“Yes,” Kallum said. There was awe scrawled all over his face. “I feel it.”
He lifted his eyes to mine just as she kicked again, and I pressed my hands over his, and suddenly it was like none of the messy stuff had ever happened. It was just him and me and our baby, it was just pure joy... and then we both seemed to realize at the same time that this was the most he’d touched me since that fateful last night in Christmas Notch.
I didn’t want him to stop.
And from the way his eyes dipped from my face to where our hands tangled over my stomach, I got the sense that he didn’t want to stop touching me either.
“I never thanked you,” I murmured.
“Never thanked me for what?” he said as he tore his eyes away from our hands.
“The pizzas,” I said. “The maple bacon ones. I have no idea how you managed to send me a fresh one every day, even while you were in Kansas City.”
“The pizza mafia owes me a few favors,” he said, and I laughed, although I noticed his answering laugh was a little strained. I added that to the small but fascinating mental bucket of Kallum Lieberman mysteries.
“Kallum,” I said, having no idea what I was going to say or why, but knowing that I had to tell him how his touching me made me feel. “I think that maybe I—”
“We need you in the back, boss!” called a voice from the kitchen. “The natural gas hookup isn’t where you said it would be!”
With a heavy groan, Kallum got to his feet. “Hold that thought and hold still,” he said.
“I can’t go anywhere without you, remember? You are my chauffeur today.”
A bright grin. “Oh yeah. Sometimes my foresight amazes me.” And then he trotted off to go deal with the gas hookup crisis.
Topher plopped down on the booth next to me after Kallum had disappeared through the brick opening to the kitchen. “He’s trying really, really hard at this whole baby thing, you know.”
“I know,” I replied with a smile at Kallum’s nephew. He’d been at Kallum’s new apartment today when Kallum had swung by with me to show the new crib he’d built himself. Topher and Kallum had been jostling with each other to show me all the baby things Kallum had stockpiled already—a bottle warmerand an entire Target aisle’s worth of baby bottles, a diaper pail with enough bags to last a nuclear winter, and a mobile for the baby’s crib that had dangling pizza slices.
(“It’s custom,” Kallum had told me proudly. “From an Etsy store. It even plays the Slice, Slice, Baby jingle when you turn it on.”)
Topher had seemed to be equally proud of all the baby stuff—he’d helped Kallum pick out all the stocking caps—and had helped put the crib together. He’d been staying at Kallum’s while he waited for his first couple paychecks from his new job to roll in, but he already had his eye on a place out near Studio City and was getting a decent amount of overtime as a catering attendant for the TV studio that produced Nolan’s showBand Camp.
“And I’m so glad he was willing to move to LA, even part-time,” I added. “Although this location for Slice, Slice, Baby seems to need a lot of elbow grease.”
“Yeah, just imagine if he’d taken thatShark Tankdeal or whatever,” Topher said, stretching out his legs. With his height, scruff, and dark blond hair, he could have been a younger Kallum, and it made me wonder what any sons of ours would look like one day.
“Shark Tankdeal?” I echoed, still thinking about sons and how I maybe wanted them. With Kallum.
“Yeah,” Topher said. “You know. They were going to funnelso much moneyinto SSB to expand it. All fifty states and then internationally too.”
“They were? I had no idea.” Kallum hadn’t said anything about it, which was strange. Yes, our new routine was growingslowly and carefully, with both of us cautious about how much we leaned on each other and shared, but over the last eight weeks, we’d become something like... well, like friends. Which probably should have comebeforethe lovers and coparents part, but Kallum and I seemed destined to do things out of order, I guessed. Either way, I was still surprised he hadn’t mentioned such a big opportunity to me. “That sounds like it could have been huge.”
“It would have been epic,” he pronounced with solemnity. “He would have been a pizza emperor! But it would have meant a lot of time away from you and the bambino, so he couldn’t do it. He told that tank of sharks no thank you, and decided he’d expand whatever way would give him the most time with the baby. And you.”
And you.
And that was it, wasn’t it? When I’d told Kallum I’d needed space, he hadn’t pressed me and he hadn’t crowded me. But he hadn’t run away either. He’d let me know he was there to help with anything I needed—that he was there to be a father when the time came—and that took so much patience and generosity. And that wasn’t even factoring what he’d given up for Slice, Slice, Baby, which, however metaphorically, was his baby too.
He’d given all that up for achance. For the hope that we’d be able to mend things and peaceably coparent. For the hope that I would learn to trust him again.
And I was startled to realize that Ididtrust him. It had come slowly, quietly, a gentle tide coming with each call and text and ride to the doctor’s office. With his signed leases and diaper pails andConsumer Reportslistings. With his sweet,happy, surety that everything was going to be okay, because he’d make it that way.
I’d been so afraid to give him grace because so many people in my life had been grace-eaters—they’d devour any grace I’d given them and still needed more and more, endlessly, eternally. But Kallum devoured nothing. He gave and gave and he tried.
I wanted to be more like him, actually. And I wanted more of him inmylife, not just our child’s life, and it was so obvious it could have been kicking me in the stomach along with the baby:
I still loved Kallum Lieberman.
