The Baby (The Boss #5)

by Abigail Barnette

  Though I questioned my abilities at human interaction outside of the house, I was pretty proud of my tiny human skills in the home, and learned even more with Neil there to guide me. I’d gotten my on-the-job-training while he’d been in the hospital, but I was more at ease, and that seemed to put Olivia at ease, which made a huge difference. Now that she trusted me to fulfill her needs competently, she was a much more pleasant baby to be around.

  Sometimes.

  “I think she’s finally down for the night,” I said, dropping the baby monitor on the counter.

  Neil leaned on the sink, his head drooping on his shoulders. “Oh, thank god.”

  The day had been particularly rough. Olivia’s stupid, indecisive molars had been refusing to erupt all week. She was exhausted, we were exhausted, and the seven consecutive seconds of quiet we’d had since I’d entered the kitchen were like seven thousand years in paradise.

  “I don’t remember this being so exhausting with Emma.” He rubbed one hand over his face.

  I froze. He’d mentioned Emma by name, without crying or staring off into space. He picked up Olivia’s bottle from the sink and turned on the water.

  “I don’t remember ever being so exhausted,” I said, apprehensively steering us away from the statement he’d made. I wasn’t sure it hadn’t just been a slip of the tongue, and I didn’t want to call attention to it, just in case. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to mourn for Emma, but we were suddenly standing in our first conversation since her death that it wasn’t haunting us, and I clung to it desperately.

  Spaghetti-O’s had been on the menu for Olivia this evening, and I collected up her sticky little spork and bowl and carried them to the sink. I myself hadn’t eaten any dinner, yet, because feeding her required every ounce of concentration and physical dexterity I had. I ran two fingers around the inside of the bowl and brought them to my mouth to suck off the sauce. “And I forgot how good these are when you’re starving.”

  Neil put down the brush and dropped the bottle into the strainer at the side of the sink. And he smiled.

  A real smile, not one he forced.

  My chest ached.

  And the expression didn’t falter. It actually grew as he said, “You must be dying of malnutrition, if you’re desperate enough for those.”

  Though I wanted the moment to last, I couldn’t find the words to play along. Grief had become normalcy, and now, anything less than heartache felt like thinking you’re missing the bottom step when your feet are already on the ground. I couldn’t bluff my way past the shock, so I just stared at him, and I knew he saw straight through me, to the reason for my paralysis.

  Before I could react, his arm was around my waist, jerking me up against his body so forcefully I dropped the dishes. They clattered on the floor as his mouth covered mine. My hands flew up in surprise then fell to his shoulders, rhythmically tugging and crumpling his sweater.

  It had been so long since he’d touched me like this. Some part of me that had gone dormant out of self-preservation, the part of me that required intimacy with Neil to be fully alive, reluctantly woke. I opened my mouth under his. I didn’t want to give over to the electrifying rush of hormones that coursed through my veins, just in case the mood changed, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  Neil lifted his head, his eyes searching mine.

  He didn’t have to ask. I said “Yes,” as I pulled my t-shirt over my head. I was braless underneath, and his hands fell to my breasts, kneading them almost too roughly as his mouth ravaged mine again. I reached for the fly of his jeans, popping the button with a hard jerk of his waistband.

  “Do you need to stop and take a pill?” I gasped against his cheek. With all the sex we hadn’t been having lately, I wondered if he’d even bothered to bring any with him.

  “No,” he mumbled between the kisses he nibbled down my throat. “Let’s just…see what happens…”

  If seeing what happened included not having intercourse, I would have still been okay with that. All I needed were his hands on me, the sexual desire between us. While my logical brain knew that Neil’s prior abstinence had nothing to do with me but with his fragile emotional state, there was still a little voice that whispered doubt in my mind. Every time he’d slid beneath the covers, giving me a quick peck and a “good night”, my thoughts had turned to taunts. You’re not enough. He’s not attracted to you, anymore. The fact that he was touching me, now, needing me physically, soothed me so effectively that, if we stopped at that very second, I would have still felt high and satisfied.

  He grabbed the baby monitor off the counter as we stumbled from the kitchen. We stole awkward kisses and struggled out of our clothes along the way, until we reached the stairs and sprinted up, into the living room. We would have to be more quiet, as Olivia’s room wasn’t as far away, but there was no slowing our frantic breathing. After he tossed the baby monitor onto the end table, Neil pushed my panties down my legs—of course we’d do this the day I wore cotton Hanes with the hole under the waistband—and me to the couch. I writhed on the leather as he stepped out of his jeans and kicked them aside. In a blink, he was on top of me, naked skin against naked skin. Then, he was inside of me, joining us in strong thrusts. I arched up to meet every one.

  I wrapped my legs around his back, my arms around his shoulders. “I love you. And I love your cock, too.”

  He laughed breathlessly, moving harder against me. “I love you,” he gasped against my ear, then sucked my earlobe into his mouth. I love you.

  I hadn’t come since my date with Gena, and I’d lost track of how long ago that had been. It was just too exhausting, and most of the time, I’d rather sleep than masturbate. Now, though, I felt how badly I needed it. The thick base of his penis pushed with delicious pressure against my pelvis, and his coarse pubic hair rasped my straining clit. I wriggled my hand between us, and Neil rose up on his knees, grasping my hips in his big hands to move me back and forth with his thrusts. I rubbed my fingers over my clit, and I couldn’t stay quiet. Shouts of ascending volume and pitch wrenched from my throat as I came closer and closer to my peak. My cunt clenched and released in violent tremors around his cock, and I sobbed with relief.

  I didn’t want to come down. I wanted to stay there, suspended in that perfect physical pleasure. I’d missed it too much, needed it too much, to let it pass so fleetingly by. Besides me, nobody knew my body the way Neil knew it. Sex with him was a hundred times better than sex with anyone else.

  “Harder!” I begged, pumping my hips frantically, and he obliged, pounding me so hard that my sobs of ecstasy turned to cries of pain. My next orgasm battered me with shocks of pleasure, each one greater than the last, until I split apart at the metaphorical seams. He growled, “Ah, fuck, I’m coming,” and drove deep, tearing a startled shriek from my throat. I felt the hot, wet gush of his cum inside of me, and I wanted it to fill me up, to spill out of me and pool beneath me on the leather. I reveled in the obscene imagery, and as he pulled out, I couldn’t help myself. I reached down and pushed two fingers into my cunt, coaxing his semen out so I could spread it up and over my clit. It only took a few quick flicks of my fingers to bring me to the edge again, though my body throbbed there for some painfully long seconds before I came for the third time.

  Neil sat back on his heels, breathing hard, his face red and covered in a sheen of perspiration. I pushed my sweat-drenched hair back and closed my eyes, needing to catch my own breath.

  “God, but I needed that,” Neil rasped.

  My muscles burned, and everything south of the Mason-Dixon Line ached. Worth it.

  My eyes flew open. “Neil…listen.”

  We both went still and silent as corpses.

  Olivia hadn’t woken up. It was a miracle.

  We cleaned up the couch then headed downstairs, dressing ourselves again in reverse order from that in which we’d discarded our clothes all over the house. In the kitchen, I rummaged through the cupboards for some bread and Nutella.

 
“I know this isn’t on my diet,” I admitted guiltily as I popped the bread into the toaster. “But I’m going to eat it, anyway.”

  “Don’t apologize for eating, Sophie,” Neil scolded gently.

  I snorted. “I’m not apologizing for eating. I’m apologizing for not being more concerned about not getting fat.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder and turned me to face him. “Stop it. You don’t owe it to me to maintain some ideal weight. I want you to be happy, and you can’t be happy and perfect at the same time.”

  I picked up the jar from the counter. “Yeah, well, it’s easy for you to say. I just spent half a year worrying that my husband wasn’t sexually attracted to me, anymore.”

  His eyes clouded with uncertainty. “I made you feel that way?”

  “You didn’t make me feel that way. I just…felt that way.” I shrugged. I wanted him to understand the difference, but it was difficult. Neil blamed himself for things he had no control over, just like I blamed myself in similar situations.

  “Listen,” I began, a tired plea. “I know why we weren’t having sex. You have been through so much, and you’re still going through it. And you were awesome about giving me the freedom to fulfill my physical needs. There are just some things I can’t get from anybody else. It was easier to blame myself and my appearance for the disappearance of those things. It felt…less selfish.”

  He nodded.

  “You’re still going to feel guilty, aren’t you?” I asked, the corner of my mouth twitching.

  He let out a resigned exhale through his nose. “I can’t help it. It’s too ingrained in me not to.”

  “Well, can I feel a little guilty about the fact that we didn’t use a condom?” I winced and admitted, “I had sex with Gena. I forgot to mention it before…”

  “Ah. Well.” He shrugged. “We’ll play it safe until we get tested, again. We’re not the first people to make a mistake.”

  I put my arms around him and stood on my tiptoes to kiss him. “That was a fantastic mistake, by the way.”

  “It really was. I don’t know why we don’t do that more often,” he said. “No, I do. The small tyrant who mercilessly directs our days and nights rarely allows it.”

  “Please tell me it gets better.” I was trying to make a joke, but I sounded desperate and unhinged when I laughed.

  He smiled at me. “It does. You’ll find it easier when we’re back in New York.”

  It had been easy enough to forget our lives in New York, the ones that had been put on hold since I’d come to Iceland to be with him. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t push him to go home, even if he never wanted to leave. Was going back a real possibility?

  “Do you think we will go back to New York?” I opened a drawer to get a knife for my impending toast.

  He frowned. “Of course we will.”

  “I didn’t know. I was just kind of…rolling with things.” I faced him and tapped my fingers on the countertop. “I was willing to stay here, if you had to.”

  He gave me a small, grateful smile. When he spoke, he choked up a little. “I could never ask you to abandon your life, darling.”

  “I know. But you didn’t ask.”

  He opened his arms, and I stepped into them gladly. And he didn’t feel like a stranger to me, anymore.

  * * * *

  Despite the mild jet lag and the weird effect of having a sun that never fully set, I managed to get a few hours of sleep. The downside was that, when I woke, I had no idea what time it was, because it was still freaking light out. I slapped the nightstand futilely until my fingers hit my phone. It was four-thirty in the morning, and Neil wasn’t in bed with me.

  I tried to not feel immediate dread, or think of all the ways he could have hurt himself. I pulled on the robe that matched my slinky satin nightgown, the blue Carine Gilson he’d given to me in this very room the night he’d proposed. I tied the sash at my waist as I headed down the stairs, to the second floor. I checked in on Olivia, expecting to find Neil with her, but she was still asleep, her soft baby snores releasing with every fall of her chubby tummy.

  “I’m in here, Sophie,” I heard from down the hall. I wondered if he’d been listening for me, if he’d known I would come looking. I closed Olivia’s door quietly and padded down to the study. I hadn’t noticed that the light was on. Inside, Neil sat at an iMac, the large screen illuminating the room almost as much as the small desk lamp did.

  “Are you working?” I asked, my throat raw, probably from sleeping with my mouth open.

  He looked up at me over the tops of the glasses he wore when he didn’t have his contacts in. “Hmm? No. I just couldn’t sleep. Someone was doing an incredible amount of snoring up there.”

  “Shut up.” I laughed. I peered over his shoulder. On the screen was a picture of Emma. A younger Emma, with a pink streak in her hair, but unmistakably her.

  My expression must have given away the stab of alarm I felt, because he said quietly, “I’m just revisiting some memories. I’m not saying goodbye, or anything of the sort.”

  “I didn’t think—” I began, but I didn’t finish. Because I had thought, for a moment, that he was doing that.

  “I’ve had a very difficult time even thinking of her lately,” he went on. “Or I was having. We were told in grief counseling that, one day, we would be able to look at pictures of our lost loved ones and remember the good times, rather than the bad.”

  “That’s the same thing Rudy told you,” I reminded him. It was a nice sentiment, but just that. It had only been six months since Emma’s death. If Neil believed he was already through his grief, he was fooling himself.

  I had to test it. “Is today that day?”

  He scrolled to another photo, Emma proudly beaming at the camera while cuddling a bunny. She had on a shirt that read something in Icelandic, but I guessed from the large red no sign over it that it probably had something to do with protesting animal testing. Neil let out a long, weary sigh. “No. It’s not today. I just needed to see her.”

  “Do you mind if I stay?” I didn’t know how I would feel if he sent me away. Nervous, for sure, but a time was going to have to come that I could trust him. I could let that be tonight.

  He smiled sadly at me and reached for my hand. I gave it to him, and he pulled it to his mouth to kiss it. “I meant it when I said I didn’t want to be alone, anymore. Stay.”

  The sick dread in my chest eased. I pulled one of the sleek black enameled chairs near the bookcase to sit beside Neil at the desk.

  He clicked another folder, and it opened on pictures of a wedding. It wasn’t our wedding, or Emma’s.

  “Oh, these might not—” he began, and I waved my hand.

  “I know you were married before. I’m not threatened by your ex-wife.” That was kind of a fib; I was growing mature enough in my late twenties to recognize that I felt threatened by any woman I suspected of knowing my husband better than I did, past or present. Recent events had exacerbated that, but at least I owned it.

  I vaguely recognized the stunning blonde on Neil’s arm in the first photo. The only other time I’d ever seen his ex-wife was when she stood crying on the sidewalk outside of the baby store, but she was definitely the same woman in the frosty highlights and expertly applied makeup. Her dress was lacy and beaded and tight and strapless, a bridal abomination I allowed her a pass for, because her arms were Michelle Obama toned. Neil stood beside her, looking more like the man I’d met at the airport than the man he was now. His big, stupidly besotted smile warmed me all over, even though it was directed at a different woman, one he’d been madly in love with before he’d been madly in love with me.

  “Wasn’t she beautiful?” he said quietly, and it took me a split second of horror before I realized that he wasn’t looking at Elizabeth. He was looking at Emma, captured in the margin of the photo. Her lilac bridesmaid dress made her sun-kissed shoulders practically glow, and her hair, in a pixie cut, turned her into a little elf against the backdrop of th
e lush grass and the water beyond. Neil’s first wedding had been in Italy, in a castle. Emma had probably outshone every breathtaking vista and medieval arch.

  He clicked to the next photo. Emma sat at a table, a half-finished piece of cake in front of her. I didn’t recognize the guy next to her, but he was a cutie, with dark skin and thick dreads pulled back. He had his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned her head in toward him. Their smiles and body language were the perfect picture of a very young couple in love, without a care in the world.

  “That was Jason,” Neil said with a note of fondness. “He was a nice young man. A bit of a kiss-ass, but a good chap.”

  “A kiss-ass?” I pretended to be surprised. “While dating your daughter?”

  Neil made a noncommittal noise and clicked rapidly through the next few pictures, of him and Elizabeth dancing beneath the high arched ceiling of a room in the castle. He shot a quick glance at me as he did so, as though he had something to hide. I knew it bothered him that I hadn’t splurged on some elaborate destination princess wedding, but it couldn’t have been more perfect if we’d had our ceremony at Versailles.

  He found another picture of Emma, dancing with Jason, and murmured, “I don’t know why she finished with him. He went off with the Peace Corps, but I don’t know…”

  Neil’s voice died away, and the hand resting on the desk turned to a fist. “If he had just been paying closer attention. He was probably texting or fiddling with the radio or, or—”

  We weren’t talking about Jason, anymore.

  Neil pushed back from the desk. “I knew this would happen! I offered to pay for a driver for them, but he had too much fucking pride to take anything!”