Chapter 19
Gregor
“Your instincts were correct. You are, indeed, pregnant.”
Silence met the doctor’s announcement, as August and I stared into each other’s eyes, his voice in the back of my head crackling with a wide array of thoughts and emotions.
“I…”
his voice began before trailing off.
We’re gonna be papas, I thought back, just to see the look on his face.
A soft grin lifted his lips and he nodded. “Papas, I like that. So, like Papa Gregor and Papa August.”
“Something tells me we we’ll end up with several evolutions of names before we get there. Gregor is going to wind up being Gre-Gre, you just mark my words, and August is going to become Auggie at some point and when it does I doubt I’ll be able to resist calling you that, too.”
“Papa Auggie will not happen, I hate being called Auggie,”
he murmured out loud as the physician chuckled, and suggested we write down any questions that arose between now and our next visit so she could answer them for us when we came in.
Something told me we’d have a ton of them.
“We’ll love every evolution,”
I said, squeezing his hand.
“As long as it’s not Auggie,”
he replied as I slipped my arm around him.
“Just remember to take some time to process and read the pamphlets I’m sending home with you. There is some great information there that might provide the answers to a few things you might find yourself curious about,” he said.
I took them and tucked them in my backpack when August looked too dazed to hold out his hand. I felt like I was moving on autopilot as I guided him outside and down the boardwalk to the steps that led down to the sand.
With our arms around one another, we just walked for a little while and listened to the soft sound of the surf.
“We’re going to be papas,”
he said, repeating my words from the office. “Do you think we should start telling people yet, or wait until I start showing?”
“I’m okay with telling people whenever you are,”
I replied. “But I don’t think we have to rush into it just because we know. We can always take the time to process it before we’re faced with people who want to ask us about it.”
“That’s a good idea, let’s do that,”
he replied as he pressed closer to my side. “You’re still going to make the furniture right, the way you were talking about when you were on the ship?”
“Yup, I plan to carve everything for their room, once we decide what features we’d like in the nursery. I can draw up our ideas, too, to give us a visual of what the nursery will look like before we start setting things up. That way we can tweak things and determine which space would be best to set up in.”
“Would you be willing to sacrifice your drafting space and move it to the second level so that we can have the babies on the third floor with us or will we need to move the bedroom down to the second level?”
His words came out fast, blurted and nearly tripped over in his rush to get them all out before I interrupted him. I almost had, swiftly and with the utmost firmness, to tell him that wasn’t going to happen.
I checked myself when I thought about how inconvenient it would be to have to go up and down the stairs to check on the babies. Our rooms needed to be on the same level of the house. I’d rather move my drafting space downstairs than the bedroom. The third floor was the perfect sleeping space and one of the major features that had contributed to me buying the place.
“We can do that,”
I said. “I’ll get one of my brothers to come over and help me bring them down and get them set up in that room with all the shelves with nothing on them. It’s got good natural light and enough space for each of the tables. I might as well turn that into my office.”
“It might be good for you, to not sleep in the same space as you work anymore,”
August said. “You don’t even hesitate to head straight for one of your drawing tables and slip in at least a half hour of work every time you get up to go to the bathroom.”
“It always takes me a little time to fall back to sleep anyway,”
I explained. “I hadn’t realized you’d noticed. You always look out of it when I wake up.”
“More like I wake a little, notice, and roll over grumbling,”
August informed me. “And it still takes you a little time to wind down once you’re in bed. All going over to a drafting board does is add additional time before you get to the wind down time and keeps you up longer.”
“I stand chastised and rebuked and will try to refrain from slipping a bit of work in when I’m supposed to be sleeping.”
“Thank you, otherwise you’ll start finding me down in the kitchen mixing up candy jewelry boxes and filling them with little candy rings, necklaces and bracelets.”
He froze the moment the words left his mouth, which meant I stopped walking and turned to face him as he blinked and cocked his head.
“That is a brilliant idea,”
he sputtered right before he snatched his phone from his pocket and added the idea into his online notebook.
Leave it to my mate to still find a spark of creativity to latch onto moments after we received life altering news.
“You made your point,”
I told him as I pressed a kiss to the top of his head and held him close. “I wouldn’t like waking up to learn that you’d left me alone in bed so you could start working well before it was supposed to be time for you to. I won’t do it to you again.”
“Thank you.”
“So, we know where we want the nursery, I’ve already got the dimensions of the room. I can design the furniture with rounded backs to fit the curve of the space just like the bedroom set, so we can best maximize it. I think we need to fence the entire space in, like a corral, so there is no chance of one of them crawling anywhere dangerous if we set them down. I’ll work on dimensions and mockup a few sketches to give you an idea of what it will look like. Once it’s finished, we can work on stocking it and acquiring nesting materials.”
“Oh good, because I want to nest on the third floor, too,”
he explained. “I can lie there wrapped in blankets with the windows open and smell the scent of the breakfast you’re cooking for me on the hibachi. I want us to lie there and feed one another and feel the babies move. I want to start every day that way.”
“It will make the transition to the nursery easier, if you only have to move a few steps,”
I said after thinking about it a little bit. “I’ll get to work on those plans later today, you start thinking about what you’ll want for furniture so I can design the room to fit our needs.”
“I will.”
“There’s some kind of bedroom warehouse place a few towns over if you’d prefer to shop for blankets there, that will let you touch them before you make your selection.”
“If they’re going to be for the nest then I have to touch them,”
August said. “I’d be too paranoid about buying ones offline without being able to see if they’ll be too scratchy or not. I only want soft things in our nest. I’d love to take a trip to the bedroom warehouse with you.”
“Then we’ll go as soon as the space is ready,”
I promised as I draped my arm around him and started guiding him down the beach again. “Would you care for a private celebration tonight? I can pick up a couple lobsters, some crab legs and a bunch of muscles and boil everything up if you’re still craving seafood.”
“Do you really think that’s what it is, my first craving?”
“If it is, it’s a healthy one and an easy one to fulfill. I can put in a call each day and have something fresh for you on the table for as long as it’s appealing to you.”
“If you could do that, it would be everything,”
he said, going up on tiptoe so I could kiss him.
My body absolutely was craving seafood and had since I’d begun to suspect I was carrying hoglets. Knowing that I could have as much of it as I wanted made my inner hedgehog happy. In my head he lay sprawled with an obscenely full belly, sipping flavored lemonade with a platter of empty crustation shells on a table beside him.
“I can tell how much you like the idea,”
Gregor said, his voice tickling my cheek as he spoke near my ear.
Giggling, I tried to wiggle away but that just led to him tickling me more. We wound up doing an awkward tickle-dance-wiggle-shuffle that left an older couple snickering at us. They waved when we caught sight of them, and headed off down the beach, still snickering over our antics.
Gregor laced our fingers together and we walked with our hands swinging between us as we stared out at another storm rolling in.
“Might turn out to be a candlelit supper tonight,”
Gregor said.
Smiling at the prospect, I nudged his shoulder and peered up at him. “Can we have a candlelit supper just because, even if the lights don’t go out along the coastline again?”
“Of course we can. I’ll even hang a couple lanterns on the hooks over the table, it’s what they’re there for anyway.”
“Really? Now that I know that I think I’d like to eat by lantern light more often,”
I declared. “After being in a kitchen with bright lights all day, soft lighting would be a welcome change and probably help my brain wind down easier.”
“Consider it done. I can also hang hooks over the nest once it’s been constructed, so you can lounge and snack by lantern light, too,”
I offered, the image immediately taking root in my head.
We’d have to pick the perfect sized lanterns for the ambiance he wanted, so I could space them properly, and I’d have to measure the angle of the beams, so they’d be evenly placed. It wouldn’t even take an hour once we were ready to install them, and I’d get LED ones with different settings too, so we could change the ambiance if we wanted.
“Oh hell yeah, that would be awesome,”
he declared while my mind raced to ponder if hooks for lanterns in the den might also be a welcome addition, too.
I decided to just go ahead and install them, after I started to picture what the room would look like bathed in soft light.
“We’ll need to stock the kitchen so I can start making sides to go with all the seafood I’ll be bringing home,”
I declared as we continued down the beach toward my shop. “Once it starts to get hot, I was thinking of sticking to a variety of fruit salads and pasta salads with some green salads thrown in as well.”
“I’d love all of that, and pickled beet salad, too.”
“My mom makes batches each year from the overabundance of beets in her garden,”
I told him. “I’ll pick up a few the next time I’m over there, as well as her recipe, in case you start craving a variation of them.”
“Thank you, I feel like I can eat them with everything right now. I ate half a jar while I was waiting for my lunch order to arrive and killed off the rest a few hours later while I was waiting for a batch of sugar to reach the right temperature.”
“I’ll pick up a bunch of beets at the farmers market then, so I can start making you your own,”
I promised, glad I’d at least paid attention in the kitchen when Mom was teaching us the basics.
She’d really instilled in each of us that cooking was better when you did it with someone else. Watching her and Nana working together, I could see where it was a lot more fun. They were always laughing together while dreaming up twists to old recipes. The best part about getting to flex the culinary skills that I did have was that it would also give me some time at the table in the evenings that I could spend drawing and continuing to develop the new ideas I’d been dreaming up.
“When do you think you can get the drafting tables moved?”
he asked, his tone curious, not pushy.
“I’ll see who doesn’t have anything going on and we’ll take care of it tomorrow. I’ll take pictures of the space so I can feed them through the design software and start mocking up the sizes of the furniture we’ll need and where everything should go.”
“Oh, oh good. I’ll get that list of furniture to you tomorrow, once I’ve had the chance to pick a few brains around the bakery.”
“Works for me, but won’t they get suspicious when you start asking questions like that?”
“I doubt it, not when they’re already taking bets on when it will happen. At most, they’ll think I’m getting curious and as excited about the prospect as everyone who keeps bringing it up,”
August explained. “I mean, I am, but some of them gush about the possibility for so long you’d think they were the ones waiting to hear that they were pregnant.”
“No, I get what you’re saying,”
I said. “It’s got to be hard to feel your own excitement when so many others around you are expressing their hopes and encouragement. I’m glad I get to process it without anyone hanging over my shoulder asking me what I’m thinking about.”
“And by anyone you mean Olly.”
“He’s the only one who’d dare to do it.”
“Not the only one,”
he reminded me.
Chuckling, I realized that I was going to be in for it once the two of them started conspiring against me. My only hope was that I’d find an ally in Ever or I was going to find myself horribly outnumbered.
“They are going to go nuts when I finally do reveal what’s going on and bury us in an array of amazing outfits.”
“Just because I won’t have someone peppering me with questions every day doesn’t mean I won’t be thinking about them developing inside of you,”
I said. “I’m sure I’ll be distracted by thoughts of building them a playground in the yard, and a maze they can play in when they’re shifted. I want to build them a clubhouse, too, something with a table and art supplies, a little reading nook and a place for napping.
“Do you think we can build them a splash pad, too, so they have somewhere to play in summer where they can get wet without trying to go in the pool? I imagine that it would be a big temptation for hot, frustrated kids who might be tempted to sneak down and dip their toes in.”
“And wind up over their heads,”
I said. “I see where you’re going with that, and yes, we can. We will also be adding a high fence with a locked gate surrounding the pool to prevent any incidents.”
“Good. I’ll start looking at splash pad designs, we’ve got to get one with the bucket that fills up and then spills over onto the children’s head. That was always one of my favorite parts. I bet our kids would enjoy it, too.”
“All right, then splash pad with bucket is officially on the list of must haves when we start making additions.”
“And a hot tub, too, for winter, so we can sit outside and relax in it while they’re playing in the snow,”
I remarked.
“I hope we use it for reasons that don’t involve keeping an eye on our children,”
I said, flicking my tongue out at him when he turned to look at me.
“Oh, we will.”