“No. Wait. The first one.”
“Are you sure?”
She sighs. “No. What do you think?”
“I think I like whatever you like.”
She backhands my chest. “You’re not helping.”
“They’re all blue.”
“No. That one is sky blue.” She gestures to the first one,then points to the middle swatch. “That one is called soft sky. And the last one is morning sky.”
I roll my lips together to smother a smile.
“Remind me again why I keep you around?” she asks.
I offer up a self-deprecating smirk and a shrug. “Orgasms, probably.”
She simply rolls her eyes and ignores the comment.
After an hour-long debate, she narrows it down to the second and third swatches, and in the end, we flip a coin.
“Morning sky it is,” I say.
I head down to the hardware store and pick up two gallons of the stuff. When I get back home, Angie’s sitting in the middle of the nursery floor with pieces of the crib strewn around her as she reads through the instruction manual, her brow furrowed.
“Baby girl, what are you doing?”
“It’s called nesting,” she deadpans.
“I know that. But why are you putting together the crib when we haven’t even finished painting?”
“I needed something to do. Idle hands or some shit. I don’t know. Stop questioning me and help.”
I set the paint cans down near the closet and hold out my hand. “Give it here.”
She hands me the papers, which contain little more than vague diagrams with no description. Part of me wants to shove all of the pieces back into the box and save it for later, but I know better than to disrupt Angie’s carefully laid plans. She was headstrong before the pregnancy, and it’s only amplified tenfold in recent weeks. The closer we get to her due date, the worse it gets.
It takes two full hours to assemble the white vintage-style spindle crib, with a detour somewhere around the one-hour mark when I realized I’d assembled parts of it backward. Once it’s complete, Angie helps me cover it with a tarp, and wefinally start painting the upper half of the wall that’s not covered in wainscoting.
Angie wipes the back of her hand across her brow, leaving behind a blue smudge. She looks sexy as hell in my oversized paint splattered T-shirt tied above her belly and a pair of cut off jean shorts with a hair tie holding them closed.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she says.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re going to eat me alive.”
“Is that a bad thing?” I take one tentative step closer, swiping my thumb through the forehead smudge and holding it up.
She lifts the paintbrush and dabs it on my nose. “There. Now we match.”
I nuzzle against her in retaliation.
She giggles and swipes the brush down my bare chest. All hell breaks loose. I dart over to the paint pan and dip my entire palm into it.
She cocks her head and inches backward. “Don’t you dare, Griffin Hayes.”
