“Can you look?”
The image of Tessa plucking her shirt collar away so she could peer down it did Ethan in even though he knew Darius meant the bottle, and this time he had to choke down an actual laugh.
It was easy to read murder in Tessa’s eyes. Ethan swallowed the rest of it until he could look at her with a straight face.
Mary came over to investigate. “How are you supposed to tell by looking?”
Tessa took Calvin from Ethan and popped the bottle out of the baby’s mouth. He gave a little fret right away, but she peered closely at the bottle. “It has a number three on it,” she said, popping it back in.
“It’ll have . . . do for today,” Mary said. “Make him slow down.”
“Uhhow exactly am I supposed to do that, Mary?” Tessa asked.
For the first time, Mary looked uncertain of herself. Then she scowled and said, “Google it,” and went back to her desk.
The next few minutes led to googling with inconclusive results, but since Calvin finished the bottle and didn’t seem too worried about it, Tessa set it on her desk and put the dish towel over her shoulder before resting Calvin against it and doing a bounce-pat thing with him.
“You need help?”
She shook her head and went back to work, but a few minutes later, a huge belch from the little guy had them all staring again.
“Was that him?” Mary asked.
“Obviously. Did you think it was me?”
“I think it had to be,” Mary said, casting the baby a disbelieving glance.
“That was not me!”
Mary, looking doubtful, turned back to her desk.
“It was him,” Tessa said to Ethan, the slightest touch of pleading in her voice.
“I mean, if you say so,” he said, adopting Mary’s same tone of doubt.
“Ethan!”
“Fine, it was him.” He grinned at her.
“Ugh. Just for that, you have to get the chair thing Mary bought and see if he likes it.”
“I’ll set it up!” That came from Mary, Darius, and Sanjay all at once.
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Tessa said, but Ethan barely heard her because he was already racing to get to the unopened box first.
It had been like this since he was a kid. While his brothers fought over which Hot Wheels car to race, Ethan was happiest building the track and tinkering with the launch mechanism that sent the cars hurtling down it.
A few minutes later he brought it over to set beside Tessa, who put Calvin inside it and buckled the safety belt around his waist. She flipped the switch at the bottom, and it began a gentle vibration.
Calvin blinked up at her and smiled.
Tessa looked at Ethan uncertainly. “Is that how it’s supposed to go?”
He nodded back at the still-smiling baby. “I think he likes you.”
“He likes the chair.”
But Ethan knew what the kid was really thinking: he liked Tessa, and Ethan did too.
Chapter Seven
“You’re a genius, Mary,” Tessa said an hour later.
“Always true in a general sense,” her boss said, “but are you referring to something specific?”
“This chair.” She’d been able to disappear into her work, focus on the project crowding out her stress over the baby for the first time since she’d realized her sister had left without him. “It’s magic. He’s so quiet.”
Mary grunted. “It’s only doing what the online reviews said it would.”
Tessa stole another glance at the baby, who was simply watching her. “Magic.”
“Does that mean it’s a good time to interrupt?” Ethan asked. “I finished going through your documentation and now I’ve got more questions.”
She glanced over at him. He looked . . . she wasn’t sure of the word. Fresher? Sharper? Crisper? Something. Somehow new and improved even over Monday when she’d seen him walking in the lobby. That’s what a full night of sleep did for someone, she mused. Lucky guy. “Questions, huh? I hope I have answers. Scoot over here, and let’s talk.”
He rolled his chair over. “Can you pull up the specs on the solar cells?”
“Got them.”
“Great. I’m wondering about the—”
The baby peeped. Tessa glanced at him, nervous, but he didn’t look upset. She leaned down slightly to study him closer. He had an expression she didn’t recognize. Not distress. More like confusion. And was he turning red?
“Ethan.” She waved him over, growing alarmed as the baby turned an even deeper shade of red and went from looking confused to downright startled. “I think we need to get him out of the chair.” She lunged forward to undo the straps, but Ethan caught her arm, a light touch just enough to check her forward momentum. She paused and looked at him, and he let her go. Warmth lingered where his fingers had touched, and it surprised her.
“That’s, um.”
She frowned. “That’s um what?”
“That’s poop face.” He looked a little embarrassed, but also certain of his words.
“Poop face,” she repeated. “What are you talking about?”
“My brother-in-law always takes pictures of their kids when they do this. My sister hates it, but he thinks it’s hilarious, and he always texts them to me because I might also think it’s really funny.” Now he looked even more embarrassed.
This definitely took her right back to college, spending her senior year in the lab with boys who loved potty jokes.
“I think he might be working on a diaper. As in filling it,” he added.
“Yeah, I got that. What do I do?”
“Either his face will go back to normal or he’ll start crying when he’s done? That’s kind of a guess.”
He sat back, and she did too, watching the baby’s lower lip quiver and his face edge toward slightly purplish. She was about to reach for him again, alarmed by the color, when suddenly his face relaxed and turned its normal peachy shade.
She glanced at Ethan who returned her look with raised eyebrows. “I guess that means he’s done?” It felt impolite to talk about the kid’s intestinal functions, but she guessed he probably didn’t understand. “I’ll go change him.” She half-hoped Ethan would offer to help this time because the two dirty diapers she’d changed so far had been worse than the wet ones by orders of magnitude. But Ethan was no dummy, and he kept his mouth shut.
She unbuckled the restraint and slid her hand beneath the baby’s diapered bum to lift him up and froze. There was something very warm and mushy beneath him.
“Oh no.”
“Is he stuck?” Ethan asked, half-rising as though he’d help.
“The diaper didn’t contain everything.”
Ethan sat right back down.
“Guess we know why that list said to pack three changes of clothes,” Mary commented.
Tessa took a deep breath and held it, then finished scooping the baby up and walking him over to the changing pad, trying to hold him securely while not letting any part of him touch any of her clothes until she set him down. Then she reached for the wipes with her clean hand and crouched to go to work.
She gagged once but didn’t puke as she wrangled off his onesie and diaper and cleaned the worst of it off him. But when a bit of the mess got on her finger again, she gagged a second time and heard an echoing gag behind her from Darius’s desk. Ignoring him, she held her breath for a final push, slapped the clean diaper on him, and sat back to eye him and the surrounding area to make sure she’d gotten everything.
“Mary,” she called.
“No.”
“Mary.” She turned to glare at her boss. “You made me bring him in here. Just come stand here and keep an eye on him while I throw this away and wash my hands. I can’t put him in clean clothes with dirty hands.”
Mary glared back for several seconds then, shoulders slumped, she walked over to stare down at the baby. “Hurry up.”
Tessa did, making sure the wipes were closed inside the diaper which s
he taped in on itself to keep the mess contained. She was proud of her solution then immediately wondered what had become of her to be admiring the elegance of her diaper disposal.
She hurried to the women’s restroom outside the lab doors and threw the diaper in the trash before scrubbing off her hands and fingernails with soap. Four times. Then again, just to make sure.
Back in the lab, she found Mary still looming over the baby, who kicked his feet and looked up at her, all pudgy pink rolls.
“Thanks,” Tessa muttered, fishing out another outfit for him. And by outfit, it was just another onesie, but the lab wasn’t so cold, so she hoped it was enough. “It’s the swing for you, buddy.” That chair was contaminated. No more chair for him, even if had bought her an extra-long silence.
She put him in his swing and walked away but he immediately cried. She turned around and lifted him out, dragged the swing to her desk, put him back in where he could see her, and sat. He watched her without comment.
“So back to the energy cells,” she said to Ethan when it seemed the baby was going to go along with her plan.
They worked steadily with a hiccup or two here or there. Literal hiccups. The baby got them, and she had to pick him up and pat him until they quit because it distracted her too much. Other than that, she and Ethan moved through his questions quickly.
“I think you’re really close,” he said, his eyes sparking with excitement when he asked his last question two hours later. “This is going to change—”
“Everything?” she interrupted.
“Everything.” He sat back and blew out a long stream of air. “If you could find a more durable panel surface, you’re going to reduce carbon emissions by . . .”
She watched as he stared into the distance, his eyes losing focus.
Darius glanced over. “What’s he doing?”
“Math.”
Darius’s own eyes widened. “Is he trying to calculate the emission reduction in his head?”
She held her finger to her lips to shush him, but it didn’t matter. She’d seen Ethan solve complicated problems a dozen times in school, but it was still remarkable to watch someone do this kind of mental math without even a pencil.
Mary watched now too, and Tessa smiled and mouthed, I told you.
A moment later, Ethan blinked, and just like that, she sensed that he was all there again. “1.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually in the US alone.”
Darius hooted, and Mary shook her head and turned back to her own work. “You could have just asked. We already calculated it.” But Tessa caught the small smile on her face, and she was glad that Mary had witnessed one more reason that Ethan had been a smart hire.
Sanjay chose that moment to walk over and set a paper cone down on her desk. It looked like he’d made it from the tray for his In-N-Out French fries at lunch.
“Thank you?” she said.
“For pee.” Then he went back to his desk without further explanation.
Tessa picked it up and examined it, but she had no idea what she was supposed to do with it.
Ethan cleared his throat. “I think it’s like a hat.”
Her eyebrow rose.
He tried again. “Or maybe a kind of umbrella? For Calvin,” he said, nodding toward the baby. “To keep the stream from hitting you next time. You just strategically place it on the little dude.”
Her confusion cleared. “Oh. Smart, Sanjay.”
“Better than my idea,” Darius admitted. He reached beneath his desk and pulled out a welding mask. “I figured you could just put this on.”
“No way,” Mary said. “You put that back.”
“Mary likes to do all our welding,” Tessa explained to Ethan. “We can send it over to the fabrication guys, but she prefers to do it here.”
“It’s faster, and I’m just as good,” Mary sniffed.
What Tessa really wanted to say was, “Thank you guys for helping.” But the words got stuck behind a funny lump in her throat, so instead she said, “It’s true. Mary’s just as good.”
There was an awkward silence, like they all kind of knew what she meant to say, before Ethan broke it. “Can we go look at the panels now?”
“Yes.” She jumped to her feet like she was the exclamation point on her own sentence. “Let’s do that.” She was halfway across the lab to the stack of panel prototypes when a short squawk from the baby drew her up short. Right. The baby.
“I’ll get the stroller,” Ethan said. “Seems like he’s happier if he can see you.”
Once the baby was moved over, they investigated the panels, but Calvin fretted constantly and didn’t want a bottle. Tessa flinched each time. The noisy hum and whine of their machines periodically filled the lab, but those were a kind of white noise, a comfortable backdrop to their individual work. Baby squawks were something else entirely, neither rhythmic nor soothing.
She rocked the stroller back and forth, but it didn’t do much to settle his cries. Finally, when he reached a pitch that forced Ethan to repeat a question twice to make himself heard, Tessa shot Ethan a look that she hoped communicated her apologies and pointed to the door. “I’ll take him out until he settles down.”
The baby didn’t settle down in the hallway, but Tessa still felt her tension ease the tiniest fraction. The reinforced lab doors and walls meant they wouldn’t hear him inside. Maybe they could concentrate, at least. She glanced at her watch. It was four o’clock. She stared at the baby. He wouldn’t meet her eye as he fussed more. It wasn’t a full-bore cry like he’d been doing when he was hungry, but maybe another bottle was in order here?
The lab door opened, and Mary poked her head out. “We switched the nipple and Ethan made another bottle.” She thrust it at Tessa and disappeared back into the lab.
She set the bottle against his lips, but he sealed them up tighter than an O-ring on a gasket.
“What do you need?” she asked him.
He answered with a small, tired mewl.
She crouched beside him and offered her finger for him to suck the way Ethan had. “That’s the sound my brain makes every time I think about Rachel being gone. Is that what’s got you fussing?” He accepted her pinkie and quieted for a few minutes, and the soft draw of his mouth on her finger created an equal tug on her heart. “Of course that’s what it is,” she said softly.
They stayed that way for a few minutes before he released her pinky and cried again, but this time when she offered him the bottle he took it, and she froze, not wanting to change a single thing about the angle of the bottle, not even wanting to breathe too hard and distract the baby from eating.
When the lab door opened next, it was Ethan. “Is it going okay out here?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
He dropped his voice to a whisper too. “Is he asleep?”
“No. But he’s eating and not crying and I don’t want to do anything to distract him. I’m afraid to even change the angle of the bottle.”
“Got it,” he said, and disappeared.
It frustrated her that him disappearing into the lab affected her differently than when Mary had done it. She felt the impulse to call Ethan back, not something that she wanted to do with Mary. Not that she minded Mary. It’s just that Ethan . . .
She stifled a sigh. This wasn’t good. Not good at all. It shouldn’t be any different when he offered help than when Mary did. But somehow it was easier to accept it from Mary even though it was Ethan she wanted to lean on more.
That was exactly the problem, actually. The impulse to depend on him. She knew Ethan pretty well, or had, anyway. Even six years after graduation, he seemed as thoughtful and helpful as he always had. But hard experience had also taught her not to ever put herself in the position of needing someone to the point of not being able to function if they somehow disappeared.
That lesson had come courtesy of Rachel too, in a roundabout way. Rachel plus Tessa’s jerk ex-boyfriend. But Tessa had never needed to learn a lesson twice. She didn’t
depend on people for personal stuff.
She’d learned to rely professionally on her co-workers here. They’d all shown the same passion for this project that she had, and she’d known Ethan would be into it too. But she wouldn’t make the same mistake she had with Dylan in viewing Ethan as a soft place to fall while she carried the weight of another human’s problems, even if it was a human as tiny as this baby.
“You’re hauling huge problems around with you, little guy,” she murmured to him. But he nursed at his bottle and seemed content to ignore her.
When he’d fallen fast asleep again several minutes later, she carefully maneuvered the stroller back into the lab, parking him against the wall and away from the soft clatter of keyboards and mouse clicks and the low conversation of her labmates.
“Mary,” she said, stopping by the project manager’s desk. “I’m sorry about this. I’ll just work from—”
“No,” Mary said. “Don’t say ‘home’ because there’s nothing you can do there that will be helpful. You here at fifty-percent with a baby in tow is still better than zero percent with you at home. We’ve got the new filaments coming tomorrow, and we need to figure out if we can make them work. You have to be there for the testing. The kid will be fine in Baby Quad.”
Tessa nodded, smiling a little at the Baby Quad name. There wasn’t anything else she could do. She went back to source materials with Ethan, and he smiled when she took her seat next to him.
“I was thinking about Calvin, and I have an idea.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll figure it out. Sorry he’s been so distracting.”
“It’s fine. Not a big deal, I promise. I told you, I’m used to babies.”
She didn’t say anything but the voice inside her head issued a firm retort. You may be used to babies, but you’re the only one, and this is not a sustainable situation. She had to solve it. Her whole focus was sustainability, after all. She allowed herself a tight smile for the grim joke.
The baby slept for another hour-and-a-half, but when he woke again fussing, she knew they’d both reached their limits, whatever Mary said.
“Is it okay if we go?” she asked Ethan. “Sorry to pull you out early, but now that I have a real car seat set up, you won’t have to do it tomorrow.”
Always You: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (ABCs of Love Collection Books 5-8) Page 6