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I pursed my lips, not wanting to request anything more from the man. “I’ll order pizza,” I decided, searching my blanket for my phone.
“I’ll make pizza,” Kip decided.
I scowled up at him. “The pizza place will make pizza. With ranch.”
He did not scowl back. Instead, he had that soft look on his face, devotion tingled with amusement. It hurt. And it made me feel warm and fuzzy.
“I can make pizza. And ranch.”
I opened my mouth to argue with him, but Calliope interrupted. She’d arrived not long after we got home from the hospital, which was after I had urged Nora and Rowan to go home to their daughter and dog, who were being looked after by Rowan’s mom.
Calliope had been silent on her phone during the whole blanket fiasco, sipping from the glass of wine I’d urged her to have. It seemed she was also listening.
“Let him make the fucking pizza,” she said. “No one outside Naples makes pizza better than Kippers—or Deidre, to be exact, since he learned it from her.” I turned my glare her way, which she met with amusement. “I get that you’re trying to fight against being taken care of by a man,” she continued, guessing what lay behind my glare. “And I do support it. But you kind of have to be taken care of… a little bit.” She held her finger and thumb millimeters apart. “Because you’re pregnant, now injured, and you can’t cook for shit.”
I stopped glaring at her to continue to search for my phone amongst the mountain of blankets. “I may not be able to cook, but I can use my phone,” I argued, still searching.
“Not when it’s on the counter,” Calliope countered. “And you’re all tucked in there. Just let Kip make the fucking pizza.”
Shit.
The counter wasn’t far away in the grand scheme of things.
But when you were pregnant, recovering from a car accident, and wrapped in blankets, the distance seemed yawning.
I looked from Kip to Calliope. “I don’t like either of you right now,” I grunted.
Both of them were smiling.
“You don’t have to like us right now,” Calliope answered. “Plus, you’ll want to marry Kip and have his babies once you get a taste of that pizza.” She looked pointedly at my stomach. “You know, if you weren’t already working on that.”
I flipped her the bird.
Kip leaned down and kissed my head before walking away.
I ignored Calliope. She wasn’t bothered.
Kip made pizza.
And Calliope was right—one taste and it did make me want to marry him and have his babies.
Except I was already in the middle of that.
* * *
Kip had scheduled an OBGYN appointment for me the day after we arrived home.
“You cannot just schedule doctor’s appointments for me!” I yelled when I found this out.
“I’m your husband,” he replied. As if that were a sane thing to utter.
My eyes widened, and I was surprised that steam didn’t come out my ears. “You’re my husband on paperonly. And even if you weren’t, I have a little thing called bodily autonomy, and I get to choose when and where to have doctor’s appointments.”
Kip’s expression was hard but not cold like it had been for the past few months. There was emotion there, to be sure. Concern, mostly, and determination.
“I can do it when my pregnant wife got into a serious car accident the day before,” he bit out.
Again, the underlying anguish in his voice hit me because of what he’d told me in my hospital room. I could never unhear those words. They’d been bouncing around in my head ever since.
