He sighed. “Santa’s real. Do I get my candy bar?”
“Not until you tell me why I just heard a baby crying.”
“Well . . . it’s complicated. I didn’t have a baby. But my friend Tessa got a baby.”
“Define ‘got’ a baby.” Her tone had taken on the same sharp interest he felt inside when he faced a new engineering problem. She may have taken no interest in formal STEM work, but he knew exactly where he’d gotten his analytical mind from, despite her insistence on the existence of intuition. “Isn’t Tessa the person who convinced you to move out there?”
“Yeah. I reported to work on Monday, she showed me around and helped me build some Ikea stuff, and then she got a phone call that her sister was at her house. I don’t really know what’s going on there, but the punchline is that when Tessa woke up on Tuesday, her sister had left her kid behind with a note for Tessa to take care of it.”
“Poor girl.”
“It’s a boy.”
“I meant the sister who left him. But the baby, too.”
Leave it to his mom to feel sorry for the woman he and Tessa could cheerfully string up. “I’m more worried about this little guy right now.”
“Why is he with you at 2:30 in the morning?”
“I’m not dating her.”
She sputtered for a second. “I don’t know what that has to do with anything.”
“You trying to tell me you weren’t about to fish to find out if there’s something with me and Tessa? There’s not. She’s never been into me.” He’d thought for a little while in college that there might be some interest on her side. No, not some. A lot. But he’d been wrong and then he’d met Sarah. Unfortunately.
But that was a long time ago.
“Let’s see,” his mom said, stopping his meander down memory lane. “You moved six hundred miles to work with her for a month, and you’re watching a baby for her in the middle of the night.” She paused, and he knew she was going in for the kill. His lips twitched in an almost-smile as he waited. “Yeah, can’t imagine why I’d think there’s something going on with you two.”
“Got it all out of your system yet?”
She made a noncommittal sound. “You said you were about to call me anyway?”
“I can’t get him to stop crying. I was hoping for ideas.”
“Might be withdrawal. Was the mom using?”
“Tessa doesn’t think so, and I ran through a list of symptoms with her, but she says that a lot of that sounds like what all babies do, and she wouldn’t know if it was normal or not.”
“Why’d he stop just now?”
“I’m swinging him. But he’s in his little carrier thing, and my arms are going to give out soon even if I keep switching sides.”
She asked him a few more questions, still trying to suss out if it was withdrawal. Finally, she said, “It doesn’t sound like drugs. It also doesn’t sound like it’s a food issue since there’s not projectile spit-up. I think he’s sad.”
“Isn’t that why everyone cries?” Ethan asked, befuddled by the response. Usually his mom offered more practical feedback.
“No, he could be crying because he’s hurting or hungry. I don’t think he is. At this age, he should be sleeping more at night, about six hours at a time, but if he’s waking up, eating, getting a fresh diaper, and still crying, I don’t think there’s anything physically wrong with him. I think that poor little man is missing his mom.”
A sense of helplessness washed over Ethan in direct proportion to how tired his shoulder was growing. He paused for a second to shift sides and got Calvin going again just as another little cry started up, but he subsided when Ethan found his rhythm. “I can’t do this all night. I wish I could, but my shoulders say no. Any ideas?”
“Tell me what else you’ve tried.” He complied, and she thought for a minute. “He’s missing his mama, and there’s not much you can do about that. But it sounds like the reason this swinging works and the baby swing didn’t is because it distracts him. He forgets for a minute that he’s sad. Sometimes we drove babies around in the car and that calmed them down. Sometimes a walk will work.”
“Like just putting him in a stroller and walking around? There’s a stroller here.”
“You got anywhere good and safe to walk around there in the middle of the night?”
“Yeah. There’s a paved footpath that runs around the complex.” He’d been meaning to explore it. Guess life was making time for him since he had a bad habit of not making time himself.
“Then yes, I’d say try taking him for a walk. See if that helps.”
“What if he cries the whole time? I can’t drag a screaming baby past a bunch of people’s windows in the middle of the night.”
“Then you bring him home,” she said in the patient tone she used when he was missing the obvious.
“Right. Okay, I’ll try that.”
“Call me again. Or better yet, have Tessa call me so I can get a better description of his behavior. Maybe I can come up with more specific suggestions.”
He wasn’t fooled by her innocent tone. “I’ll call you and let you know how it’s going, or if I have any more questions.”
“You’ll have questions.”
“Don’t sound so smug. That was an easy prediction.”
“Talk to you soon! Love you!”
“Love you,” he answered, before hanging up. He kept the swinging going, and looked around for the stroller frame thing, spotting it leaning up against a wall. He made his way over in an awkward swing-step-swing-step rhythm and studied it, not wanting to put the baby down in case Calvin cried too loud and woke Tessa. He eyed the different hinges and components and decided he could snap in Calvin’s seat and get the whole rig out the door before the baby could fuss too much.
Except he’d want to let Tessa know where he was. A text might wake her. He’d leave her a note so she wouldn’t freak out if she woke up and came down to an empty house. But that meant a longer window for Calvin to cry. He considered the options and settled on a plan. He didn’t see any loose paper anywhere but he was a hundred percent sure Tessa would have a stack of paper takeout napkins lying around, and sure enough, he found them in a kitchen drawer that contained other sensible odds and ends: pens, pencils, a measuring tape, screwdriver, thumbtacks, antivenin.
He blinked at the antivenin but took the pen and napkin out and set them on the counter, ready for him to write, all the while still swinging Calvin. He didn’t want to stick the note to the fridge with one of the myriad restaurant magnets that covered it because he doubted she’d check there first. That meant taping it to the door so she’d see it as soon as she came down, but although he’d hoped to find a junk drawer with tape, the rest were either empty or full of more paper restaurant napkins and plastic utensils.
He considered what to do next. How to leave a note that she would see without tape? He checked the cabinets and found one full of jars of marinara sauce. Perfect.
He carried five of them over to her small dining room table which was situated a few feet to the right of her front door, one at a time, and built a three-level tower of jars. That would capture her attention when she came down. Next he set Calvin down beside the stroller frame for a minute and popped it open, pleased when it worked exactly as he expected it too. These makers of baby stuff had some good ideas. He snapped Calvin and his carrier into place and as the little guy’s face began to screw up for a cry, he hurriedly pushed it toward the kitchen. It put Calvin on pause. Ethan found that encouraging but unsurprising. If his mom thought a stroller ride would work, it would probably work.
In the kitchen, he rocked the stroller back and forth with his foot as he scribbled a note to Tessa. “Took Calvin for a walk. Be back soon.”
He set it beside his totem of marinara jars, eased the stroller out her condo, down the lone front porch step, and set off for the footpath. Calvin stayed quiet through it all.
Ethan wasn’t sure why this was working when there was les
s to see in the dark night than there was even in the condo, but he was glad it did. He walked the loop, a distance he estimated at a third of a mile, four times before he glanced down and saw that Calvin had fallen asleep.
Tension ebbed out of him and tiredness flooded in, the lateness of the hour finally catching up to him. “Good idea, kid,” he whispered. “I wish I could sleep too.” He’d bring him back to Tessa’s and see if he could grab a few Zs on the couch.
Calvin stayed asleep on the short walk back to her place, even when Ethan jostled the stroller trying to get it up the porch step. He slipped inside with a sigh of relief that turned to a smile when he realized that Tessa had crept downstairs to the sofa, but exactly like her nephew, was sound asleep.
He pushed the stroller to rest beside the couch and grabbed a blanket to cover her. She’d curled up in a corner, her hand tucked beneath her chin with the takeout napkin containing his note crumpled in her fist. He sank to the other end of the couch and angled his long frame awkwardly so he could stretch his legs on the coffee table and rest his head against the sofa arm. He hoped for a doze, but he doubted . . .
***
Something warm and soft burrowed against his side, and Ethan slowly blinked awake. What was . . .
He glanced down. Oh. The gray half-light of early morning leaked through Tessa’s curtains to pick up the glints in her honey highlights in her deep brown hair. Hair that was splayed across his lap. He’d fallen asleep, and so soundly that he hadn’t even noticed Tessa migrate over at some point to settle her head in his lap to sleep. Nor had he noticed the growing stiffness in his neck and legs as he’d slept. He should move. His muscles would hate him if he didn’t, but he didn’t want to wake Tessa.
Six years ago, they had shared a similar moment. He wondered if she would remember. It had always stuck in his mind because it marked a turning point for them. It just hadn’t turned the way he’d expected it to.
He glanced over at the stroller where Calvin was still out like a light. Tessa stirred and he froze, hoping she wouldn’t wake yet. He wanted to soak in the moment a little longer, and he didn’t think too hard about why. Probably just because he hadn’t had a woman snuggled against him since Sarah.
Tessa settled again, a breath that was almost a snore escaping her, and he smiled, even as her movement against his leg made his knee twinge. Maybe he wanted to soak it in because this was Tessa, and she was cool, and it was as simple as that.
He’d always thought she was cool. She had caught his eye when she joined his thermodynamics class, an unfamiliar female face in his male-dominated major. But he’d have noticed her even if there were a hundred other women in the room. It wasn’t even that she was beautiful. She was pretty on any scale someone might use. Her dark brown hair set off delicate features, high cheekbones and a fine, straight nose. She was almost petite, but most people felt that way next to his six-foot-two frame. She was probably average height for a woman, around five-six, maybe a little under. But her bones had that same delicacy as her face. Bird bones, he wanted to say, though it probably wouldn’t sound like a compliment to her.
It was her eyes that had really captured him. Big and hazel, they were clear and present in a way he didn’t see much in his major. Engineering-types were often either laser-focused on the project in front of them while the rest of the world fell away, or they were lost in their own thoughts, working through technical problems, sorting and discarding possibilities. In either case, their eyes all held that far-away look as they obsessed or puzzled.
Tessa’s presence had struck him. Not the way she physically occupied space, but her awareness of it, as if she herself were fully present in any moment. It was a sharp contrast to their classmates, and as he watched her watching, always watching, he wondered what she thought about everything she observed. He sensed she was filing it away, and he wondered for what purpose. Curiosity? Simple information?
He’d made a point of trying to find out, gradually moving his seat nearer to hers, eventually striking up a conversation. He wasn’t great at small talk, but he didn’t have to be with her. He’d asked what she was thinking about doing for her senior project the following year, and she’d animated like Jessie from Toy Story and begun talking to him about some clean energy ideas she had. It had delighted him that she shared his passion on the subject, and they immediately fell into habits of long lunches and study dates.
He’d never been great at dating. He didn’t seem to know how to communicate that he was interested in a girl without a blunt, “I like you.” In high school, that had sent a couple of them skittering in the other direction. But other times, he’d noticed if he fell into a friendship, some girls would eventually make it clear they wanted something more from him. They would need to say, “I want you to invite me to prom, and make it splashy,” or something equally direct for it to sink in. He’d found that very helpful. And he’d asked his older siblings a lot of questions and read a lot of articles that helped him figure out when a girl was sending signals and maybe even more importantly, when she wasn’t.
At first when he and Tessa had begun hanging out, he hadn’t seen any of those signals. His brother Liam had told him that interested girls would laugh extra hard at his jokes, but that didn’t help him because his jokes were funny, so why wouldn’t anybody laugh? He couldn’t tell if Tessa was interested or just had a decent sense of humor.
His sister Megan had told him that girls would deliberately leave stuff with him as an excuse to see him again—a sweatshirt or earring, maybe even a purse or her phone. Tessa was organized to an almost scary extent. She always knew exactly where all of her stuff was and kept to her schedule, which he’d glimpsed once over her shoulder, and it was both packed and meticulously planned. She never left anything with him accidentally-on-purpose, so he decided to take that as neutral.
It was Liam’s wife Andi who had given him the most helpful clue. She said to watch for Tessa to touch him. When he asked her in what way and how often she’d said, “If it would seem really weird for a guy friend to touch you the same way she does, then she’s flirting with you.” Nothing like that had happened for a long time, but toward the end of the semester, Tessa had begun to nudge him with her shoulder when he made a pun or give him playful pushes as they walked to the student union. Once, when they were studying on one of the couches in the Woodruff lounge, she’d propped her feet on his lap and leaned back against the sofa arm to get more comfortable.
Somehow that had sent a stronger zing up his spine than even the first time he’d made out with a girl after senior homecoming. It had unnerved and excited him all at once for such a simple touch to put all his senses on high alert. And it was finally the sign he’d been looking for, a clear one if Andi was to be believed, and she was pretty smart about such things.
More moments like that had followed, and Tessa didn’t work up to them anymore; she simply climbed onto a sofa beside him and settled her legs across his lap before she dived into her NCEES licensing prep book or worked on differential equations. He’d ached to make a bolder move, but he let her set the pace, sensing that she would bolt if he moved too fast. He went home over Christmas break feeling optimistic that they’d be on new footing when they came back in January.
At first, they were. They’d made sure to register for the same senior seminar class and planned their graduating project together. They fell right back into their routine of studying together all the time, Tessa’s legs across his lap, their books and papers strewn about them. The night before their first exam in fluid mechanics, she’d fallen asleep and eventually twisted and wiggled so much that she flipped directions on the couch and settled her head in the spot her feet normally took, sound asleep the whole while.
It had been the best night of Ethan’s life up to that point. Until she woke up. Even then, when she’d gathered herself together, disconcerted and blinking awake, he hadn’t realized that everything was about to change between them. But she’d mumbled an embarrassed apology, he�
�d made a weak joke about her not needing to feel bad about enjoying “the lap of luxury,” and then she’d gathered her stuff and gone home.
It was the last time things were normal between them. After that, it took a couple of weeks for him to recognize that she was brushing him off for every invitation to eat at the student center or study in the science building. But while he could be a little obtuse about girls, he wasn’t completely clueless. He’d finally caught on and left her alone, interacting in a friendly and distant way on their seminar project, but never beyond that. Sarah had come along when he was feeling the sting of Tessa’s quiet rejection, and he’d fallen into a relationship with her that had lasted for almost six years. Looking back, he’d say it was about five-and-a-half years too long.
He smoothed a strand of Tessa’s hair that had fallen against her cheek, worried that her breath would stir it and tickle her awake. She was the same Tessa in so many ways. Driven, focused, excited.
In other ways, she was different. She was more polished now, which he guessed everyone sort of was so many years out of college. She’d also grown into her body more, acquiring softer curves and nicer clothes than the jeans she’d lived in. He didn’t know much about women’s hair except that he’d always liked Tessa’s, but it seemed a little different now, sleeker, maybe, and not always in a ponytail.
His fingers itched to touch it again after brushing it away, and he dared to wrap a strand of it around his finger It slipped from his skin like silk. For a second, he wondered what it would be like to have her undivided attention now the way he once had, whether the pull she was reasserting over him would work both ways this time.
But it didn’t matter. He had Klieber and the job of his dreams in Switzerland waiting for him, and even if they had agreed to a mutually satisfying fling, he suspected that opportunity existed in a different timeline that had ended when her sister dropped Calvin on her doorstep.
Calvin gave a soft grunt in his sleep now, and Ethan glanced over at him. Cute kid. He hoped for both his and Tessa’s sake that her sister pulled herself together and came back soon. He’d rarely been privy to the details of the women whose babies his parents had fostered for days, sometimes even weeks or months until a suitable relative could take over, or until the mother could prove that her arrest or disappearance was all a big misunderstanding. But he knew enough to know that while the mothers often desperately wanted the babies returned, the other adults in the room rarely thought they were ready or able to take over again.
Embracing Her Ever After: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (ABCs of Love Book 5) Page 8