AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Sitting down opposite him, Elaina called Beldon to her and started petting him. “Of course, you should have,” she said. “You’re going to be here indefinitely, and he’s part of the household. The way I see it, we’re co-parenting him, too. Although the responsibility of Beldon is all mine, I’m not shoving that off onto you...”
He hadn’t thought for a second that she was.
“It actually worked, huh?” she asked, smiling again as she looked at him. “You’re right, he needs to know that he can’t jump up. Most particularly after the baby comes. I just wasn’t thinking about that...”
“What were you thinking about?”
“Finding out the sex of the baby.”
Ah. Curious, he asked, “What do you think about it?”
She shook her head. Which made him need to know even more. He waited.
“I want to know,” she said. “It’s time. I get that...”
He nodded, not following.
“Right now...” Putting both of her hands on her belly, she continued, “This is just the beginning. We have a heartbeat and movement. It’s a safe happy place to be...and not much else to think about...”
Or worry about. Greg stood up, reached a hand down to her, and when she hesitated, shook his hand a bit. “Come on, walk with me,” he said.
Warmth flooded his entire being as she put her hand in his and stood, walked with him across the yard to the shed, Beldon trotting along beside them as though certain that he’d been included in the invitation.
Taking a key out of his pocket, he opened the door and stepped aside, showing her, on the workbench side of the building, the beginnings of a new project.
“You work with wood?” she asked, sounding shocked enough that he could have been offended. Except that her shock was valid.
“I’ve never tried before,” he told her. “But you’ve talked so much about the great work Wood does and so... I called him and asked if he’d mind giving me a hand in making a crib for the baby.”
They’d looked at furniture. Hadn’t landed on any crib that seemed like...the one.
“You called Wood.” She stared at him, and by the blank expression on her face, he couldn’t tell if he’d upset her or not.
So he just continued on with what was. “I did. And he’s come over a couple of times while you weren’t here, to help me get started. I’m doing the legs,” he said. They were the most basic. “And I’m on my seventh one.”
“The crib’s going to have seven legs?”
“Five are in the trash.”
Elaina glanced toward the two good stems he had sitting on the worktable, with the router he’d recently learned to use, and said, “You think you’ll have it done in time?”
Practically speaking, the question had merit. “I know I wouldn’t if I was doing it myself,” he told her. “Wood’s making the majority of it at his place. I’ve been there once, and then he set me up here with the legs.”
“Wood’s making us a crib?” Her eyes lit up at that one. And after having seen her ex-husband’s abilities, the bedroom and nursery furniture in his and Cassie’s home, Greg understood Elaina’s excitement.
“We’re making it together,” he told her. Because he had a point to make. “When you talked about Wood making Alan’s furniture, it made me want to do the same for my baby. I’m a doctor, good with my hands and doing math. I’m great at figuring out puzzles and putting things together...but I don’t know the first thing about woodworking. What tools to use for what. How they work. The glues, the types of woods...yet I couldn’t get that idea of a finished crib, handmade, with my work in it, out of my head. Maybe I wasn’t going to be living where the crib would live, but even more so if I wasn’t, I was jazzed by the idea that my child would sleep in a crib I’d helped make...”
She was looking silently from him to the workbench with those two spindles of wood, while Beldon went back out to run in the yard.
“I might not end up doing much of it,” he said. “I might not ever get the legs right. But I’m happy if all I do is sit and think about how cool it would be. If I let fear of the unknown stop me finding out, I’ll miss a whole bunch of experiences along the way.”
Her gaze turned on him, not in a particularly friendly way. “You think I’m letting fear stop me from moving forward? Because let me tell you...”
“...I think you could let fear rob you of enjoying every step of the way,” he interrupted her. “And I think you’re so set on doing it all on your own that you don’t factor in the Woods in your life. Wood being one of them. But there’s Cassie. And me. Among others. Yeah, the more the baby grows, the more we find out, the more real it all becomes, but... You want to know the sex of the child. And yet you’re holding back...”
“When I should be moving forward, enjoying every step, no matter what it brings?”
Spoken by a woman who’d walked more incredibly painful steps than he’d ever fully grasp. Her words stopped him.
