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He’d failed to process that she’d been a passenger in a fatal car accident. No one forgot something like that. He saw too many incidents of post-traumatic stress in his line of work.
“Were you conscious?” he asked, wanting her to know that she didn’t have to be alone with whatever horrors were stored in her mind. “After the crash?”
She nodded. And then said, “And it’s not that I don’t want you to talk about it, but can we please just keep the conversation easy while we’re on the road?”
Note taken. She needed his attention fully on his driving. Not on her.
As did anyone else driving within his vicinity.
Elaina might think she didn’t have enough to offer, might think she did all the taking, but Greg knew differently.
Even if he hadn’t been in love with her, even if she never returned his love in the same way, in her quiet, unassuming way, she was giving him a much fuller awareness of everything around him. Making his world more alive.
How could a man not stick around for that?
* * *
Pushing her cart out to his car, Elaina was happier than she’d been in a long, long time. Peacefully so. With anticipation for the future lingering around the periphery of her mind. She’d grasp at it and it would fade, but if she didn’t pay attention, it would flit around again.
She loaded her groceries and Greg loaded his—on opposite sides of the huge space in the back. “We’re probably wasting money here,” he said, closing the hatch.
“I supposed we could figure out a monthly average and include it in the rent,” she allowed hesitantly, waiting for her mind to come up with some reason why it wasn’t a good idea. Or some stab of guilt to poke her from the inside out.
Pulling her seat belt down, fitting the clasp into the holder, she let it go when she did feel a sudden stab from the inside out.
“What’s wrong?” Greg, instantly attentive as her seat belt snapped back, turned toward her.
“Nothing,” she told him, afraid to move this time, lest her little one freeze again. “Put your hand on my stomach,” she said. “Right where I put it last night.”
“The baby’s moving?” He glanced at her, and then at her belly, as though he expected the child to just pop right up and say hello.
“Yes,” she said softly, not wanting her voice to distract her little one from exercising.
Placing his hand gently right where she’d helped him place it the night before, Greg applied a very slight pressure. And sat completely still.
Reminding her of a time she’d seen him with his stethoscope on a patient’s chest, counting heartbeats. He looked like he was concentrating that completely. Was intensely focused.
The baby moved again, more strongly. Greg’s face blanked. As though he was in shock. She watched him, waiting for him to glance up at her. Waiting for his smile.
He didn’t look up. He just kept staring at his hand on her belly, his eyes moist. Then welling. And tears dripped slowly down his face.
Elaina, unable to hold back her own tears, thanked whatever fates whose bad side she’d been on for so long, for allowing her to give Greg this gift.
* * *
“I think maybe it’s time to find out the gender of the baby.” They’d put away their groceries and Greg made the comment to her as he returned from putting the toothpaste he’d purchased away in his bathroom. She was standing at the sliding glass door in the dining room, watching Beldon out in the yard, and as he spoke, she opened the door and walked outside, leaving the door open.
Because she was coming right back in? Or as an invitation to follow her?
Greg took it as invitation. “Unless you don’t want to,” he amended his statement, plopping down in a chair on the patio right outside the door. There were two padded chairs and a love seat there, with a wrought iron table. He’d never seen any of it used.
She laughed as Beldon came running over to her and sat, his whole body seeming to wiggle with his tail. When she didn’t pet him or hand down a treat, he jumped up on her.
“Down,” Greg said, kindly but with the firmness that told everyone at work to do as he said at once. And then realized that he’d just rushed right into something that wasn’t his business.
“Down,” Elaina repeated, taking the dog’s paws off from her belly and lowering them to the ground.
“I shouldn’t have butted in.”
