“That would be great,” I say without considering Travis’ time. “My office gave me the rest of the day off, but…” I turn to Travis. “I’m not sure if you have something to do.”
“Hang on, I just need to make a call,” he says.
“You don’t have to?—”
He holds up a hand. “I’m just going to step out to make a call, but yeah,” he looks at Dr. Dupas, “we’ll be there.”
We.
Such a little word shouldn’t have an impact on me.
“The tour will be an hour.Are you sure you have time?” I whisper to Travis who returned from his call frowning and has been eyeing his phone off and on since we entered the hospital.
He pushes his phone back into his pocket, looking me in the eye. “There is literally nothing more important than being here right now.”
Something kicks against my ribcage. My mind forbids me to admit that it’s my heart.
I nod in lieu of speaking, and try to ignore the sensations happening between my legs. Which has been happening more and more lately.
“Alyssia?”
“What? Huh?” I startle, my words coming out a little louder than intended, which causes the rest of our eight-person group to turn my way.
“Your brochure.” Travis passes me one of the hospital’s brochures that the head of the hospital’s maternal department handed to all of us.
I thumb through the brochure, admiring the pictures of smiling families with their newborns and the statistics on thesafe and healthy births that the hospital is responsible for over the past half a decade.
As soon as I make note of that statistic, the hospital administrator points it out to us in her speech.
We’re first given a tour of the ground level of the hospital where there’s a gift store and lobby complete with coffee shops and some small eateries before we’re taken up to the maternal unit.
The first section we come to is the delivery area. There are a few nurses who introduce themselves to us, and in both French and English tell us how much they’re looking forward to taking care of us during our deliveries.
Their welcoming and open natures further relax me.
The next section we’re brought to is the nursery. We all come to a stop in front of the large window that separates us from the dozen or so newborns in their glass bassinets. I swoon over the precious infants swaddled in their blankets.
“Look at him,” one of our fellow group members says. She’s around five months pregnant, just like me. I look to where she’s pointing to find one of the newborns has almost completely broken free of his swaddle and his little face is scrunched up as if he’s on the verge of crying.
“He’s not happy,” Travis says, beside me.
He joyfully watches one of the nurses come over to the baby and playfully scold the infant before reswaddling him.
With one of Travis’ hands pressed against the glass, his attention glued to the scene in the nursery.
“Did you ever want to be a dad?” I hear the question before I register that it’s me doing the asking.
It’s hard to square the man standing beside me with the guy I heard a month ago who said that the only thing on his mind was winning a championship.
Almost as if coming out of a state, Travis turns to me.
“In all honesty, I never gave it much consideration.”
I appreciate his honesty. “At the gala you said you weren’t ready for kids,” I paraphrase.
The space between his eyebrows narrows, appearing as if realization just dawned. “Is that why you were hiding from me that night?”
My eyes bulge. “You noticed?”
