Chapter 18 #2
“I’ll return it, if you prefer your milk warm,” he said.
“Stop,” I replied, laughing into my palms. “You’ll make me love you.”
We both heard the word ring the air-bell.
I took my hands down slowly. He didn’t flinch.
He didn’t run. His face didn’t change at all, which was somehow worse and better than any reaction he could have given me.
He crossed the room in three quiet steps and set two fingers under my chin again, the way he had last night when he wanted me to look him in the eye and tell the truth.
“Don’t be careful with that word around me,” he said. “Just be honest.”
“I’m not there.”
“I know,” he said. “I wasn’t asking for it.”
“Then what are you asking for?”
“For today,” he said, thumb brushing a small arc against my jaw like punctuation. “For you to go to your shop and let people carry pieces for you. For you to let me be a problem you want, not one you have to solve.”
I didn’t trust my voice. I nodded. He kissed my forehead like I was something he respected. The tenderness of that undid me more than almost anything else he’d done.
We dressed—me in high-waisted denim and a soft tee with my shop logo, him in the shirt from last night.
It felt domestic in a way that should have scared me.
It didn’t. He called down for the car like he owned the elevator shafts.
I tucked my hair into a clip and gave up on mourning the blowout—the curl had already surrendered to duty.
My hands remembered the muscle memory of a messy knot and my mouth remembered a toothbrush and lip balm. That was enough.
At the door, he caught my wrist. “Tonight,” he said. Not a question.
I swallowed. “Tonight.” It came out rough. “I want the whole thing when it’s ours, not rationed between contractions and phone calls.”
His mouth tipped. “Good. You’ll be starving by then.”
“I already am.”
“Then hold.” He leaned in, almost a kiss, still not giving it. “No shortcuts. No getting lost in the middle.”
I hated how much I loved that. “So, we agree,” I said. “No sex until after I shower and eat something that isn’t birth center coffee.”
“After you shower again,” he echoed. “After I watch you eat. After I decide where to put you.”
Heat shot through me in a clean, traitorous line. I nodded. He let go of my wrist and opened the door.
On the way down, his phone vibrated. He glanced, declined the call, and slid it away. Thirty seconds later, it vibrated again, harder, the kind that says not a suggestion . He answered without looking at me, voice turning into the uninflected thing I’d heard once before.
“Yeah.” A pause. “No. Then you wait.” Another pause. “Because I said. And because the container doesn’t move without a receipt. You know that.” His mouth flattened. “Respect is not optional.” He listened, silent a long moment, then: “I’ll send a man.”
He hung up. The quiet between us changed pressure, then steadied. He didn’t explain. I didn’t ask. He looked at me like he was measuring whether I’d pry. I smiled, small and sharp. “Logistics?”
“Compliance,” he said, mouth tipping.
When we pulled up, The Nesting Place looked welcoming—fern in the window, chalkboard sign half-erased from yesterday’s closing announcement, the oval table where new parents learned to diaper.
A woman I didn’t know stood at the counter, dark hair in a low twist, crisp white shirt, soft sneakers. She had a clipboard and a competence that read from the door.
“Mei?” I asked.
“Yes, hi!” She beamed like she already loved the place.
“I’m early. I like to get the lay of the land.
Phones are forwarding. I set up the answering service with after-hours scripting—your voice, not some robot.
Gianna Haynes will be here at noon to start curbside.
And there’s a postpartum doula named Reese Flanagan arriving at two to cover a hospital discharge visit someone booked for you. I can go if you prefer, but?—”
“Reese is perfect,” I said, somewhere between laughing and crying. “Who are you?”
“Someone who likes order,” she said simply. “And babies. And women who build things without enough hands.”
Atticus stood a step behind me, hands in his pockets, a king who’d dropped off a cathedral and didn’t want credit. I looked back at him. He pretended to study a rack of muslin swaddles. The line of his mouth gave him away.
“Thank you,” I said softly, for him alone.
He nodded once, the gesture spare enough to make my throat go tight again. “You’ll text me when you need me.”
“What if I want you?” The question came out without a filter, and I watched it hit him like a warm wave.
“Then you’ll get me,” he said.
The door chimed. A woman I half-knew from the breastfeeding circle stepped in, surprised and grateful in the same instant, and Mei slid into motion like a dancer joining a piece she already knew the steps to. My shop breathed around us, familiar and new. I felt my chest widen to fit the morning.
Atticus touched my wrist as he passed—a brush that felt like a promise. “I’ll be close,” he said.
“Doing logistics,” I said dryly.
He smiled, bent, and put his mouth at my ear with that careful restraint that set my bones to humming. “And, tonight,” he murmured, “I’m collecting on last night’s interruption.”
“Bossy,” I whispered.
“Accurate,” he said, and left me in my kingdom, a milk fridge humming in the back and the harbor bright beyond the street, my life suddenly full of hands that were not mine—and one pair I had not expected, steady and sure, waiting where I could find them.