Chapter 12 #2
One Sunday afternoon, I came off shift and let myself in. Colleen was on the couch with Nova in her arms. Audrey was in the kitchen. Colleen looked up when I came through the door, and I crossed the room and reached for Nova because that was what I did now when I walked through this door.
"She just ate," Colleen said, handing her over. "About twenty minutes ago."
"I'll burp her."
I settled Nova against my shoulder. Her fist closed in the front of my shirt. Her face pressed into the space below my collarbone, the same spot she always found, and her body went slack—the full weight of her trust against my chest.
Colleen watched my hands on the baby's back. She watched Nova settle against me. She gave the small nod. Not approval. Not disapproval. Just the nod. The receipt.
I burped the baby and walked her around the living room. Colleen went back to the knitting she'd pulled from the tote. When I looked over, she was counting stitches, her eyes on the needles, and she wasn't watching me anymore.
But she had been. I caught it.
By the end of the first month, I realized I hadn't been on a date in almost a year.
Not since before the wedding. I hadn't wanted to.
That was the part I kept noticing and not examining—the absence of the want, the fact that the Tuesday nights and the easy goodbyes had stopped pulling at me, and in their place was something quieter that I wasn't ready to look at yet.
One morning at the end of a twenty-four shift, I walked out of the firehouse to my truck.
The air was bright and warm, the last of summer still holding in the valley, and I was already thinking about the drive to Audrey's.
The coffee from the place on Main. The spare key on my ring.
The baby in the bouncer, Audrey on the couch, the apartment that smelled like milk, laundry detergent, and whatever lotion she used on Nova's skin after the bath.
I wanted to go there. The wanting was simple and unremarkable—as natural as wanting coffee in the morning—and I noticed it only because it had been true for a while and I was only now looking at it directly.
I got in the truck.
"So when do we meet the kid, Rhodes?"
Micah was at the stove with the eggs on, which was already a problem.
Halsey was at the island with his coffee and the expression of a man watching something go wrong and deciding not to intervene.
The kitchen smelled like grease, diesel, and scorched butter.
Lou was in the office with the clipboard. The fluorescent over the island hummed.
I let the question sit, then let the easy version of myself come back—the firehouse version, the one who had answers for rooms like this.
"Not until she gets all her shots. Pediatrician was specific. Two months minimum, full set of vaccines. Then we'll talk about her being around a bunch of guys who roll in covered in smoke and diesel."
Halsey purposefully didn't look at the stove. He looked at his coffee. "’Pediatrician was specific.’ Listen to you."
"What?"
"Duke Rhodes talking about vaccine schedules." He shook his head. "Never thought I'd see it."
"See what?"
"You. Slowing down." He said it to his coffee, not to me. "Used to be a different girl at the diner every week. Now you're talking about shot records."
Micah came around from the stove with the plate. Halsey looked at the eggs and grunted.
Lou, from the office doorway, clipboard at his hip: "It's a good look, Rhodes."
Micah said, grinning, "Are you going to start driving a minivan?"
"Micah, I will put you through that wall."
The crew laughed. I laughed. But Halsey's words stayed with me after the laughter cleared, because he wasn't wrong.
I'd been the guy with somebody on a Tuesday. I'd liked it. The ease of it, the lightness, the goodbyes that cost nothing because nothing was at stake. That was a life that worked, and it worked for a long time, and I'd never once sat in it and felt like something was missing.
Now I was running on four hours of sleep, and my shoulders ached from walking a baby in circles at three in the morning, and the strange thing—the thing I hadn't expected and didn't know what to do with—was that it was giving me something the old life never had.
Not the exhaustion. Not the schedule. The moment when Nova fell asleep on my chest, her whole body going still against mine, her fist loosening in my shirt.
She was a newborn. She wasn't choosing me.
She didn't know what choosing meant. But my body knew what it felt like to be the person she went quiet against, and that feeling was doing something to me I hadn't budgeted for.
Easton walked past the island on his way to the bay. He didn't say anything.
The morning went on. I sat at the island, finished the burnt eggs, drank the coffee, and let the easy version of myself sit in this room doing what it did.
In twelve hours, I would be in a different room, at a different counter, with a different version of myself—the one who carried the baby, brought the coffee, and sat on the floor beside the bouncer.
The two versions hadn't met yet. They were living in separate rooms of the same life, and I was the man walking between them.
The coffee from the place on Main was in the bag on my passenger seat.
Audrey's order—the oat milk thing she'd been drinking since the pregnancy, the one with the name I refused to learn because calling it "Audrey's coffee" was funnier, and she hadn't corrected me.
I pulled up to her building in the late morning, at the end of my twenty-four, the tired sitting behind my eyes—not a bad shift, just a long one.
The spare key had been on my ring for weeks.
She gave it to me early on, without ceremony, while I was holding Nova and she was trying to find her phone.
She pulled it out of a kitchen drawer, set it on the counter, said, "So you can stop buzzing me at six in the morning," and went back to looking for her phone.
I put it on my ring that night. Neither of us had said anything about it since.
I let myself in.
The apartment had changed in three weeks. The bouncer was in the living room beside the couch. The bottle drying rack sat on the kitchen counter next to the coffeemaker. A basket of folded onesies had been on the coffee table for two days. I picked it up on my way past. "Where do these go?"
"Top drawer," Audrey said from the couch without looking up. "The one that sticks."
I put them away.
Audrey was on the couch. Nursing. Hair up, no makeup, the robe loosely tied. She looked up when I came in.
"Tell me you got coffee."
I held up the bag.
She closed her eyes. "I love you."
"You mean the coffee, right?"
She opened one eye and glared at me.
"Just checking." I set it on the counter, crossed to the couch, and sat on the arm of it. I looked at the baby.
Nova was on Audrey's chest with her eyes closed, her fist curled against the underside of Audrey's jaw.
She was bigger than she'd been three weeks ago.
Her face had lost the compressed redness of the first days and settled into something that was starting to look like a person—a small, specific person with a dimple on her left side that I couldn't look at without feeling something rearrange in my chest.
"How was the shift?" Audrey asked.
"Quiet. A medical on Second that turned out to be a panic attack. A fire alarm at the middle school that turned out to be burnt popcorn in the teachers' lounge. Micah made the eggs. They were burnt. I ate them anyway."
"Halsey didn’t make them?"
My grimace said enough. "How was the night?"
"She was up at one. And three-thirty. And five." She looked at me with the flat honesty of a woman who had been awake since one. "I'm going to need you to hold her while I become a person again."
"Whenever you're ready."
She finished nursing. She fixed the robe without looking at me—practical, unbothered, the modesty she used to perform around me having worn off somewhere in the second week when I walked in on her pumping at the kitchen counter, and she looked up and said "If you're weird about this I'll kill you" and I said, "I'm not weird about this" and that was the end of it.
She passed Nova to me. I took her with both hands under her back and her head—steady now, no shaking, my body doing what it couldn't do in the first week. She settled against my chest. Her fist found my shirt.
I walked her around the living room. The route was worn in by now—past the bouncer, past the bookcase Audrey had moved from the nursery to make room for the crib, around the kitchen island, back to the window.
Audrey watched me from the couch. She picked up the coffee, took a sip, and made a sound that was somewhere between relief and worship.
I put Nova in the bouncer when her eyes stayed closed for a full minute. I sat on the floor beside it. Audrey was on the couch above me, her knees drawn up, the coffee in both hands.
The quiet stretched. Nova made a small sound in the bouncer, the one that wasn't a cry but was close, and I put my finger against her palm. Her fist closed around it. The grip was strong. It always surprised me, the strength in a hand that small.
"You know you don't have to be here every time you're off shift," Audrey said.
I looked up at her. "What are you talking about?"
She shrugged. Her eyes were on her coffee. "Didn't you used to go out a lot?"
"Audrey."
"I'm just saying." She took a sip. “We're not dating. You can go out with other women if you want to.”
I didn't say anything. Nova's fist was still around my finger.
The truth was plain and simple: I didn't want to go out with other women. I hadn't wanted to for a long time. I didn't know how to tell Audrey that without making it into something she hadn't asked it to be.
"Good to know," I said.
She looked at me over the rim of her coffee. I looked at the bouncer. Neither of us said anything else.
I leaned my head back against the side of the couch. Audrey's knee was close to my shoulder. The late morning light was coming through the window. Audrey was drinking her coffee above me with the warmth of her knee an inch from the back of my neck.
I liked coming home to them.
The thought arrived without buildup, without the architecture of a decision. It was just there, sitting in my chest beside the sound of the baby breathing and the smell of the coffee and the warmth of the room, and it was true.
I didn't say it. I didn't even let it settle.
I filed it back—the same shelf where I kept everything I wasn't ready to look at yet—and I sat on the floor with my daughter's fist around my finger and my head against the couch where the woman I wasn't supposed to want was drinking the coffee I brought her.
I noticed it. That was all. I noticed it, and I let it be.