Chapter 13
Chapter
Thirteen
Devon was feeling a little pouty. It was time for the holiday stroll, and normally he didn’t have a problem working.
But this was his first year to do this annual evening out with his lover, and he was on call, and Laird was at work, so he just kind of moved into the birth center and sat there with his knitting and pouted.
It wasn’t even Christmas knitting because he’d done all of that already.
Fuck Christmas.
Was this how it was going to be his whole life? Working holidays, working weekends, missing everything?
There was a part of him that realized that this was totally ridiculous, like seriously ridiculous. So what? He was on call. He was the boss. He could literally schedule someone else to be on call. One of the single people. They could draw straws.
He was the boss. He owned the name. He owned the business. Raven was his partner, but Devon was the managing partner. He owned seventy-five percent. He could make the hard decisions.
So really he was just kind of being a pouty baby.
But that didn’t matter because he was mad, and he didn’t want to spend another Christmas by himself, and he wanted to go be out with his lover, nibbling on goodies and having cocoa and spending their one and only Christmas holiday stroll as a couple together.
It really made him mad.
He hadn’t even bothered to decorate their house.
Laird hadn’t brought it up, so he didn’t bother. He assumed that they were going to celebrate Christmas. He had bought Laird some odds and ends, little things. It was really hard to know. He got Laird a briefcase for his new venture in school, a couple of gift cards, a few dress shirts.
They hadn’t had Thanksgiving together. He’d gone to Raven’s for the day. And Halloween, Laird had worked.
He didn’t like this at all.
He didn’t like how it made him feel that he didn’t like this at all.
He felt whiny and mean-spirited.
So he knitted hard to work out his shit. He figured out after half an hour or so that he was doing a shawl…
He was really on a roll when a persistent sound distracted him. He frowned, glancing up, but nothing in the room should be making any noise that sounded like jingle bells.
Nothing.
He muted the television. He wasn’t sure why Criminal Minds reruns would have bells, but it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.
He tilted his head, listening.
No, that was totally jingling bells.
Maybe one of the Wi-Fi speakers was playing Christmas music in another one of the rooms. They could get glitchy and turn on by themselves fairly easily.
It used to freak him out.
He headed through the darkened birthing center, looking around, but everything seemed to be quiet and solid, as it should be.
Then he went to the front door to peer out into the snow and see if he could see something.
There was a chance that maybe it was a dog’s collar, and he needed to bring him in.
He supposed it could be a serial killer. That would be interesting, a little inconvenient and kind of aggravating, but interesting.
Although he thought he could probably defend himself from a serial killer, he had rage, a healthy sense of self-reliance, and at least a million hours of watching police procedurals and true crime shows.
Finally, when he didn’t find anything inside, he headed for the front door.
Maybe there were some misguided carolers or something who had found their way to him because his light was on and were trying to get him to make a donation to something, he didn’t know.
But one way or the other, he was not having it.
When he opened the door, though, it was Laird, draped in tinsel and wearing a Santa hat, shaking a double handful of jingle bells yelling, “Ho ho ho!”
His eyebrows shot up and Devon stared really hard. “What are you doing?”
“I am coming to get you for the holiday walk.” Laird stopped jingling and came up to give him a very cold kiss on the mouth, their noses touching and making him shiver.
“Naomi is on her way. She will be on call for the rest of the evening. She says she wants to get away from everybody for a little while and just sit in the quiet with the fake fireplace on in here. So I told her to go for it.”
Devon’s mouth dropped open and he hugged himself because it was chilly outside. “But you’re on duty tonight.”
“Nope. I have found a substitute—someone who wants to pull a couple of doubles to make some money. Nick agreed to it, and I am yours for at least tonight, if not longer. So what do you say, baby? Let’s go holiday.” Laird looked so happy, beaming, and his eyes just twinkling.
Devon found himself tearing up, his lower lip quivering. “I thought you didn’t like the holidays. I thought you didn’t want to spend holiday time with me.”
“What?” Laird immediately dropped the jingle bells and came to wrap both arms around him.
“What? Baby, I’ve been working doubles and triples trying to get enough stuff put aside so I can start school in January.
I’m so sorry if you thought I didn’t want to do holidays with you.
I thought you had a birth on Thanksgiving, or I would have fought for that day off, too.
” He had to admit, Laird did look genuinely stricken.
He sniffled. “I really want to decorate the house. Can we do that tomorrow? I have all the stuff.”
Laird squeezed him tighter. “You know it. I never thought. God, baby. You should have said. I don’t have anything, because I was always renting, and I was single, so I always volunteered to work.”
Tears streamed down his face. “I felt so ungrateful, but I was so mad!”
“I’m so sorry.” Laird held him, closing the door behind them for warmth. “So sorry, baby. I had no idea.”
“I know!” He wailed the words.
“Can we sit a minute before we go stroll?” Laird led him to the comfy couch in the waiting room.
Sniffling, he nodded and let Laird settle down next to him, grabbing his hands and holding on.
Laird took a deep breath and then let it out.
“Look, I can tell I bungled the hell out of all of this, and it wasn’t intentional.
I promise it was just stupidity. But I think we need to talk about it a little bit before we head out there. ”
“I’m sorry,” Devon started and Laird cut him off.
“No, you don’t have to be sorry for anything.
You don’t have to be sorry for being mad at me, and you don’t have to be sorry for telling me.
I want you to know that. That’s important.
You are allowed to feel what you feel.” Laird held his hands tightly, squeezing a little bit.
“And don’t excuse yourself by saying that it’s the hormones talking or that it’s just the time of year that has you down. That’s not fair to you.”
Tears started to dry up and Devon tried to breathe, too. He tried to calm down and talk about all this in a rational way, although it was hard because he wasn’t emotional and he was feeling the pressure of the season and being pregnant was wildly emotional.
“Okay, that’s fair.” He gave Laird a smile.
“And I should have said something to you before now. I should have.” He paused, trying to put his words in order because this was important and he didn’t want to misspeak.
“I pushed it down because I just thought this wasn’t important to you.
The holiday. So I didn’t want to burden you with it. ”
“And I didn’t even think about it because when you’re a single EMT, you’re the one who gets all the weird shifts during the holidays.
In fact, I volunteered for them up until this year because if you have no family, then you help the guys out who did.
” Those bright blue eyes shone with regret, and Laird scrubbed a hand over his clipped beard.
“I didn’t volunteer this year, but I got assigned, so I resigned myself to working them one last time. ”
“Do you feel guilty because you’re going to be leaving?” Devon wanted to have his knitting in his hands, but instead he held on to Laird like he was a lifeline.
“A little.” Laird nodded, then tugged him even closer until he was leaning on Laird’s side, head on Laird’s shoulder, one big arm around him. “Not because it’s real, and I have any reason to feel guilty, but because it just is what it is. Nick’s going to be sad when I go.”
“I know you two will stay friends, and he’s welcome over any time. But it’s not the same as working together every day in an ambulance.”
“Exactly. So maybe I felt like I owed the guys one more holiday season. I don’t know. One way or the other, I should have been more attuned to what you wanted, and you should have spoken up and told me that I was being a dick.”
He searched Laird’s bright blue gaze, then smiled and nodded. “I should have. And I shouldn’t have just come and sat here and pouted like a whiny baby.”
“You’re not a whiny baby. You were sad and you were on call and you couldn’t think of anything else to do.
But Naomi’s coming in and then we can go do our thing, okay?
Do you have enough warm stuff to bundle up in?
” Laird looked him over, lips pursed, and he knew he wasn’t dressed for the holiday stroll, but he did have his parka, gloves, hat, and scarf out in the closet.
“I do. I want to go with you. I want to drink hot chocolate. I want churros or crepes or whatever it is that Fuel is making out at the street. I want to buy us our first Christmas ornament.”
“That sounds amazing.” Laird kissed the top of his head. “I’m so sorry, baby. Promise me we’ll talk from now on. I’ll make sure to ask you about my schedule before I just blithely make it.”
Tears threatened again, but this time because Laird was being so sweet. “Thank you. I know it’s probably hard for you.” He thought Laird would be proud of him for stopping himself from saying it was probably silly.
“It is different for sure. Not difficult when you think about it; it’s just a matter of making myself think about it, and it’s not any kind of reflection on you. It’s totally something I have to figure out.”
“Now we can figure it out together.” Devon knew he couldn’t let Laird take all the blame for this.
He’d been unwilling to just speak up because he was always afraid Laird was right on the cusp of leaving him.
“I don’t want to lose you because I’m being a bitch.
I mean, you’ve already moved and changed your whole life. I guess I’m just jealous.”
He shrugged. It was weirdly hard to do Halloween alone and Thanksgiving over at Raven’s. Everybody had looked at him like he was pitiful, which he guessed he had been. He felt a little pitiful.
He could be honest; he felt like a dipshit.
“We are changing our lives, huh? You let me in your home, and we got pregnant together. It took both of us. It’s going to take both of us for the rest of our lives.”
“Yeah?” He blinked up at Laird. “You mean it?”
Laird nodded. “The rest of our lives. I mean it.”
Devon took a deep breath, then kind of lunged at Laird, hugging him so tight. “I love the sound of that. This morning I wasn’t sure I did, but I do.”
Laird patted his hip. “Come on, let’s go play for a little while. This will be the only time that we’re ever doing this that we’re not dads!”
Devon looked at him, “I know; it’s wild. This will be my first time to ever do it as part of a couple, and my last time to only ever do it as a couple.”
Laird shook his head. “No, no, because at some point all the kids will be grown and we’ll be waiting on grandbabies, and we’ll go just as a couple. Hell, by the time our children are teenagers, they’ll want to do their own thing.”
It blew Devon’s mind the way Laird thought about them in terms of decades. His experience with families was very much contained to infancy.
Mostly he spent most of his time dealing with fetuses.
Then he saw a baby the day it was born and then possibly never again.
But it wasn’t true with Raven and his little one, or for that matter, Wren and her little one. He was building a family here. In more ways than one. He patted his stomach, feeling very literal.
Laird chuckled, hauling him up. “No more deep thinking. Hot chocolate. Weird hot pastry. Crafts. Costumes. Come on, baby.”
Naomi breezed in then, and she frowned at him. “You’re still here.”
“We were just leaving. I was pouting.”
“Stop, it’s boring.” She rolled her eyes and pointed to the door. “Get out.”
“My coat—”
“You have twenty seconds. Move.” She winked at him. “Leave your knitting here. Whatever it is, you can finish it next time you’re on call.”
He grabbed his coat, his mitts, his hat, and his scarf.
Laird stared at him, and Devon blinked. “What?”
“Do you realize your mittens don’t match?”
“Neither do my socks. I just wear the ones that are spares. You know, when I make something, and I don’t like it enough to make a second one?”
The stare didn’t fade. “That’s awful.”
“What?”
“Seriously, that’s just awful. You wear mittens you don’t like enough to make a second one of? I’m going to buy you a pair of mittens when we go downtown. Let’s go.”
Laird was cute, but weird. Really, genuinely weird.
Good thing Devon loved him.