that sounds delightful . . . and fucking terrifying,” he said in a somber tone, sending them both into a short fit of laughter before recovering themselves.
“So, where will they play then?”
“Well, obviously, they will have their rooms, but there are seven bedrooms on their future floor. That is one for each of them and one for the nanny, as I figure Marla, or whoever is with us at that point – she may have gone mad with the terror you describe – and one left over. We’ll make it a playroom for them to share or batter one another in.”
“It’s going to be weird having them on a separate floor from us though. What if they get in trouble?”
“It’s not like they are going to be down there before they are old enough to be okay without constant supervision, plus there will be a nanny near them.”
“I know, but still.”
“How about this. How about I put cameras and intercoms in the rooms until they are old enough that we don’t want to know about what they might be up to in their bedrooms?”
Leslie made a disgusted face at the thought of teenagers and what they’d get up to but nodded her agreement. “I like that idea. What about guests? Are we relegating them to the single empty room on our floor?”
“Oh, no. I’m going to turn that into an enormous walk-in closet for your things.”
“Really?”
“Yes. The one mistake I made in this house was sharing a closet with you. How can you possibly have so many clothes? And shoes! There’re enough shoes in there to start your own shop!”
“You can’t complain. You bought most of them,” she laughed.
“I guess I am guilty of that,” he laughed. “What can I say, I like to take you shopping and watch you try on things. If you didn’t look so perfect in them, I wouldn’t insist on buying them.”
“I could just dress in old housedresses and save you some money.”
“Don’t you dare. I’ll give you my whole closet if you want it. I can keep my stuff in suitcases.”
Leslie laughed and turned back to the sketches. “What about guests though? We have this huge house and still no room for guests once the kids are older. How crazy is that?”
“I’ve thought about that too. That is why I have also been working on this!” he said, flipping over one of the papers with a flourish.
Leslie looked down at the paper and tried to figure out what she was seeing. It looked like a smaller house, almost like a duplex, but with a center separating the two apartments inside.
“You’re going to build our guests a duplex?”
“Something like that. A split guesthouse with a studio apartment on each side of a common area in the center. There will be everything they need in the studio but the option to hang out in the common area, if they wish.”