Total pages in book: 43
Estimated words: 39947 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 200(@200wpm)___ 160(@250wpm)___ 133(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 39947 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 200(@200wpm)___ 160(@250wpm)___ 133(@300wpm)
“You prepared this beforehand?” I bit down my smile.
“Well, yeah.” He shrugged. “I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Since you told me you were pregnant, actually. Is that too much?”
No. It wasn’t too much. It was just perfect. And if I weren’t pregnant, and there wasn’t so much at stake, I would probably try to date Grant for real. He was so easy to love that trying not to fall in love with him felt like an uphill battle.
“Nope. Not too much at all.”
“Good. Let me know when you want to start packing, and I’ll take a day off. I’ll do the heavy lifting.”
And it was funny, because he really had done the heavy lifting without lifting a single finger.
Because in the way he treated me, he’d singlehandedly restored my faith in men and humanity.
Chapter Eleven
Layla
Grant: How do you feel about George?
Layla: Washington, Clooney, Carlin . . . ? Can you be more specific here?
Grant: No, George as a name. If it’s a boy.
Layla: Oh. No. Too serious. If we have a boy, it’ll probably be a Tristan or a Kaleb, you know? Something fun and attractive.
Grant: I don’t like Kaleb.
Layla: Rude. He’s not even out yet.
Grant: But I’ll also go along with pretty much eighty percent of the names you want.
Grant: Not Phyllis by the way.
Layla: Good. This was a test and you failed miserably. You almost agreed to call our maybe-daughter after an STI.
Grant: Won’t happen again.
Layla: What about Chad?
Grant: No.
Layla: Chandler?
Grant: Go to sleep.
Layla: Make me.
I stared at the screen, grinning. A second later, it lit up and Grant’s name flashed across it. I swiped to answer. “Yes?”
“Are you in bed?”
“Yes.” It was after nine thirty on a weekday. Where else would I be?
“Good. Get comfortable, because I’m going to read you Moby-Dick.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s very sleep inducing, trust me. One of my favorite books, but boy, some parts test your ADHD threshold.”
I laughed. “Don’t you have better things to do with your time?”
“No, not that I can think of.” I heard the smile in his voice. “Why, do you have better things to do with your time?”
“I mean, I was planning on scrolling through Instagram and see where the wind takes me . . . girl dinner tutorials or heart-wrenching videos of a woman saving a wingless bee and building him a bee mansion? Who knows where I’ll end up?”
“I’ll take that as a no.”
“You will be correct.”
“Okay, all tucked in?”
“All tucked in,” I confirmed.
He read fifteen pages to me before I fell asleep. I woke up the next day, drooling all over my phone screen.
Chapter Twelve
Layla
Grant: I left you groceries at the door. They didn’t have the coconut boba you wanted, so that’ll arrive via Prime tomorrow morning.
Grant: And took the full trash bag out.
Grant: Also signed us up for a birth course.
Layla: Thank you, thank you, and I mastered the art of breathing, which is all they do there. I don’t think I need any pointers.
Grant: You sure? You might feel differently when a watermelon-sized human plows its way out of a place in your body usually too narrow to host my dick.
Layla: TBH the watermelon is probably not as thick.
Layla: Kidding. Okay. I’ll go.
Grant: We’ll* go.
Layla: ?
Layla: Do you have plans with watermelons you want to tell me about?
Grant: Emotional support, baby. Better get used to it.
“Are you sure this is okay?” I asked Maddie as she parallel parked her Range Rover in front of Grant’s apartment.
“Yeah. I’ve done it before. Chase just says to pull up parallel to the car in the front and match the steering wheel to its position.”
“No, I mean showing up at Grant’s place unannounced.”
We were both nursing a huge fountain soda and Wetzel pretzel. I allowed myself a Diet Coke once a week now. I knew it wasn’t the best thing I could put inside my body, but that could also be said about all the fuckboys I’d slept with prior to Grant. If I could survive them, the baby could survive this. It was all about balance.
“Yeah, I’m sure.” Maddie killed the engine and flung her bag over her shoulder. Her Range Rover was at least ten inches too deep into the road. “He literally invited you to live with him. This is your apartment now just as much as it is his. You broke your dang lease. Besides, we need to take some measurements for the baby’s room.”
This was true. And since I was terrible at measuring anything that wasn’t how much food I could eat at Thanksgiving before my zipper exploded, I’d brought Mads as reinforcement. She’d picked me up armed with a measuring tape and a big book full of wallpaper samples.
We got out of the car, and I punched in the combination to enter the building. I had to admit that I liked that I was moving into such a secure place. We walked inside and took the first flight of stairs to Grant’s apartment. My heart thumped inside my chest. I hadn’t seen him in four days. Not since we had Thai curry together and finished binge-watching a reality TV show about glassblowing.