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“I’ve had the axe the whole time. If I was going to murder you with it, I’d have done it already.”
She rolls her eyes. “I’m not worried you’re going to murder me with it. I’m worried you’re going to, like…cut yourself.”
“I’m not going to cut myself. I don’t even know how I’d swing it like that.”
Lily Hayes is so gorgeous in that shaft of light that I can’t stand to look at her. My heart rate is up from all the chopping, and there’s a knot in my gut that’s beginning to seem permanent, and I don’t have a firm grip on what that means.
She sips her lemonade and watches me chop wood.
“How was it?” Lily asks. “The hospital, I mean.”
“Terrible.” Sick heat flashes through my stomach. I could throw up, which would make the chopping considerably less sexy. As an alternative, I go for stripping my shirt off over my head and tossing it on the ground. “Everyone’s fine.”
Lily tilts her head to the side, eyes skimming all over my body.
“You’re being exceptionally shameless, angel. I’m not a sex object.”
She purses her lips. “You kind of are.”
“I’m not fucking you on this stump.”
“Good. I don’t want to get splinters.”
I laugh out loud, surprised as hell that it happens at all, and pick up the axe again. Is she doing this on purpose? Making jokes and pretending I’m not a human fucking train wreck and talking to me like she cares?
“Did you hold the baby?”
Anotherthud. “Yeah.”
“How did it go?”
“I didn’t drop him or anything.”
“Oooh, him?”
I glance over at Lily, and her eyes are huge and excited over the rim of her lemonade can.
Oh. She’s into babies. That explains the questions in the car on the way here.
“I didn’t ask how much he weighed or his height, so I can’t tell you that. He seemed pretty normal-sized, and he sounded like a dinosaur.”
Between swings, I catch her scrunching her nose. I don’t think that description gave her any details she could realistically find cute, but she’s putting on a good show.
“A dinosaur?”
“I guess new babies sound raspy and weird at first. He was loud, though. Good set of lungs, or whatever people say.”
“That is good, though,” Lily says thoughtfully. “Some babies don’t have a good set of lungs, and then it becomes a thing.”
“Are you sure you were going to go to law school? You sound like a nurse.”
“One of my friends liked this show about midwives, so she played it sometimes while we studied. I noticed things.”
Lily also looks like she’s noticed quite a bit about me. Iamthe one who took my shirt off and very recently fucked her in the shower, so I’m not shy about being half-naked in front of her. It would be nice if it didn’t feel like she could see my heart through my skin, that’s all I’m saying.
“Did the baby get a name yet?”
“Robin,” I answer, and make an instant, defense decision not to tell her what my new nephew’s middle name is. She’ll think that’s cute, too, and wonderful, and a great honor, and I’ll have to pretend that I completely understand why my non-fuckup of an older brother would name his firstborn son after the biggest fuckup of us all.
