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“The one to the bathroom?” My fingers curl into the hair at the nape of his neck.
“Probably,” he says with a slight shrug. “I wasn’t paying attention in the moment.”
I lean my head against his chest, my ear over his heart, and close my eyes. His hands rub up and down my back, soothing and relaxing me.
After a little while, I pull back and say, “I should probably go home.”
“Okay,” he says, brushing stray hairs away from my forehead. “I’ll get dressed and meet you downstairs.”
I climb off his lap and watch him go.
I head down the hall and gather up my clothes then go downstairs and wait by the door. Ryder jogs down the steps a minute later, dressed in a t-shirt and shorts similar to the ones he let me borrow.
“Ready?” he asks, opening the door.
“Yeah,” I say.
He holds the car door open for me and I climb inside. It doesn’t take long for him to reach my house. I don’t make any move to get out of the car, though.
“Thank you for today,” I say. “I really did have fun.”
“Good.” He smiles and leans over, pressing his lips to my forehead. “And maybe one day you’ll tell me exactly what goes on in that pretty head of yours.”
“Maybe,” I echo.
I slip out of the car and he watches until I’m in the house. I close and lock the door,
then turn around, exhaling a heavy breath.
My eyes land on the vase full of paper cranes from Ben and my heart clenches. It’s been too long since I found a new one and I need to hear from him. Compelled by some unknown force I stride across to the vase and pluck out one of the carefully folded birds.
Remember, it’ll be okay.
—Ben
He left this paper crane for me on our bed shortly after the first negative pregnancy test. Those words, though, I need them now just as much a needed them back then.
Maybe it was fate that made me pick this particular crane, or maybe it was just random, but whatever the reason, I’m supremely thankful for it.
I fold the paper crane back up and put it back in the vase with the others.
“Until next time,” I whisper.
I sit in bed snacking on chips with the baby name book propped on my belly. I crunch down on the chip and Winnie glares at me from the windowsill. The silly cat is finally coming around more. She’s mostly hidden under the bed the last few months, only coming out to eat in the middle of the night. At one point I thought she’d died, but when I crouched on the floor and lifted the bed skirt, mean blue eyes glared back at me.
Animals, they know things we can’t comprehend, and I believe she understood that Ben was gone and never coming back. I think in her crazy cat brain she thought I’d done something to him and it gave her more ammunition to hate me.
“What are you looking at?” I ask her, chomping on a chip.
Her dark brown tail swishes and her eyes blink lazily. The disdain in her expression is almost hysterical. I should probably find her a new home, but she’s been with us for so long that I can’t fathom her not being there. With the baby coming it’s something I have to seriously contemplate. I can’t imagine Winnie doing well with a baby.
I flip to the next page in the baby name book. I never realized there were so many names before.
I glance at the empty space beside me in bed and my heart aches. This should be something that Ben is a part of. I feel wrong picking our child’s name on my own, but it’s not something we ever talked about.
“Bernadette,” I say, cringing. “No way.” I skim through the B names and find nothing. “Carly. Hmmm, maybe.” I scribble it down on my piece of paper. It joins a very short list of names. Granted, I’m only on the C’s so it’s bound to grow.
I make it to the H names before I have to set aside the book. I end up picking up What to Expect When You’re Expecting. It seems to be the go-to pregnancy book but most of the passages scare the crap out of me.
