Chapter 250 Don't Give Her a Hard Time

Chapter 250 Don't Give Her a Hard Time
APRIL'S POV

The crib came in a flat box — eleven pieces, a bag of screws — and Asher had the whole thing spread across my bedroom floor before four minutes were up.

My old desk went out to the landing last week, and it left behind this lighter patch on the wall — six years of a desk sitting there, and nobody's painted over it yet.

I've got a whole booklet of paint samples going around the house in my hand, and I still can't commit to one of them.

He was already on his knees, a length of slatted wood in each hand, working it out.

"Are you sure that goes there?"

"Yes."

"You've been looking at it for five minutes."

"I'm thinking."

"You're lost."

Without turning around, Asher held up the instruction sheet. "See."

I took it, turned it the right way up, and handed it back. He studied it a long moment, mouth hanging open a little. Then he laughed at himself — nineteen years old and that was still beyond him. He went back to the rail.

We argued about the paint for twenty minutes and settled nothing. He wants warm, I want soft, and neither one of us can say what those words actually mean. So the wall stayed as it was, rectangle and all.

"We can leave it," Asher said. "Until we know what we're having."

"That's the coward's answer."

"That's the answer that means we only paint it once."

There was one thing he'd gone and bought on his own. Out it came, and he held it up against the rail — a cream blanket, plain, no animal on it, nothing printed anywhere.

"That works either way."

"You've thought about this."

He gave me a one-shoulder shrug. "I'm trying."

For an hour after that we were oddly good at this. I folded clothes on the bed. He sorted the pieces into piles by length, which wasn't a thing I'd ever have thought to do and was completely right.

At one point a screw passed from his hand to mine without either of us saying a word. Later, the screwdriver turned up before I even asked for it. Through the wall, my mother was on the phone about some delivery she's still not happy about — has been since November.

Then a box needed lifting, and I stopped halfway down, one hand pressed to my side.

Asher had a rail in each hand. Both hit the carpet.

"What."

"It's fine. It's just doing it."

"Doing what?"

"Kicking. It does it in the evenings now. It has a whole schedule."

Asher dropped to his knees, which put his head right level with my stomach and left me standing in the middle of my own bedroom, not knowing what to do with my hands.

"Can I talk to it."

"You're asking my permission."

"I'm asking yours."

"Then yes."

Down there he was close enough that my sweatshirt carried his voice.

"Hey," he said. "Uhm, it's your dad."

Nobody in this house has said that word out loud yet. My mother bought a stroller catalogue and read it twice and still hasn't gone near the word.

My father says the baby eleven times a day and has yet to say whose. Neither of us has used it either — not in a car, not at a clinic, not across a table with a menu on it.

Asher just said it into my sweatshirt, half four in the afternoon, flat as anything — like it was a fact he'd already checked somewhere else.

"Don't give your mother a hard time," he told it. "She's had a year."

The next kick landed right where his voice had been. Asher looked up at me from the floor, his whole face wide open.

"Did you feel that?"

"It's inside me, Asher."

"It answered me."

"It's the size of a melon and it has no opinions."

"It has one." He got up.

Getting up took him longer than it should have. Once he was standing, there was a lot less room between us than either of us had planned on. He put a hand on each side of my waist, low and careful, nowhere near the front of me.

We just stood there. Downstairs the television was going in an empty front room. He didn't close the distance, and he didn't hurry me toward it either — he just left it open long enough that it was plainly mine to take or leave.

So I took it. A handful of the front of his shirt, and I pulled him down and kissed him in a half-built room with a screwdriver on the floor.

It was slow. At seventeen we did this in cars, in a hurry, with somebody about to walk past. This was a completely different thing. One hand settled at the back of my neck and stayed. About four things I'd been refusing since November arrived in me all at once.

"April? I've brought—"

My mother made it two feet through the doorway with a tray in her hands. She stopped dead. Her eyes went from me to Asher and then down to a crib in eleven pieces on my carpet.

"Oh."

"Mom."

"No, no." She was already turning around. "I'll come back. Everyone stay exactly where they are."

"Mom."

"You were assembling furniture," my mother said to the hallway.

"Mom."

"Right. Going."

She went to set the tray on the desk — the desk that isn't there anymore — caught herself, and put it on the floor instead. The door shut behind her with the enthusiasm of a woman who's been waiting a long time for one good thing under this roof.

Both my hands were over my face.

"That happened."

"She brought juice," Asher said. "Two glasses. She knew I was up here."

"Don't."

"I'm just saying your mother's tray had two glasses on it."

I laughed into my palms and couldn't stop for a while. Once my face was out of my hands, he was watching me with an expression I have no name for.

That was the sensible place to stop, and I didn't stop there.

"I emailed them this morning," I said. "I took the job."

"April, that's—" He was already moving toward me. "That's huge. When did you—"

"Twelve games. In the fall."

He stopped where he was. The same arithmetic crossed his face that I'd been running since the middle of the night — and then he had all of it.

"The baby's due in June," Asher said.

"Yes."

"You'd be on the road in September."

"Yes," I said. "With a three-month-old. So one of us needs to say something, and I've been awake since four deciding it wasn't going to be me."

Asher leaned on the counter with his head down and stayed there. He hadn't moved when I left the room.