“I’ll hold you to it,” Damara says, planting a gentle, tempting kiss on my lower lip. “The first thing on my list is another round in bed.”
Fuck,she’s perfect.
“I can do that,” I whisper, moving my lips down to her neck so I can kiss her and make love to her again.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Damara
December, Three Days After I Gave Birth
Of course my dramatic ass offspring had to arrive on Christmas Day. Magnum brought me ham and sweet potato pie in the hospital, but spending all of Christmas Day pushing out a baby is not what I thought Santa would send down the chimney for me. When our baby got here though, it was like the hate in my heart from pushing so hard melted away and I just felt… love like I never felt before. It was serious. Strong. I felt like I would kill just to protect the innocent creature I was holding onto. There was this rush of emotion I felt, like I could never imagine hurting a child and was suddenly able to sympathize with the little girl version of myself that so many people had thoughtlessly hurt.
I knew I wouldn’t put that out into the world.I couldn’t.Magnum and I argued a little about her name, but in the end we agreed: Noelle Sinclair. She’s the best Christmas gift I ever got in my entire life. Even if she bites down so hard on my nipples to feed that I bleed everywhere. Nobody warned me aboutthatpart of things and researching all that birth stuff scared the crap outof me. I’d put it so far out of my head throughout my life that I almost felt like the research would curse me.
It would have helped to have some Aquaphor on hand before Noelle’s more violent feedings…
Her crying wakes me up out of my first connected forty-five minutes of sleep since I brought her home. I know it’s wrong for me to think, but in the depths of my exhaustion, I sometimes wish that I had the strength to sleep through her cries just a little bit longer. I feel like a zombie. By the time I get to her crib in the corner of our bedroom, I stub my toe against something gigantic.
“Ow!”
“Sorry,” Magnum grunts. “I got her.”
“How did you get over there?”
He sleeps less than I do, which he doesn’t have to, but his attentiveness to Noelle borders on psychopathic.
“Walked,” Magnum whispers, somehow finding me perfectly in the dark and kissing the top of my head. I can smell Noelle’s baby smell as she gets closer to me and I reach to hold her. Magnum gives her over to me reluctantly. We both always want to be the ones holding her.
“Is she hungry?” I ask.
“No,” Magnum mutters. “Shit herself.”
I’m surprised I didn’t smell it sooner. It must be the sleep deprivation or the fact that her previous dump singed the hairs on my nostrils.Fuck.
“I’ve got it,” Magnum says, taking her from me with ease.
“You did the last one.”
He gets stern. “You pushed her out and you need sleep. I can change my daughter.”
See what I mean about his protective urges? I know I only want to start a fight over it because I’m tired. So instead of sayingsomething mean or stinging, I bite my tongue and mutter, “Thanks. I love you, babe.”
“I love you too,” he says. “Now get some sleep. Please.”
Again, I’m way too tired to argue. I nod and don’t even remember how I get from my spot near the crib back into bed again. I wake up a couple hours later to hear Magnum on the phone with someone, sitting at the edge of the bed.
“I don’t know why you feel the need to come here,” he says. “We have a newborn, Isaac.”
Isaac. Sinclair? That’s not a name I’ve heard in a while. I shift slowly and try to go back to sleep, but Magnum’s conversation wakes me up, especially because I can only hear his end of things.
“Yes. I understand and trust me, I want my money too.”
…
“With the kids?”
I roll myself out of bed and stumble to the bathroom, pretending that I’m not just doing it to overhear Magnum’s conversation with his cousin. Luckily, I have the very real need to pee going on, even if I thought my bladder would relax once the baby came. Peeing has also been a process involving a lot of these weird postpartum diapers, so I guess I have an excuse to listen up.
