Page 165 of All The Things: The Last Thing He Needs Omnibus

Nora sat next to Tina’s bed—she wasn’t afraid of a few stitches—holding the baby. “He’s just perfect.”

Tina looked awful, with her hair matted down on her face, her skin blotchy and purple in places. Her eyes were closed, and Gavin wasn’t sure if she was napping.

“Do I get to hold him?” he whispered to Nora.

“Of course you get to hold him,” Tina said, only lifting one eyelid, her smile weak but happy.

Gavin sat on the edge of her bed as Nora passed his nephew to him. “He’s so tiny.” Just holding something so small felt precarious, and Gavin thought he’d never been so careful in his entire life.

“He didn’t feel so tiny,” Tina said. Her voice sounded raw, paper-thin.

Ben stood close to Tina and passed her a cup of water. She leaned forward and took a long sip before falling back on the pillows.

“Have you picked a name?” Ben asked, tugging her blanket up higher around her, as if he were tucking her in for the night.

Tina looked hesitant at first, biting her lip as she lifted her head. “Well, I… I want to name him James—maybe call him Jimmy? Or Jaime? But I wasn’t sure if… I know that’s Ben’s dad’s name, and if you guys ever have kids—”

Ben nodded, grinning. “No, that would be…”

“Lovely,” Nora finished for him.

Gavin looked down at the baby—James—and whispered, “Welcome to the family, little man.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Ben

Ben stumbled into the kitchen, his boxer shorts hanging haphazardly off his hips, his robe open in the front. The house was quiet still, the sun barely up yet, sending shoots of golden light through the windows, warming the tiles under Ben’s bare feet. He heard Tina before he saw her, the quiet hum and swoosh-swoosh of her breast pump alerting him to her presence. When he turned to glance at her, he could see her pumping both breasts, plain as day for the world to see.

“I doubt I’ll ever get used to that,” he said as he filled a reusable coffee pod and loaded it into the machine.

Tina snorted a small laugh. She looked exhausted. James slept silently in the bassinet next to her. “If I can, you can,” she said dryly.

“Fair point,” he said as he sat down heavily in a chair at the table.

“Gavin still sleeping?” she asked as Ben looked anywhere but at her.

“Yeah, he’s sacked.”

When James started to stir, Ben reached for him.

“He’ll go back to sleep if you let him be…”

Ben only smiled as he lifted James up and put him on his chest. “Yeah, but then I don’t get to hold him. Between you, Ma, and Gavin, I get to hold him about once a day.”

“That might be a slight exaggeration.”

“But only slight,” he whispered, pressing his lips to James’s silky hair. He took a deep breath, tucked James’s blanket around him as the baby settled and seemed to fall back asleep again. “He’s pretty cool,” Ben said to Tina.

“Yeah he is.” With a laugh, she added, “Especially when he’s asleep.”

Ben remembered Anna with her first baby. She was a zombie, never slept more than two hours at a stretch. Her type A personality flew out the window, and she was suddenly late for everything and usually covered in one bodily fluid or another. She and Ben got along far better now than they had before she had kids. “You’ll be fine,” he said, shifting James into one arm so he could drink his coffee. “He’ll bring out the best and the worst of you.”

Tina turned around as she unstrapped the pumps and went about cleaning and putting everything away. “I don’t even know my best and worst.”

“Get set, ’cause you’re gonna.”

“You sure you’re ready to meet the real me?” Tina asked on her way to the refrigerator. She wrote the time and date on the plastic storage bags and stashed them inside.

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