Page 96 of Sexting the Cowboy
I’ve stopped pretending that doesn’t make me consider leaving work in the middle of a clinic day just to watch him be a perfect stay-at-home dad.
Levi is here today visiting in the way their family visits—not a formal visit, just the gravity of people you love pulling them toward the space you made. He leans against the counter witha coffee and his eyebrows furrowed. He looks up when Brick returns to the back office with an empty box. “Hey,” Levi says, amused. “You hear from him?”
Brick’s face shifts. “Not yet.”
“Still in rehab,” Levi adds for me, because he knows I’m standing in the doorway of the exam room pretending I have a throat to culture. “Sticking it out. Says the right things on the group text. Unsubtle flex is that he has weak Wi-Fi.”
He thinks Reno is also weaponizing distance to avoid us as a unit, and specifically me. We all do. It doesn’t matter. The fact that he’s in the place that might fix the thing that broke him trumps the petty thought.
I can handle being avoided. I cannot handle attending a funeral. “I’m glad he’s there. I hope it works.”
“Also a spectacular excuse not to see his father and his father’s fiancée…”
“A man’s gotta live with his choices,” Brick says neutrally. I’m not sure if he means Reno or himself.
“I hope he comes to the wedding,” I say. “But I’m not going to hold the ceremony hostage to his temper. If he comes, he comes. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t. I will get married either way.”
Levi tips his coffee cup at me. “Good. Also, I’m wearing a tie.”
“Your mother would be proud,” Brick says, dropping the last of the boxes into the hallway and washing his hands with that thoroughness he applies to dishes and feelings both. “Everyone eats at our house afterward.” Then, because he listens for little noises only he can hear now, he tilts his head and squints towardthe back. “She’s awake.” He leaves to check on Mae in my office-turned-partial nursery.
Minutes melt in the low hum of clinic life. A man with a rash insists he changed nothing in his environment until Jaden asks if he’s still sleeping with his dog after firewood deliveries. Same stuff, different day in our world.
Then the back door opens with its particular hinge squeak, and the entire room tilts like a field of flowers turning toward the sun. Brick enters in that lopsided way that means he’s carrying the world as if it’s lighter than it is. Mae is tucked against his chest crosswise, drowsy and warm, wearing a cloud-soft onesie that saysTroublein a font Jaden designed to make me laugh. He must have taken her for a walk when she woke up—he loves doing that. All the shops around here know them, and they love doting on both of them.
Last week, he came in with a fresh manicure. Apparently, the nail techs took turns holding our baby and trying to teach her Mandarin. He tried to explain that she isn’t talking yet, but that didn’t stop them.
“She needs her mama for lunchtime,” Brick says as he passes her to me.
“Good thing her mama has a minute,” I say, and hold out my arms. He transfers her with the little ceremony we’ve developed—the pause, the kiss to the forehead, the soft whisper that we both pretend we can’t hear. Her weight settles into my chest, and every part of me that holds tension lets it go in increments, like easing off a brake down a hill I didn’t know I was on.
“We’re going to go let patients be disappointed by me instead of you for ten minutes,” Brick says, already turning to steer Levitoward the hallway like a bouncer who learned his moves in a library. “Come on. Let’s let them have privacy.”
I retreat to my office chair and lower myself slowly because if there is any dignity left in my body, it deserves to be spared the indignity of falling into a squeaky swivel seat with a baby and a full heart. Mae turns her head in that miraculous rooting way that still makes me laugh out loud because the biology is so specific.
I unclip my bra with the dexterity of a person who can put in a suture one-handed and who can also breastfeed in an exam room while ordering syringes on hold with medical supplies, if she needs to.
She latches, greedy and perfect. The first pull always makes me gasp, soft and involuntary. The ache that follows is not pain. It is relief.
My office is not much more than a closet with a window, a desk, a chair, a lamp, a crib, and the diplomas I hung too low. There’s a plant in the corner that’s trying its best, and I talk to it more than I admit. The blinds are crooked, and I still haven’t bought a rug because I can’t decide between “adult with taste” and “woman who spilled grape juice today.”
Mae’s hand curls around my finger as if she’s checking whether I’m still here. I am. I am here, in this chair, in this body, in this life I didn’t plan. It has been a thousand small surrenders to realities I once might have resisted on principle.
Mae sighs around a mouthful of milk and opens and closes her hand. I brush her dark hair with my knuckles, and the softness goes straight through my skin into the hard places. Her ears are elfin. Her eyebrows are faint and determined. I cannot believe Iget to love something this easy that also makes demands at three in the morning like a goddess bent on revenge.
I have never been happier.
The End