mouth gaped wide enough for a fly to go into it.
It was so fucking adorable.
I wished I hadn’t left my phone downstairs so I could take a picture.
“She’s so cute. I can’t even be mad or annoyed with her for keeping me up last night,” I whispered to him.
“Did she keep you up a lot before?”
Before. Right. “I barely slept the first… four months. She was waking me up every other hour to feed her or change her diaper, and I’d still constantly wake up to come check on her even if she didn’t make a peep. I worried that she’d stop breathing or someone would climb in the window while I was sleeping to steal her or something. It was kind of bad, but right after that, she started sleeping almost through the night.” I had done some difficult things in my life, but none of them were anywhere near as hard as this parenthood thing. I didn’t know the meaning of pressure until I had the responsibility of keeping a mini life alive.
But hey, she was still here, so I couldn’t be fucking up the job too badly.
At least not yet.
“I had an air mattress in here at first so that I wouldn’t have to walk all the way back to my room.” AKA all the fifteen feet down the hall, which had been more like a mile and half when I could barely keep my eyes open and my body hated me for the trauma I’d put it through after so long of taking care of it.
Jonah didn’t say a word, but I could hear his steady breathing beside me as I kept rubbing Mo’s sole, her little eyes fluttering closed and then reopening with a jolt, over and over again. I’d read her book too early, I guessed.
The sigh that came out of his mouth had me glancing over at him.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Those two hands went to the top rail of the crib, fingers curling over the edge, his attention totally focused on the squirming body inside of it. “I can’t help but wonder… if I hadn’t gotten hurt, if I hadn’t gone off to my granddad’s farm to sulk about for so long… if I would’ve hardened up and come before or answered the damn phone or messaged you back or checked my fucking email… if I wouldn’t have felt sorry for myself like a selfish fucking arsehole….”
Oh.
That’s what he meant.
“I don’t know how you can forgive me for leaving you. For leaving you both,” he whispered in a voice rougher than I’d ever heard him capable of before.
He sounded so damn upset, it made my heart hurt, and I wasn’t expecting that.
His right hand reached inside the crib, and his thumb and index finger took hold of the other tiny heel just as he sighed. “I should’ve been here.”
Should’ve, would’ve, could’ve. One of my coaches had told me once that those were the most pointless set of words in the world. But you learn to live with them, you learn from them, or you let them weigh you down for life.
And maybe I had been pissed off at him for so long for not being around. But he was here now, and, mostly, I understood why he’d done what he did. Not totally, but mostly. He was sensitive and apparently shy.
I knew all about what I expected of myself. So I could understand the expectations someone else would put on themselves too. I wasn’t that much of a hypocrite.
Those shoulders of his were enormous, but there are certain weights that no one could bear.
Especially alone.
And really, seeing his profile, hearing his words, I couldn’t help but forgive him for what he’d done. He was going to beat himself up over it more than I ever would. He’d suffered enough maybe, I thought with surprise. I hadn’t even made a shitty comment to him in a while because there hadn’t been anything to complain about.
He should’ve been here, yeah. But he hadn’t. But he was now.
I didn’t hesitate to lean my shoulder against him, just a little, that ache in my heart still faintly there. “It would’ve been nice to have you around so I could blame you for all those months of morning sickness,” I told him quietly, sucking up the heat of his clothing against my bare arm. “Or to bitch when I was sleepy all the time, didn’t want to eat anything but fruit, and on the nights I couldn’t sleep