It’s just too fucking quiet.
“I’ll get you some fresh clothes and we can—”
“No,” Julia says with a shake of her head. Her hand rests at the empty swell of her belly, and her face pinches. Her fingers dig into the fabric of her t-shirt as her eyes move toward the stairwell. “I think I just want to get cleaned up and lie down on the couch.”
She offers a subtle shake of her head when I move to follow behind her, and I nod in understanding. As she reaches the stairs, I blow out a long breath, tossing the car keys onto thecoffee table before I drop our overnight bag off of my shoulder and onto the living room floor.
I fix things for her.
That’s what Ido.
Something hurts her, scares her, shakes her, and I fix it.
I’ve never felt more useless in my life than I do now, unable to fixthis.
“Tripp,” she calls out no more than two minutes after she leaves my side. As I round the corner to the stairwell, she shakes her head at me with a hand resting beneath the curve her stomach. “I can’t— I can’t do it.”
I take the stairs two at a time until I reach her, and we walk into the bathroom together, where I carefully pull her underwear down her legs and hold her hands to help lower her onto the seat of the toilet.
A sharp breath pushes out of her nose and her elbows rest on her knees as I crouch in front of her, pulling packages of maxi pads and wipes toward myself.
“Don’t look at what I’m doing,” I tell her as she throws a glance in my direction. “Look at all the shit on the counter and tell me what I need to get us more of.”
She studies the space behind me while I work to take the maxi pad out of her underwear, wiping the back of her hand against her eyes with a loud sniff.
“Mouthwash,” she finally says.
“What else?”
“You need more aftershave,” she tells me. “I need toner. Maybe some dry shampoo.”
“The skinny yellow can with all the swirls on it, right?”
She nods as I pull a ‘feminine wipe’ from the container in my hand. I have a feeling that they’re really not all that different from the baby wipes tucked away in the closet in Paxton’snursery, but the packaging and the wording make a whole world of difference.
Her body tenses as I gently pull the wipe between her legs with a kiss to her knee, and I toss it into the garbage can, topping it and the used pad with some bunched-up toilet paper, so she won’t have to look at them before I can get the bag changed out.
This isn’t the first time that I’ve taken care of her like this. On her twenty-first birthday, I got a hands-on crash course in changing a tampon in the cramped stall of a dive bar’s ladies’ room.
But this time is different.
She’s not stumbling over herself and laughing at me trying to figure out the logistics of a Tampax.
She wasn’t supposed to be using any of this stuff yet. She was never supposed to use it like this.
Everything about this was supposed to be different.
I just put his crib together last week.
“Anything else?” I ask her with a sharp tightening in my chest.
I try to keep the crinkly plastic wrapper in my hand as quiet as I can as I pull it open, keeping my eyes on hers while they scan our too-messy counter top.
“Your toothbrush looks like crap,” she sniffles. “You need a new one.”
“Yeah, I do,” I nod, offering her the best half smile I can muster. “That thing’s old as shit.”
Her eyes meet mine and we sit together, holding each other’s gaze for long moments before her lip finally gives in to the quiver that she’s been holding back and tears force themselves to fall from her eyes.
