Page 32 of Daddy Bear Picnic

The rest of the week was bright and sunny, I kept a watch on the weather, and we managed to eventually paint the exterior of the house successfully without any rain. And after painting the house, I was inspired to paint again… in my new painting room. The natural light wasn’t as good, but I was a messy painter. The little in me didn’t care if I threw paint around my bedroom, but the adult side did not want to deal with that, so an unused bedroom was now where my canvases and paints were being housed.

Using a color-matched blue from the wood paint, I created a sea of blues, scraping and splattering them on the canvas, and my easel, and the wall behind it, and even the floor. It was chaos, even if I was creating serene. All the shades of lightened blues and purples with a touch of seafoam green as if these were waves or the darkened lake water with the algae and moss-covered stones by the banks.

The house was far from being finished, but I’d told Daddy Bear I wanted to have a house warming sooner rather than later, and the town had a lot going on already, so my housewarmingwas an event they posted on the bulletin in the library, the community center, and the town hall.

A knock came at the door where I was working.

“Yes?” I called out.

“Can I come in?” Elijah’s deep. voice, a Daddy-ish tickle down my back.

“One second.” I maneuvered the easel around so that he couldn’t peek at what I was creating.

The door opened on the squeak of a hinge. “Oh,” he said, looking me up and down. “I didn’t realize you—” He held a brown parcel wrapped box in his hands.

“I always paint in my onesies,” I told him. “What else did you think those white stains were?”

He laughed. “You don’t want to know what I thought that was.”

“Is that for me?”

“Yes. I’m not sure if you’ll like it, but I wanted to give you something you might appreciate,” he said. “And paint, because I saw how much you liked painting the bird house.”

That was also in the light blue we’d painted the house.

As he held the box in his hands, I pulled away the paper to reveal a wooden box. On the top of it,Malcolm’s Toyswas carved into it in really nice lettering. I ran my fingers across it, feeling the ridges of it. “Did you write that?”

“It took a whole bunch of YouTube tutorials, but I managed,” he said. “You wanna open it?”

“There’s more?”

“Well, you’ll have to find out.”

Lifting the lid and almost smacking Daddy Bear in the face, I was greeted by six Sublime teddy blind boxes. “What?” I gasped. “No, you shouldn’t have. These are expensive. What are you—”

“I actually got a discount for ordering six,” he said. “And you deserve it for all the work you’ve put in recently. I know it’s your house, your project, and whatever, but I also know you’re just a sweet little who shouldn’t have to be stressed ever. It’s a reward, baby.”

I think I might’ve squealed in a tone that only animals could hear, in fact, I was sure of it. “Ok, we should open them somewhere else. This room is a hazard. I don’t wanna get—” I looked at my hands, covered in paint. “Let me wash my hands and then we can open them.”

“Unless you want to finish painting,” he said.

My brain was unfocused now. “I’ll wait for it to dry so I can see it was new perspective,” I said, a truth and a lie, I just wanted to open the boxes and see which teddies I got. They were from one of the newer collections too. I was far too giddy, giggling, and skipping my way to clean my hands and change from one onesie to another.

“I’ll have to send a picture to the group chat first,” I said. “Oliver did it last time and it was fun to see what he got.”

We sat on the bed, I bounced around on my knees, trying to curb my excitement as Elijah stared at me with that same look as if the mattress was about to fall through the frame.

I only managed to snap the one picture of all the boxes inside the wooden toy box Daddy Bear had hand crafted for me. I sent it off to the group chat and then tore through all six of the boxes to discover which new Sublime teddies I was going to have. Of the seven, including the rare, I got four different ones and two the same. They were so fluffy and cute, these were the large ones and not the smaller keyring version I had.

“Thank you, thank you,” I jumped onto Daddy Bear and smothered him in kisses.

“Whoa, come on now, you know I don’t trust this bed,” he said, trying not to fall back from me pushing on his face with my kisses.

The bed didn’t break, which always seemed to surprise him.

He was slowly moving in, although neither of us realized it, there was a natural progression of his things at the house, to the point I found a tool box and wondered what the hell it was doing here. The only tool I ever needed was a butter knife, they were surprisingly versatile at helping unscrew the wooden binding on canvases.

It took us a couple of weeks, working together to get the house into a place where it was in the state of being able to be shown off. All the floors were polished and varnished to the natural wood with fluffy rugs on almost every room.

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