Embracing Her Ever After: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (ABCs of Love Book 5)

by Brenna Jacobs

  She buckled the baby into the swing and booted up her computer. She’d changed her password the day before, something she always did in the grip of strong emotion, because there was something cathartic about typing out “Rachel*is#theworst*x10” several times a day.

  It reminded her that she had another unpleasant Rachel duty to attend to, and she fished her phone from her work bag to send her a text.

  Have you been using? Drugs?

  At this point, she doubted it. Or at least she doubted that the baby was suffering withdrawal. He had long stretches of calm, and that didn’t seem symptomatic of someone suffering the kind of withdrawals she’d witnessed in movies or TV shows. But really, what did she know about babies or drugs? Nothing.

  A few minutes later, Rachel responded, and while she was shocked that her sister had bothered, her emphatic “NO!” didn’t surprise her. Tessa believed her, mainly because she knew what an addict looked like after being raised by one. Rachel had seemed exhausted and even depressed, but not high. Tessa knew what high looked like all too well.

  When are you coming back? She typed and sent it fast so there was no way Rachel could pretend she hadn’t seen it. The typing dots appeared and disappeared a few times before they disappeared completely and her screen went dark. Rachel wasn’t going to answer.

  Tessa wanted to pick up something and throw it. At home she might have even let herself scream into a pillow, but that wasn’t a luxury here. Instead, she typed her passcode again, striking each key much harder than she needed to.

  “I need to get a chassis in here to run a sim,” Ethan said.

  “You’re ready to do that?” She’d expected it to take him until next week before he was ready to test.

  He shrugged. “I will be by Saturday.” Then realizing that wasn’t a workday, he frowned. “Or I guess it can wait until Monday.”

  “No. If you’re willing to come in Saturday, let’s do it,” Mary said.

  Sanjay nodded, and Tessa turned to see how Darius felt about it, but his seat was empty. She looked around until she spotted him by the 3D printer. “We’re going to work Saturday, Darius,” she called. He wouldn’t care. They’d been doing that a lot lately. He gave her a thumbs up over his shoulder but didn’t look up from what he was doing.

  The baby still seemed fine, so she turned to her work and dove in, researching cadmium. It was one of the most frustrating things about green technology: sometimes the solution to one environmental problem created a new one, like how wind farms generated astonishing amounts of electricity in places like Texas, but also decimated local bird populations. She was facing the same dilemma. Cadmium was the best material to use for the battery cells embedded in the solar road panels, but over time it leached into the soil which wasn’t good for the surrounding ecosystems.

  She was lost deep in an article about battery recycling when one of her favorite scents in the world tickled her nose. Melting plastic.

  Ethan sniffed the air at the same time and they both rose and headed to the 3D printer without a word, Sanjay trailing behind them.

  She examined the thin lines of plastic the 3D printer was laying down. In its simplest form, a 3D printer worked by feeding it a spool of plastic that it melted and squeezed out in the shapes the operator programmed it to, building it layer by layer from the base up. The melted plastic came out in precise strips a few degrees above melting. Too hot and it wouldn’t hold its shape. She was thrilled by the precision with which the printer balanced temperature against form, and she could watch it work for hours.

  In fact, she had several times during the project so far, staring at it while her mind had worked through some of the thorniest parts of the road panel design. She guessed it helped her reach the same Zen that Buddhist monks sought in monasteries. It reminded her of childhood, when she would drown out the chaos around her with marathons of “How It’s Made,” soothed by the precision and orderliness of the processes that produced everything from men’s socks to kayaks. She’d admired the episodes where items required a human touch, but she’d loved the ones where pieces of food or plastic or aluminum progressed through a series of machines, each doing a tiny part of a larger job that generated a perfect product, rolling off its assembly line and headed for inspection and packaging.

  Sanjay slipped in past Ethan, forcing him to step back from the 3D printer so Sanjay could see.

  “What is it, Darius?” Tessa asked. She couldn’t figure out where the emerging component would fit in any of their current designs.

  “An I/O port?” Sanjay asked.

  “Grid connector?” That was from Ethan.

  “Power box cover,” Tessa said.

  “No,” Darius said. And that was all he said. Tessa and Sanjay knew his silences well enough to know they wouldn’t get an answer until he felt like giving them one, so they returned to their desks. Ethan watched for a few more minutes and eventually wandered back to his computer too.

  The baby began to fuss midmorning, and before she could even kick herself for not having a bottle ready, Ethan said, “I’ll make his formula if you want to hold him.”

  “Sure,” she said. She didn’t want to have to accept his help again, but if she didn’t, she’d either have to try to make the bottle while she held the baby—something she knew she was terrible at—or let him cry while she made it and risk him disturbing the whole lab.

  “Number two nipple,” Darius reminded Ethan as he dug a bottle from the diaper bag.

  “Uh, right. Thanks, man,” he said, and peered more carefully at the nipple before he hurried to the breakroom.

  Tessa took the baby out to the hall and bounced and walked him until Ethan stuck his head out and waved a bottle at her. She accepted it and went back to her seat, waiting for Calvin to finish. When five minutes had passed with only about an ounce gone, she sighed down at him. “Aren’t you hungry?” she whispered to him.

  “I got something,” Mary announced over her shoulder, startling her into popping the bottle out of the baby’s mouth. She hurriedly replaced it when he gave a short cry of protest.

  “I’ll come check it out as soon as he’s done,” Tessa told her.

  “No, it’s for the baby. It’s in Baby Quad. Come see if it works.”

  O-o-o-kay. Tessa had no idea what this was about, but she dutifully followed Mary who led her to Calvin’s carrier. It now had a frame over it, a double set of PVC pipes with two elbow joints that looked like a miniature pair of gymnastics parallel bars. Each bar had a loop of dangling plastic like tiny nooses or the chains one might find in a medieval dungeon for hanging prisoners on walls.

  Mary looked at her expectantly, but Tessa was a little afraid to ask what it was, so she shrugged and gave her an uncertain smile.

  “It’s a feeder,” Mary said. “These loops are adjustable, and you can put the kid in the carrier, situate the frame, load the bottle, tighten the loops on either end of it, shorten the length of the back one to create an angle, and then boom, kid can feed himself and free you up.”

  “Ohhhh,” Tessa said, interested now. She could see how it would work. This was what she liked most about Mary. She wasn’t just a manager like some of the people Tessa had worked under. She was an engineer in her own right, and her solutions were usually clean and simple. “Wow, if this works . . .”

  “It’ll work.” Mary didn’t even wait to see if she was right, which meant that she was probably exactly right. She returned to her desk, and Tessa settled the baby into his carrier, then quickly removed his bottle and settled it into the straps. He fussed after a few seconds when it didn’t automatically reappear, but it took her less than a minute to make sure the bottle was secure and slide the frame so that the nipple was level with his mouth. He latched onto it greedily, and she adjusted the back to make sure it flowed. Then she realized she had to set it all up by her desk so she could keep an eye on him, and he complained as she picked up his carrier and the contraption to relocate them. He settled down as soon as he got his bottle back
.

  “Nice,” Ethan said, coming around to examine the set up. He inspected it closely then returned to his desk and dove back into whatever he was doing on CAD. She barely resisted the urge to sneak a peek at it, but she hated it when people looked at her schematics before she was ready to share them.

  Ten more quiet minutes passed and then she heard the soft whistle of a bottle sucked dry, and she leaned down to loosen it from its moorings. Ethan appeared again, and it was beginning to spook her, the way he kept appearing out of nowhere. He started to unbuckle the baby, saying, “I’ll burp him.”

  “No.” Her tone was sharper than she’d intended and his hands flew up, releasing the latch. “Sorry,” she said when Ethan glanced at her, startled. “I can do it.” She got the baby out herself and settled into the nearly familiar burping routine. A sense of relief whispered through her that she was beginning to understand what she needed to do next, but sadness followed on its heels. The fact was that no matter how well she learned, she shouldn’t know any of it because it was Rachel’s job.

  But Rachel had broken the way she always did when things got a little tough, so here Tessa was, once again left with the pieces.

  The baby gave a small burp. “You’re good at that,” she told him. “Thank you.”

  She didn’t change him right away. He followed every feeding with a wet diaper a half hour later, so she’d just check in then. In the meantime, it didn’t seem right that he should go back into his seat. Again. Or the swing. Again. Were babies supposed to do anything besides sit in chairs? All these experts said sitting too much was the next worst thing to smoking cigarettes.

  Granted, the little guy wasn’t going to get up and train for a 5K any time soon, but surely he was supposed to do something besides sit? She sat at her desk with the baby still against her shoulder and did a search for “baby exercises.” She got thousands of articles about everything from doing water baby swim classes which wasn’t doable in a lab, to exercises she was supposed to do for muscles she didn’t know she had after she delivered a baby. She X-ed out of that one in a hurry.

  The most common theme seemed to be tummy time, which meant setting the baby on its stomach. That didn’t seem like much exercise, but apparently it would help babies strengthen their necks by trying to lift their comparatively giant noggins.

  “We’ll try it,” she said to the baby. “But you have to go back in the swing for a minute.” He did without complaint, and she pulled a blanket from his diaper bag and set it on the floor and laid him on his tummy.

  He didn’t do anything for a few seconds, and then his head came up a little, and he peered around. She wondered what the lab looked like from floor level. He stayed that way for several seconds before his head bobbed up and down several times, and it occurred to her a split second too late that his neck was getting tired, and his head smacked the floor. The concrete floor.

  “Oh no,” she said, scooping him up immediately. The very deep breath he was drawing meant an ear-splitting scream was coming, so she hurried for the lab door, not quite making it before he let loose with the angriest yell she’d heard from him yet.

  “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” she murmured as the door latched behind her, but she doubted he could hear her. She couldn’t even hear herself. Not that he would have understood her anyway. But she murmured it again and again while trying to check him for injury. There was no blood, but his whole face was flushed such an angry red that she couldn’t be sure if he had any other marks on him.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said again, wishing the ability to kick herself was a literal thing so she could do it a couple of times. “I should have thought that through. I didn’t realize you didn’t know how to let your head down softly!”

  The door opened behind her, and she turned to tell Ethan to go back inside and let her deal with it, but it was Sanjay who stepped out, and right behind him, Darius. Ethan was right on their heels and even Mary’s head craned around the door.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “I tried to do tummy time and I put him on a blanket but it was thin, and he banged his head on the floor because his neck is a toothpick, and I don’t even understand how babies can do anything.” She was glad his cries drowned out the end of her sentence because her pitch had climbed to hysterical bystander levels. She reverted to shushing the baby, and she didn’t know if she was trying to soothe him or herself.

  “I, uh, I think we should let her handle it?” Ethan said over the howls and shushes.

  Sanjay and Darius looked at each other with baffled expressions and shuffled back into the lab. Mary followed, and Ethan stepped out.

  “I’m not here to help,” he said, as if he expected her to object. And she would have. The only thing worse than the baby’s howls was causing them by her own stupidity, and the only thing worse than that was Ethan witnessing the whole thing.

  “Then why are you out here?”

  “To . . .” He stopped talking, like he couldn’t come up with anything. Instead he stepped closer to look at the baby, maybe to check him for injuries as if she hadn’t already thought of that. But this was a case where it was definitely better to be safe than sorry, so she bit back any protest. Finally, he leaned down and placed his mouth near the baby’s ear.

  Was he talking to him? Asking him to assess his pain level and assign a number to it? Point to his owie? But within seconds, the baby’s cries grew softer, and Tessa realized Ethan was singing. A few moments more and the baby’s cries were gone altogether, his color returning to normal as he settled down to shuddering hiccups, and now Tessa could hear the words to Ethan’s tune. Was he . . . was he singing about popcorn? On an apricot tree?

  What in the world?

  “You’re going to have to teach me that song,” she said to Ethan as even the wet hiccups slowed down. “The baby seems to like it.”

  Ethan nodded but kept singing until the baby’s eyes drifted closed. When they’d stayed that way for a couple of minutes, he stopped singing and straightened, watching cautiously to make sure he didn’t need to leap into lullaby action again.

  “You never say his name,” he said, as he turned to open the lab door.

  “What?” That made no sense.

  “You call him the baby or sometimes the little guy, but you never call him Calvin.”

  “That’s not . . .”

  The door was already closing behind him, so she didn’t finish the sentence. But it wasn’t true. “I call you Calvin,” she said quietly to the sleeping baby. Except it felt awkward on her tongue because of underuse.

  She didn’t even really think of him as Calvin in her own mind. It was always “the baby” there too. Great. One more thing she wasn’t getting right.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. Calvin.”

  Pressure built through the back of her throat and in her sinus cavity, and it had been so long since she’d cried that it took her a minute to realize that it was the threat of tears. Dang, she hated being sleep-deprived.

  She took a few deep breaths and carefully shifted Calvin so she could pinch the bridge of her nose until the tears receded. When she was sure they weren’t going to sneak up on her again, she walked into the lab, hopeful she could ease him down for a nap.

  Four heads turned her direction when she stepped through the door, and not one of them was where it was supposed to be, instead clustered over something in Baby Quad.

  “What’s going on?” she mouthed.

  Mary straightened. “Darius made you something.”

  Tessa walked over, curious now, and they parted to reveal the baby carrier again, also with a PVC frame hanging over it, but a single one this time, with several objects dangling from its crossbar.

  “What is it?” she asked softly. They were shapes, she realized as she reached it. All flat black plastic shapes, all simple. An X, square, triangle, circle, and diamond all hung from zip ties.

  “I read that babies this young like strong blac
k and white graphic shapes,” Darius said. “I thought if he gets fussy this afternoon again, he might like to look at them.”

  “Wow,” she said. “I didn’t know that. Is that what you were printing?”

  He ducked his head in answer.

  This time, she couldn’t help it; a tear slipped out, one that apparently hadn’t dried up in the hallway under the sheer force of her will. “Thank you,” she managed.

  Now nobody looked at her, probably feeling as uncomfortable as she did when someone else cried, except for Ethan. Instead of looking away, Ethan came to her with his arms outstretched to take Calvin, and she let him, watching as Ethan settled him into the waiting crib before she fled to the ladies’ room to pull herself together.

  Chapter Ten

  “I want to offer to help tonight, but I don’t want you to kill me,” Ethan said to Tessa as they packed up Calvin and all his stuff for home.

  She didn’t say anything as she wrangled the swing closed.

  “So how about if I take a shift? Call me when you’re ready to go to bed.” Her eyes flew to his, scandalized, and he winced. “That came out very, very wrong. I meant I could come over then and crash on your couch until his middle of the night feeding or crying, and you can finally get a true full night of sleep.”

  She shook her head before he even finished. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  He dropped the offer in favor of helping her pack up and they made the trip to her car with baby and gear. He loaded the trunk and shut it as she straightened from buckling Calvin in. “What if I promise not to bring up the kiss? Would you let me help then?”

  “Ethan,” she said. That was it. She followed it with a tired-sounding sigh and an attempt to shove her fingers through her hair, one of her thinking habits he remembered well, but her braid stymied her and she let her hand drift down to her side.