Page 58 of Marcus-stiltskin
He smirks. “I was definitely horny, but that’s not why I said that. I’ve been calling you my girlfriend for weeks, if that’s not–”
I roll my eyes. Men. “Then why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m sorry. I just assumed after all the dinners, all the sleepovers, all the orgasms, you’d just realized I liked having you around.”
“You know what they say about assumptions,” I say, repeating Darla’s words.
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“Why didn’t you?”
He looks frustrated. “But if you were worried–”
“But if you were older and had already expressed extreme displeasure at my job...”
He presses his lips together. “I’m sorry.”
I shrug. We fall into silence for a long while, the only sound in the room is the baby gulping down her bottle. “So, you really tell people I’m your girlfriend?”
He offers me a half smile. “I do. I hope that’s okay.”
“Does that mean that this is an exclusive thing? Just you and me? Just us?”
“That’s how I’ve been operating. I don’t know if Willow’s okay with sharing you. It may take some convincing. And Freddie K., we can’t forget him.”
I huff a laugh. “You, me, Freddie K., and Willow then?”
The baby finishes her bottle so he shifts her and a kitchen towel to his shoulder to burp. Marcus takes my free hand and kisses my knuckles. “You, me, Freddie K., and Willow,” he repeats.
I’m not sure when it happens but sometime over the course of the next few days we start to call the baby Jada. It’s so much better sounding than Jane which makes me think of Victorian ladies or Jane Doe which conjures up true crime documentaries–it feels way less legal and more like a name. There isn’t much to do with a baby around. I take her outside with us in her carrier-car seat contraption and set her up out of the way while I help Marcus clean the backyard. It feels strangely like that week in Home Ec, where we all had to carry flour sacks around. Except this one cries and eats and then cries some more.
Marcus and I are quickly thrown into a much more domestic relationship than we have had up until this point, during which I discover that he doesn’t sleep. Like ever. And when he does, he’s the lightest sleeper on the planet. He’s up changing a diaper or fixing a bottle before my brain even registers her cries.
I ask him about it after the second day and he just shrugs.
“I haven’t slept in years, honestly.”
“Years?”
“Yeah. After my first rotation to Afghanistan. We were in this little COP.”
“COP?”
He nods as I take the baby and bottle from him. “It was this tiny little post out in the middle of nowhere, so we could be close to a village–you know, winning hearts and minds. Those hearts and minds weren’t our biggest fans. We’d have to just keep our boots on because you’d never know when you needed to get up and man a weapon. You spend weeks, months like that, and you come back…” he pauses for a minute. “Rewired. Your whole brain is constantly on, constantly ready for an attack. When you do sleep, you wake up reaching for your weapon.”
“Did you ever talk to anyone about it?”
“Like therapy?” He shakes his head and smiles ruefully. “I did after I got out. But while I was in… no. You didn’t admit to that kind of stuff back then. You’d get kicked out. And then after people started dropping like flies because they couldn’t handle it on their own, they’d say you could get help and it wouldn’t affect your career, but we all knew that wasn’t true, so we just kept going with it. Everything affects your career in the Army.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shakes his head. “What can you do?”
“Get a girlfriend who can give you something productive to do with all that time you’re up at night?”
He laughs. “Productive…is that what we’re calling it?” He leans over to kiss me and Jada starts to cry.
“I thought they only cockblocked their actual parents.”