THIRTY
BLAIR
Baby is the size of a cowboy boot
Colt has me making an absolute fool of myself in this class. The stuffy, old teacher with the plastic model of a woman’s reproductive system keeps shooting daggers at us every time I giggle, but the things he’s whispering in my ear make it hard.
“Quit it. You’re getting us in trouble,” I whisper, elbowing him in the ribs as I try to keep my mouth as still as possible so I don’t get glared at again.
He’s relatively quiet until a few minutes later, when the cervix is mentioned.
“You’re telling me the baby comes out of that part in you that feels like the tip of an AirPod?” he whispers.
I blink, still staring forward, watching the woman’s knobby finger trace the cervix on the plastic model, before turning slightly so I can see him behind me. He genuinely looks curious and I’m shocked silent.
“What?”
“I don’t like that you know what a part of my body feels like that I don’t,” I tell him. I know his cock is big enough that it hits my cervix. Or rather, hit it, the one time we had sex. But it didn’t occur to me, for some reason, that he’d have associated a… texture to it.
And it definitely never occurred to me that it would feel like an AirPod of all things.
“An AirPod?”
He nods. “The ear piece. You know, like the circular rubber part that you can replace?”
“If I could just have everyone paying attention and minimizing side conversations so that there aren’t any distractions, that would be amazing,” the woman says, politely but pointedly.
My cheeks redden as I turn back to face forward, trying to ignore everyone’s eyes on us.
“Sorry, Mrs. Collins,” Colt says. “That was my fault. Proceed.”
She huffs, which is fair. It’s not like she needed permission from a student of her birthing class to proceed , but she gives him a snippy “Thank you, Mr. Whittaker” anyway and does indeed proceed.
If I had to guess, she’d known him his whole life and was used to his antics. Everyone we’d run into seemed to be.
For most of the people in the room, this was the first time they were finding out Colt had gotten a woman pregnant, so they’d been gawking a lot even before we’d gotten yelled at.
I’d gone to Billings a couple of times with his sisters and his mama, but I didn’t go into town much.
I was mostly just a homebody, and Colt seemed content enough to stay in with me.
There were so few pregnant people in Cedar Creek at one time that they didn’t bother with weekly classes—just an eight-hour crash course one Saturday a month in an empty meeting room at the hospital.
Colt really locks in just about the time that I zone out—breathing techniques. He was back to being anxious, while I was more bored than anything else. And hungry.
“Is there a Chili’s in Cedar Creek?” I whisper to him while he’s attentively listening to Mrs. Collins .
“What?” Colt asks, looking down at me with furrowed brows. “No. There’s only Cattleman’s.” His attention quickly returns to the breathing lesson.
“Does Cattleman’s have Kraft macaroni and cheese?”
“I don’t think so. Callie would know.”
Well, Callie didn’t really talk to me much—though she was transfixed with my stomach—so I didn’t think she’d be a wealth of knowledge, but perhaps Kenny could ask her. I pull out my phone to text her.
“What are you doing? You’re going to get us in trouble again,” Colt hisses at me, swiping my phone.
I give him a frustrated growl. “I’m hungry.”
“We just had lunch.”
“And?” I dare him to act like I don’t have the right to be hungry again, preparing to give him the silent treatment for the rest of the day and make him sleep on the couch tonight.
He sighs. “And nothing, I suppose. I’ll see what I can do about the macaroni after we’re done here.”
“That’s in four hours.”
“Blair, baby, I’m trying to pay attention”
“Mr. Whittaker!”
Both of us jump as Mrs. Collins barks his name. I whip back around to face the front and she sighs.
“Please stop chit-chatting. There are others around you that are trying to learn .”
I have a feeling Colt heard that several times, in several different classrooms throughout his life, but I was always the unproblematic child who rarely got reprimanded, so it’s enough to set me straight.
We’re quiet for the rest of the class, but Colt apologizes to her on our way out, his hand in mine.
“That’s okay, boy,” she says, patting his cheek.
I can tell he hates it by how he squeezes my hand a bit tighter.
“You always did need someone to be just a little bit firmer with you than your siblings did. We’re all just so glad you’re home and back in your right mind.
I knew that nonsense of yours was just a phase, but no one at the church believed me.
Well, joke’s on them, isn’t it, because look at you now!
Pretty girl, little blessing on the way,” she says, and my brows furrow.
Phase? Was she talking about bull riding? Why would the church be involved? Colt didn’t seem particularly religious.
Colt doesn’t answer her, just giving her an awkward goodbye and pulling me along behind him. As we pass Cattleman’s and turn onto the road leading to his ranch, my stomach falls. I’d been really, really looking forward to that macaroni, and he must’ve forgotten.
I didn’t want to burden him by telling him to turn around, but every tiny emotion always felt much larger than it had any business feeling lately.
“Why are you crying?” Colt asks a few minutes later.
I wasn’t crying.
Well… I was.
Not enough for him to have noticed, though. I was being quiet. I wasn’t even sniffling or looking at him.
“I’m not,” I say, wiping away my tears.
“You are. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I insist, feeling stupid for crying at all. These hormones are absolutely ridiculous and I hate them and I hate being pregnant and I hate everything in the whole wide world except my baby bear and her father.
Colt pulls over onto the grassy shoulder of the road and turns on his flashers, but I refuse to look at him because then he’ll know for sure that I’m crying. Over freaking macaroni and cheese.
“Can I see those pretty green eyes, baby?”
“No,” I tell him petulantly.
He sighs and gets out of the truck, which confuses me until he rounds the front of it and pulls my door open. His eyes soften when he sees my tears.
“Stop it,” I grumble, wiping my face .
“What’s wrong?”
I sniffle pathetically. “You said we could go to dinner after the classes, and I really wanted macaroni.”
Colt smiles, making his dimples pop as he reaches up to thumb away my tears. I’m not sure what exactly is a laughing matter, to be honest.
“We are going to go to dinner. I’m taking us home to change first. Cattleman’s is a bit dressy.”
“Oh.”
“Oh,” he agrees. “I’ll never break a promise I made you, baby. I swear.”
“Okay. I’m sorry.”
He shushes me with a kiss against my forehead.
“No apologies needed. My baby’s wreaking havoc on you. The least I can do is deal with some moodiness every once in a while. I just hate causing those tears.”
“You didn’t,” I say with another sniffle, feeling even stupider. I should’ve just asked instead of thinking he forgot and getting my feelings hurt for no reason.
He holds my hand the rest of the way home.
Cattleman’s does indeed have Kraft macaroni and cheese on the kids’ menu.