Chapter 21
Three More Years Later
Things have been different this week. Despite finally getting the windmill up with the help of a few kind strangers, Addison isn’t happy, and he can’t figure out why.
She’s on the verge of tears at the drop of a hat and short-tempered about the smallest things. Wyatt tries not to take it personally. Mood swings are normal this far into a pregnancy.
He ain’t been living under a rock his whole life. He’s well aware that hormones can have a woman acting…different. He just never assumed he’d be the one trying to handle it.
Watching her cry over a goat the other day had him feeling more than useless. She kept saying it was ‘too adorable’ and that she ‘couldn’t handle it’ before bursting into tears while cradling the poor animal who’d been trying to nap.
She is angry one moment, distraught the next, always hungry, and in the middle of it all, he’s left with only those books they looted from the library years ago to guide him through it all.
What he can do is bring home food from a hunt, and he’s eager to show her the rabbits he caught for dinner.
Her horrified reaction to his catch slices straight through to his already battered heart.
She stands on the back porch as he plops the bunnies down, her face pale and eyes watering.
“What’s wrong? Why are you crying?” He moves closer as she stares at the pile of rabbits, certain that something awful happened while he was away.
Cramps? A supply issue? A rotter broke through the fence? Any number of terrible options spring to mind until he’s ready to burst with worry.
“They have families,” she half sobs.
“What?”
“The rabbits. What if their babies are waiting for them at home? And they’ll…they’ll never….come back. Did you check the area for babies?”
He gapes at her, his heart sinking that he made her mood worse instead of better. “Um, no. But I can go back. I can check if you want?”
“No. No, it’s too dangerous to go out just for that.”
“We don’t have to eat them.”
Tears stream down her cheeks, heavier than before. If he didn’t know better, he’d think she experienced the most heart-wrenching moment of her life. “Yes, we do. We can’t let them go to waste. I have to eat them, Wyatt. It’s disrespectful not to.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
“Please don’t bring anything back that lives in a family, okay? Promise me?”
He tries to think of what he can hunt that doesn’t live in a pack or group. “Sweetheart, that doesn’t leave much. Not unless you want snake meat.”
“Snakes don’t live together?”
He shakes his head.
“Then that’s fine. That’s good, we can eat that, right? Is it safe?”
He nods, dumbfounded to be in a twilight zone where she’d rather eat a snake because they don’t tend to their young.
“Good. Ok, it’s settled.” She sucks in an even breath and whips out her knife to gut the game right there on the porch like it’s no big deal. “Come on, I’m starving. I’ve been craving rabbit all day.”
Oh yeah. Today is going to be interesting.
They make the usual stew, but Addison keeps a few pieces of meat out to assemble on those crackers she likes so much.
He watches her put together a dozen little food towers composed of canned cranberry sauce, rabbit meat, and crushed imitation cheese balls.
It’s not the flavor combinations he’d go for, but she hums in approval at the first taste, and he’s only glad she’s happy instead of crying over rabbit families.
The three of them take everything into the bedroom to eat while putting together the bassinet taken from Jeff’s house that’s been waiting in storage.
He gets that familiar, warm feeling in his chest again at knowing the baby will be right here in their room, like he used to imagine.
“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” Addison questions around a mouthful of cracker concoction. “She’ll wake you up every night for a while. We can use the spare room as a nursery.”
“Did I wake you up all the time when I was little?” Emma cuts in.
“No.” Addison smiles. “You were the best baby. Always quiet.”
He’d find that hard to believe if he didn’t know the kid. She’s a teenage chatterbox these days, but something tells him she always knew not to wake the sleeping beast they shared a house with.
“She’ll be fine right here,” Wyatt tells her. “The spare room is too far when we can’t use a monitor.”
“You can always change your mind if it’s too much.”
He opens his mouth to protest, but she holds up a hand. “It’s an option, that’s all. A screaming baby is a lot for anyone, and I won’t hold it against you if you need a break.”
Old habits die hard. In some ways, Addison has lapsed back into her old framework far more easily than he wishes she would. “Well, she’s my baby, so she can cry all she wants. I’m gonna tell her you assumed she’d scream like a banshee all night when she gets older, though.”
She fake gasps. “You wouldn’t.”
“Oh, I will. Speaking of her getting older, have we thought of names yet?”
“By we, you mean me?”
“Mhmm.”
“Absolutely not. I can’t think about that until she’s in my arms, alive and whole and…real.”
“Can we try out names until one feels right once she’s here?” Emma asks. “Like we have been with the new goats?”
Addison snorts. “That’s not a bad idea. No birth certificate to worry about, we can throw different names at her every day until one sticks.”
“Okay, both of you are fired again,” Wyatt sighs. “This kid is gonna have some sort of identity crisis. The goats don’t even have permanent names yet, and it’s been months.”
Addison shrugs with a wave of her hand. “Goat number eleven and goat number twelve will let us know what their names are eventually, and so will this baby.”
“Oh my god.”
He hasn’t seen her smile this much in days and hopes it’s a sign that her mood swings are over…until the worst happens.
The scene in front of him plays out in slow motion as the plate drops from her hands and food scatters across the floor. Her lips part in shock, and her eyes water in an instant.
All that amusement they gathered up vanishes as tragedy strikes.
He’s got precious little time to fix this before it spirals, so he silently gathers the cracker towers that landed upright and returns the plate to her waiting hands, backing away slowly.
“Five-second rule,” he says, as if defusing a bomb.
It was longer than five seconds, but whatever’s on the floor is a better option than Addison going hungry.
She nibbles the end of a cracker in a testing bite, and then all is right with the world again. He’s granted a smile like the whole thing is silly, and she resumes inhaling the food like it never fell at all.
Crisis averted.
Now all they need to do is name this kid before she learns to talk.
* * *
He might make a move tonight. He’s going crazy without her, and sleeping side by side isn’t enough to stifle the ache.
Addison runs hot and cold these days, either ready to pin him to the bed and make the whole thing shake or telling him in no uncertain terms that if he touches her, he will lose a finger.
Wyatt can be patient. He’s the one who put her in this situation, after all. Sure, they discussed it. One might say they discussed it for far longer than anyone has considered such a thing after the world ended. They had to be sure, though, especially after what happened the last time.
He was against it, unwilling to risk her safety or both their hearts. In the end, they chose not to get pregnant because doing such a thing willingly, in their situation, was just about the dumbest decision a couple could make.
And then the condom broke. Turns out, they tend to do that after multiple years have passed since the manufactured date.
The morning after pill they looted from a pharmacy two counties over had the same, useless effect.
Now here they are, almost nine months into this journey, and he’s wanted few things more than he wants to meet their daughter soon.
Well, currently, his main wish is to coast past the current mood swing that has Addison crawling out of her skin every time he looks at her wrong.
It’s not until they’re out in the barn that he realizes he’ll have to jerk off for a second time today.
All he can see is the sight of her ass as she bends to rake up excess hay. He could swear she’s doing it on purpose, so he gets a full view but quickly dismisses the idea.
Then she does it again, bending to rake a certain section that has her backside facing him, and…is she glancing his way out of the corner of her eye?
No.
Of course not.
She’s doing barn chores after he told her to take it easy, and that’s all there is to it. He’s only hallucinating because his balls have never been bluer. He’d see sex in one of those crackers given the chance, like some people see Jesus in slices of toast.
He licks his lips and imagines the two of them moving into one of the empty stalls where he’d take her in a pile of freshly raked hay, but he’s only torturing himself.
Emma is with them. Without privacy, they’re out of luck. More than that, she hasn’t attempted to flirt with him once today. Not a look, comment, or a sassy smile. Nothing. It’s left him bereft if he’s being honest, but he reminds himself this isn’t about him.
Addison’s back is sore, and her feet are still swollen. He’s selfish to assume that she should sex him up because he’s vibrating with need.
That doesn’t mean he can stop looking. His gaze soon travels from that tight ass up to the dip in her collarbones. How badly he wants to trace them with his tongue and lick the salt off her skin.
Her hair is growing longer, too, he notices. Curling at the tips, wispy and soft. She’s ethereal in shimmering sunlight streaming through cracks in the barn wood. Then she catches him staring, and her look of concentration transforms into a frown.
He thinks she might say something, but the moment she takes a step, she trips on thin air. Too far away to break her descent already in progress, he’s forced to watch it play out like a train wreck, but her fall turns into a somersault landing her upright on her ass.