After that, I knew he was pausing in the hall to slide out of his boots so they wouldn’t make any noise on the hardwood floors, so I spoke up. “I’m awake. No need to un-layer. Unless you’re planning on un-layering everything.”
Yeah, right. That part of our married life had gone from “outlook sketchy” to “grab a duster and sweep the cobwebs away.” This time it was doctor’s orders, not just a paranoid husband’s precautions, so I had another month to endure of not getting laid by my oh-so-lay-worthy husband. I was positively rolling in a bed of win and yippee these days.
Jesse moved inside the living room, his smile moving into place when he saw me. I was eight and a half months pregnant, hadn’t been able to do anything more than be a drag for two months, and he still smiled at me like I was the girl he’d fallen in love with several summers ago. Okay, so not all parts of my life sucked.
“Why would you be asleep when that’s what you’re supposed to be doing on bed rest, right?”
I motioned at the bed I’d been having fantasies of torching in a giant bonfire when this whole thing was over. “In order to sleep, a person has to be tired. In order to be tired, a person has to have done something more than turn from one side to the other in bed. ‘Bed rest’ is the biggest oxymoron out there.”
Something flashed in his eyes. “Then this is probably the perfect time to distract you with a present?”
“I know I should be all selfless and say, ‘You didn’t have to do that’ or ‘I don’t need any other gift than getting to spend time with you’ but”—I lifted onto my elbows and winked—“Gimme, gimme.”
He laughed as he ducked back into the hallway and out onto the porch, but this time he let the screen door slam shut. It whined open only a few seconds later, and a few more after that, he came back into view. Or at least partly came back into view. Half of him was hidden behind the large object he seemed to be part wrestling and part balancing in his arms.
My heart thumped harder in my chest. “Is that what I think it is?”
“What do you think it is?”
“Something to get our freak on with.” I suppressed my smile when Jesse broke to a momentary halt.
With a clearing of his throat, he continued toward the little table that rolled across my bed so I could eat my meals, try and fail to sketch something, or bang my head against when the urge arose. Which was often.
“You’re worse than a teenage boy,” he said, setting what was in his arms on my roller table.
“That’s because, unlike the majority of teen boys pretending they know all about sex, I actually have had it, frequently, and enjoyed it just as frequently. I know what I’m missing out on, thus giving me the right to whine, complain, and be unable to carry on a conversation without referring to it in a direct or indirect sense.”
Jesse smiled as he worked on positioning his masterpiece on the table. “I can’t argue with that.” He tightened a few clamps around the lip of the table, securing the object in place. “Do you have any other guesses? Ones that don’t involve us utilizing it to ‘get our freak on’?”
The words sounded so wrong coming from Jesse’s mouth, I came close to laughing, but I was too excited about what he was rolling in front of me. “It’s an easel,” I whispered, my tone as reverent as it got. “An easel for a bed jockey whose muscles are about to jellify and whose brains already have.”
Jesse rolled the table a bit toward the foot of my bed since my stomach was in the way, then he grabbed an armful of pillows from the couch before stacking them behind my back. “Also known as an easel for a woman on bed rest.”
“Wait, you made this?” As Jesse propped me up a bit higher with the mountain of pillows, I noticed the details and craftsmanship that had gone into making the easel. I’d owned enough easels in my day to recognize a store-bought one from a handmade one.
“Well, yeah. Do you think it will work okay? I wasn’t sure . . .” He rubbed at the back of his neck as he fiddled with a few of the clamps, adjusting them a bit tighter. “I took a look at your easels when I was packing up the condo and tried to get this one close, but I wasn’t sure . . .”
I grabbed his hand, which was still fussing with the clamps. “It’s perfect. So much so, I kind of want to cry, and you know how much I hate to cry.”
He stopped playing with the easel with his other hand too. “I thought you could use a distraction from all of this. Sorry it took so long for me to finish.” He sat on the edge of my bed, his arm circling my stomach like it was instinctive. “I started it the first week you were put on bed rest and I meant to finish it in a few days . . . but that didn’t happen.”
I couldn’t stop grinning at the easel. He couldn’t have given me a more perfect gift at this point in time, not even if he’d booked me a daily massage. This right here meant I’d be able to draw from the right kind of angle or paint even. I could entertain myself for hours so long as I had a pencil or a brush or hell, even a crayon. Trying to create something with a notepad balanced on my stomach or lying flat on the table didn’t work. But this would.
Screw the close to crying. When I blinked, a tear spilled down my cheek, and I didn’t care enough to wipe it away. If ever there was a reason to cry, it was over something like this.
“Please don’t feel bad.” I rubbed at the creases in his forehead, trying to erase them. “This is one of the best presents I’ve ever gotten. You have no idea how many sessions of therapy you’ve saved me with this thing. No idea.”