The moment the bed depressed, Tallulah rolled, done with Tommy and reaching for me.
I grinned at my baby and settled her in my lap, gathering pillows to prop her up into a comfortable position to hold her, and immediately lifted my shirt.
This time was no different than last night.
Tommy watched us the entire time as she latched on, and I tried not to blush.
I’d done the whole breastfeeding thing hundreds of times.
In school during registration. At the doctor’s office. During a graduation ceremony. At the grocery store. During dinner in the middle of a busy restaurant. In front of Russell.
Seriously, out of the hundreds of times, with dozens of eyes on me, I’d never felt as vulnerable as I did right then.
It wasn’t a bad feeling, either.
It was a good one.
One where I wanted him to watch me do this for the rest of our lives, through multiple children.
It was a crazy dream, though. Something that would never happen between us.
So I licked my lips and asked him a stupid question.
“What’s on the agenda for today?”
He grinned, obviously realizing that I was uncomfortable with his intense scrutiny.
He rolled over to his back, and then did an ab curl that made my mouth go dry.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I was supposed to be on shift at the clinic, but I have a physician’s assistant covering for me for the day. So, unless you have to be somewhere, I don’t have much of anything planned other than chilling here and watching the water level.”
I nodded my head.
“Maybe you should flip on the news,” I murmured, leaning back into the headboard to get more comfortable.
He did, grabbing a remote from the bedside table at the same time he got to his feet.
“I watched a little bit this morning when I woke up at dawn,” he admitted. “Which I think, in turn, woke Tallulah. I picked her up and she went right back to sleep, though.”
“We do that a lot,” I told him, watching as he pointed the remote at the TV and changed it to a local news station.
“Do what?” he asked, turning his beautiful gaze back on me.
I licked my lips.
“Take morning naps,” I said. “We doze a lot before I have to go to school. So it’s not surprising that she’d do it with you. I think she likes you.”
“She won’t do it for anyone else but you?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Nope,” I confirmed. “My mom and dad try it because she gets up so early, but she doesn’t let them sleep in. If they wake up, and she’s up, she’s awake for the rest of the morning until it’s time to take a nap around lunch time. Drives my dad crazy.”
Tommy grinned.
“Can’t say that breaks my heart,” he admitted. “She’s a good baby.”
She was.
Despite the difficulties of the multiple illnesses that she’d had throughout her life, she was the best baby I could’ve ever asked for.
She slept through the night from the day she turned three weeks old. She ate well, had no problem switching between the breast and bottles. She smiled often, even when she was sick. Took her medicines like a champ and was genuinely a happy kid.
Unless she was with Russell, whom she hated and made no effort to hide that fact.
“She doesn’t usually take to people as fast as she did you,” I told him, turning my eyes to the TV to see a commercial on it. “You should see her with Russell.”
Tommy disappeared into the bathroom, but I still heard his question easily. “What does she do with Russell?”
I was just about to reply when I heard the distinct sound of him using the restroom—with the door open—and I wondered if I was supposed to reply or if I was supposed to wait until he was done.
Since I thought it might be a little hard to hear me over the roar of him peeing—which might I add was impressive that he had such a good bladder—I waited until he entered the room moments later, drying his hands, to answer.
“She screams,” I told him. “She refuses to sit with him, and if I hand her over while she’s asleep, she immediately wakes up. There’s no bounds to her hatred of him.”
Tommy frowned. “What happened the time he gave her aspirin?”
I shivered as I remembered that day.
“It was the day that I had to stay overnight out of town due to school,” I murmured. “Russell convinced me to allow her to stay with him. I dropped her off with him with tons of milk, her medicines, and I called to check on her once an hour.”
Tommy’s mouth kicked up at the corner.
“And he didn’t like that?”
I shook my head. “Nope. He stopped answering the phone, and since I was in class, I couldn’t do a thing about it.”
“So what happened while he was ignoring you?”
Before answering, I switched Tallulah to the other side, as he continued to watch me, eyes taking in everything.
“I’m not really sure why the hell he thought giving her a medicine that I didn’t even have in my bag was okay, but he claims he ‘didn’t realize it would hurt her’ even though I specifically said that she wasn’t to have anything that wasn’t in that bag.”
I gestured to the bag—the same one I’d been using since she was born—that was sitting next to the TV, and he turned to look at it.
“Sounds like he did it spitefully.”
I nodded my head.
“That’s what I think, too,” I murmured. “She wasn’t even sick. She was probably just crying—something he claims wasn’t happening, but I know him and I know my kid—and he was frustrated. So he gave her something.”
“What happened then?”
“She started vomiting and screaming her head off. Which, thankfully, was enough for him to get his head out of his ass and take her into the ER,” I murmured. “At the hospital, she became extremely lethargic. By that point, they were able to pinpoint why she was acting the way she was, and they were able to reverse the effects and cleanse her system of the aspirin, but it was enough for me to get a judge to issue a court order stating that she wasn’t allowed any more overnights with Russell.”
Tommy shivered.
“That could’ve been bad. Had he not taken her in, she could’ve…”
He left the rest unsaid, but I knew exactly what he was talking about. It could’ve been fatal indeed.
“Needless to say, now he’s all butt-hurt that I won’t let him have Tallulah. Even though the only reason he’s even pursuing it in the first place is because his new wife wants them to spend time with her. Or maybe she wants her. Hell, I don’t know.”
Tommy sat on the bed next to me and stroked one finger over to Tallulah’s cheek.
He rubbed it back and forth, causing her to smile.
“She would’ve screamed at Russell if he’d interrupted her meal,” I murmured. “My girl gets hangry.”
He chuckled, then moved his hand from her cheeks to start playing with her curls.
“Hangry seems to be commonplace among women,” he murmured. “I’ll have to remember to not interrupt her meal too often.”
I grinned and turned my eyes back to the TV.