Onyx Bentley awoke that morning feeling the weight of all the work he had left undone crashing down on him. Yet he was excited to begin.
His dream was really coming through. He couldn't believe he had done it, he had gone ahead and bought a house and he had successfully altered his custody schedule with both his baby mamas so that they aligned without any of them knowing what he was up to.
His two little boys, Miles and Jamie would grow up side by side as brothers should though their mothers hated each others guts.
He was playing a dangerous game but it was one he felt he would get away with. He had to get away with it for the sake of his boys.
Growing up Onyx was the youngest of three boys in a family with endless money. He had gotten into any and every kind of teenage stupidity there was and in those times when it felt like everyone had given up on him, his brothers Omari and Kairo were always there for him in ways known and unknown to him.
They always stuck close by doing to him the often unwanted but needful intervention even when it meant ganging up to brutalise the stupidity out of him.
Onyx touched the tender flesh on his knee where his skin tissues was forever altered from Kairo slamming him into the jagged tiles he had broken in the guest bathroom at their childhood home.
He winced at the memory. His brothers had showed him hell and then heaven.
That's why his boys needed each other. For brotherhood, to protect each other from him when they felt he would be an overbearing parent (not that he planned to be), to know in which situations to snitch to him about what was going on in the other siblings life, to protect each other from each other, to simply have each others trust and love.
Miles and Jamie deserved to grow up knowing that brotherhood he experienced. So he had ditched his apartment and bought a house.
A big house with a huge backyard that would have the feeling of family like his childhood home and he was doing his best to decorate it that way.
He had no wife or girlfriend but he wanted it to be as homey as possible.
His boys, Miles Bentley and Jameson Bentley were both seven years old and only a month apart. Onyx's crazy teenage years had led him to be a father of two boys at age nineteen. He'd been a mess for a while but had soon been polished into a fine man by his parents and brothers.
He was a present dad in his sons lives and was also a dependable provider, protector and role model.
Their mothers received enough child care money from him that Jamesons mom, Anisha didn't work at all.
He had mastered the dad game and the co parenting game despite the constant bad blood between Anisha and Tiana, Miles mum.
However, Onyx had noticed something off in his expert management. For the sake of peace he kept Anisha and Tiana so distant from each other that it was impossible for his boys to form any sibling bond.
He spent a crazy amount of time with each boy but separately. He never had off weeks with custody, there was always one kid at his apartment each week and because of that it had taken him a while to notice how little time his boys spent with each other. He had been measuring his dad success with how much time they got with him.
It wasn't until a year back when he had casually mentioned Miles to Jameson during a game of basketball that he realised what was happening.
Jamie had paused mid bounce and gone
'Who?'
'Miles buddy. You know Miles'
'Oh my cousin?'
Onyx had been flabbergasted.
'Your brother, Miles. About your height, dark skinned, braided hair?'
'Oh I remember him from some cookouts at grandma's house. We used to play water gun wars with uncle Omari. I mistook him for my cousin, he hasn't been to any cookouts in a while'.
That was because three years ago Onyx had begun regulating which cookouts his boys were present at after Tiana and Anisha had broke out into a fight the year he had brought his then fiancee to meet the family.
It had been a whole mess and since both women insisted on accompanying their sons to his family gatherings he regulated who to invite for which cookout.
His sons had not played together since they were four. He'd been so careful with mentioning the wrong sons name with the wrong mama around that he had said the minimum about Jamie to Miles and about Miles to Jamie.
What a miserable life and he had thought he was killing it. Handling it all well.
The following week while spending time with Miles he had purposely thrown in Jamie's name and when he received an almost identical reaction he had decided there and then that the madness has to stop.