Daddy looks so sincere as he says those words.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
“Come in!” Daddy yells.
Daddy places the nipple in my mouth, and I start suckling subconsciously as Yamal walks into the room.
“Wha—”
“We need to wait to talk until after she finishes her bottle,” Daddy explains.
I look over at Yamal to see him raising an eyebrow.
“Just sit down. She is almost done, and then we can talk,” Daddy says.
My whole body warms at his words. He was serious about no one talking. Does he really care that much about me?
I push the thoughts to the back of my mind as I continue to drink the delicious liquid like my life depends on it.
“She will surely gain weight if she feeds like that,” Yamal says.
“Yamal.” Daddy glares at him.
I look over to see Yamal holding his hands up.
“She is done. I waited until she finished before I said anything,” he informs Daddy. “Look at the bottle, and you will see that she is done.”
I didn’t even realize it was finished.
“More?” I mumble around the nipple of the bottle.
I am full, but at the same time, I want more. If someone could hook me up to a machine, I would never stop drinking it. Wenever had anything like this on the space station. All our food was bland, but this is amazing.
“You can’t have any more right now, but before you go to bed, you can.” Daddy looks down at me and smiles.
He pulls the bottle from my mouth and places it on the table next to us.
“Why couldn’t we talk while she was feeding?” Yamal asks. “We did it yesterday.”
“She choked earlier and panicked about drinking again. I promised no one would talk while she was feeding, so it wouldn’t happen again,” Daddy replies.
“What can I help you with?”
Daddy moves me, so I’m sitting up in his lap, and he wraps the blanket around me.
“She can’t keep warm. She was shivering when I woke her up from her nap, and she was under a blanket,” Daddy explains. “She is even colder to the touch, and she has been near me for a while now.”
Yamal hums and looks at me. “Nothing abnormal showed up on her tests.”
Worry churns inside my stomach. He didn’t find anything. Am I going to die from being so cold?
“How much do you weigh?” Yamal asks.
I shrug. We never weighed ourselves on the space station, and even if we did, I don’t know what normal would be.
“Let’s weigh her,” Yamal suggests. “Then if that comes back normal, we will do some other tests.”
Daddy gets up and carries me into the left corner of his room, where there’s a scale.
