Chapter 20 – Juliette #2
“She’s covered in fleas,” he said, and I watched him pick a few off his arm.
“We can give her a bath after she eats. We want to give her as much strength as possible first.”
Creed stood and watched over me like a nervous father. “How late do you think the vet in town will stay open? Maybe we should get this kitten formula now?”
“You can call them. Number’s on the back of the pantry door.”
He walked into the kitchen and a few minutes later he was walking through the living room with his keys in his hand. “Vet said he’d stay open a little late until I got there. We need anything else beside the formula?”
“Tell him a few more bottles and nipples, in case her teeth puncture this one.”
He nodded and then he was off.
And it was just me and Angie Pimplefuckingface, fighting for her life.
“Please don’t disappoint him,” I told the little creature. “He wouldn’t want us to know it, but I think he’s a softie inside.”
Angie Pimplefuckingface just continued to pull on her bottle.
“What if it gets in her eyes?”
It was later that night. Creed had returned with enough kitten formula to feed all the world’s kittens, I was pretty sure. And enough nipples that we’d probably be donating them back to the vet at some point.
I knew it. Fucking softie.
Two solid feedings later and it was time to wash our little matted piece of fur. We were at the kitchen sink, and I had a pot full of just a touch over lukewarm water. I squirted some Dawn on my finger and ran it around AP’s neck.
“It’s not going to get in her eyes. When the fleas start to move, they won’t cover her face this way. The soap traps them.”
Holding her carefully by the scruff of her neck, I dipped her body into the pot where she howled as loud as any kitten I’d ever heard.
I smiled because it meant she was stronger than I gave her credit for.
“She hates it,” Creed said, looking over my shoulder. No doubt seeing all the fleas evacuating her tiny, little body as they floated in the now dirty water.
“Of course she hates it,” I admonished him. “She’s a cat. But she needs it.”
I dunked her a few more times, right up to her neck line.
Then with my nail I gently picked away the few fleas that had scampered up her cheeks and near her eyes.
Luckily, beyond the dirt and lack of nourishment, there didn’t appear to be any other injuries.
No eye infections, no cuts where some other animal or bird might have tried to eat her.
I could see now her fur wasn’t just gray from dirt. Clean, she looked like a gray and white tuxedo with a white patch around her left eye.
“Okay, I’m going to pull her out. Pull the pot and dump it.”
The second her little legs cleared the pot of water, Creed took it out. Then I turned on the faucet, testing the water temp first with my arm, and rinsed her thoroughly, as she howled all the while.
No hissing though, so she didn’t perceive me as a threat.
Creed came back with a hand towel draped over his arms and I dropped her into the center of it, pulling up the sides around her, carefully patting the water away from her fur. I didn’t want to pull it, in case there were any more tangles I couldn’t see.
When I could see the fur start to dry, I got out another towel and wrapped her up so she was fully covered.
“I’ll hold her,” Creed said, when I attempted to take her from his arms. “More body heat.”
“Of course. Very scientific.”
He carried his bundle back into the living room and stretched out on the couch with AP planted again in that divot where his elbow bent.
I was pretty sure my uterus contracted around my unborn child in that moment. Which of course, was impossible on two fronts. One, we hadn’t actually had sex yet, and two, the IUD. I had this thought to tell him now, about the contraceptive device, but he’d probably wonder why I was bringing it up.
Then again, if he was thinking about having sex with me, I didn’t know if he planned to wear a condom or not.
There were other reasons for condoms besides pregnancy, after all.
“If we do have sex, are you going to wear a condom?”
It was a question that might have been as out of the blue as asking him if he wanted to make out.
His head jerked in my direction. Then, as if he was nervous he’d disturbed the bundle by his sudden motion, he secured the blanket around AP’s body and confirmed she was breathing.
“You want me to?”
“You need to because of all the sex you had before me,” I told him.
He huffed out a laugh. “Yeah, I’m probably not the player you think I am. But, Jules, I had all my tests done before we got married. I wasn’t bringing a fucking STD to our marriage. I’m clean.”
I crossed my feet under my legs and thought about how that was further confirmation on his part nothing had happened with Angie.
Not that I thought he’d lied, he wasn’t a liar unless he was lying to my dad.
But also, he wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.
If he had fucked around with Angie he would have gotten tested again.
“Cool.”
Tell him. You can trust him with this.
“Uh…you should probably know something. About me. Something I didn’t tell you before because…I didn’t.”
“Shit,” he scowled. “I just got done being mad at you, are you about to piss me off again?”
“Probably. You should become accustomed to me disappointing you. I always failed Herb in that way.”
“Tell me.”
My heart started to beat against my chest.
What if he asks me to take it out? What if he got mad I did it in the first place?
Years of Herb’s teaching of what constituted sin filled me with what I imagined was shame. I’d always thought my intellect had overridden all his bullshit teachings, but it was hard when it was in your face every day.
“Jules,” Creed said, again. “Tell me.”
The man was holding a sleeping kitten in a towel tucked into his arm, for heaven’s sake.
If I couldn’t trust this guy…who could I trust?
And I was sleeping in his bed. Sharing his room. He wasn’t going to use condoms so he’d be watching to see if I got pregnant. Maybe counting the fucking maxi-pads in the cabinet under the sink.
“For my eighteenth birthday, Herb let me have the truck for a day. Actually, now that I think about it, it wasn’t a present or anything. Maybe just an acknowledgment that I was legal, so I could leave if I wanted. Maybe it had been a test to see if I would come back.”
“What did you do with your day of freedom?”
“I went to the free clinic in Jefferson and I got an IUD. That’s for-”
“I know what it’s for,” he said, cutting me off.
I gave him a minute to process. “You mad again?”
“Yeah.”
Figured. Maybe it was their ego or something. Maybe he was more conservative than I realized and he thought a woman’s only purpose in life was to breed the next crop of humans for this planet.
“Not going to lie, Jules. There are days I’d like to dig up your pathetic excuse of a father and kill him all over again.”
That wasn’t expected. “You’re mad at Herb?”
“I’m guessing he didn’t know?”
“Of course not. He would have killed me. No, he wouldn’t have killed me, he would have had some unqualified medical person from the church come and try to remove it. If I would have died from that, oh well. It would have been nothing less than I deserved.”
He sighed. “I’m not mad at you. You were protecting yourself. Are protecting yourself. That’s just fucking smart. I’m mad you had to basically escape for a day to fucking get it done.”
“You’re not going to ask me to take it out?”
He shook his head. “Not unless you want to. Not unless you’re ready for what that might mean.”
It was probably the rush of relief that made the tears spring to my eyes. Covertly, I tried to brush them away.
“I thought you were going to be mad because I didn’t tell you when you were trying to have the birth control conversation.”
His face scrunched up.
“At the restaurant on my birthday,” I reminded him.
“That wasn’t a conversation about birth control, that was just a conversation about having kids in general.”
“Oh.”
“But if we’re going to do this…”
“Attempt to have an exploration of a committed partnership wherein both parties are mutually emotionally, sexually and financially satisfied?”
He laughed. “Yeah, that. Then you need to tell me the important shit. Whether or not we have kids, that’s a big deal.”
“But you want them,” I said. “You said as much when we first got married.”
He looked down at the bundle in his arm and pulled the towel up tighter around her ears.
Yeah, he wanted them.
“It wasn’t something I thought about. At all. Ever. But when I got out, I had to look forward to see a whole new future.”
“Do you ever look back?”
He nodded. “Sometimes. I was ridiculously good at what I did.”
“Not that good. Remember you were only in STS for two jobs.”
He smiled. “Yeah. But there are a lot of guys who never get picked at all.”
“Good point,” I said, and hoped he knew I was teasing him.
“There’s money out there for people with my skill set. I had a bunch of offers as soon as I discharged.”
“But you didn’t take them,” I pointed out.
“No. Because I wanted to look forward and not back. So if you’re asking me if I want kids, that seems like something future me might want. So yeah, just putting that out there.”
“Okay. Well, future you and future me should have a conversation in the future. Right now, I’m tired and want to go to bed.”
“What do we do with her?” he asked.
“I want to try and feed her one more time before bed. Then I’ll need to set an alarm for four hours.”
“Won’t need an alarm. I’ll wake up in four hours.”
I guess that was one of his Ninja Seal skills. Waking up on command. “We can put her in a cardboard box with a bunch of blankets so she’ll be safe.”
His expression told me to come up with another solution.
“Or we can bring her into bed with us, but she’s going to pee and poop and stuff.”
“We’ll put extra blankets down and set her up between us,” he said.
And that was how we both slept in half-moon shapes around AP, our knees pressed together and our heads bent so we could watch her sleep.
Four hours later, Creed woke up to feed her.