pajamas while grabbing a fresh diaper at the same time. “Right sweety? You don’t like sleeping in when the sun comes up.” Amy bent down and gave Lilly a sloppy raspberry on her bare tummy, causing the little girl to giggle with delight at the familiar game.
Walker stood there watching, his heart doing something weird in his chest while he watched the two women in his new life interact. He wasn’t exactly sure what was happening to him. His eyes were hung rily devouring the interaction – the laughter and the delighted cries of his daughter – while at the same time, the lower regions of his body were reacting quickly to Amy’s bare legs sticking out of her purple night shirt, imagining what might be underneath.
For so long, he’d repressed sexual thoughts of Amy, too furious with her assumed actions to let him think of her in a sexual way. But seeing Lilly, incontrovertible evidence that Amy hadn’t ended the pregnancy, the basis for all of his anger, and those sexual thoughts couldn’t be repressed any longer. In fact, they were stronger now than they had been before. How that was even possible, he wasn’t sure.
“Can you show me how to do this?” Walker asked, forcing his body back under his mind’s control. He wanted to make Lilly laugh. He wanted to learn to take care of her. If Sam, Brock or Colt could see him at this moment, eagerly wanting to learn to change a baby’s diaper, they would fall all over themselves laughing.
He didn’t care. This was his daughter. This was Lilly! If she needed something, he wanted to be there for her. It was an astonishing realization.
Amy’s startled glance looked up at him. “You want to change her diaper?” she asked, her hand holding Lilly’s tummy to keep her in place. She’d always thought men avoided dirty diapers like the plague.
Walker nodded, looking from Amy to Lilly. “I’d like to know everything,” he asserted with vehemence. “I’m not walking away from Lilly, Amy. I never wanted you to abort her. I was livid that you would do it. But now that I know that you didn’t, I’m thrilled and I want to be a part of her life.”
Amy heard the words that she’d prayed to hear so many times in the past but it was hard to believe it was finally true. “Even changing her diaper?”
Walker looked down at Lilly who was still wiggling and smiling, trying to g et Amy’s attention. “Everything,” he said again, unaware of the slight grin that broke his stern features because of Lilly’s antics.
Amy stared for another long moment, then shrugged. “Sure,” she said, then cleared her throat and said the word again because it hadn’t come out correctly. Stepping out of the way, she waited for him to take her place in front of the table. “Take the diaper, but keep hold of her like this,” she explained and showed him how to keep Lilly from rolling off of the changing table. “She likes being naked so she moves her legs around, trying to keep you from putting on a new diaper. But just be fast about it and she won’t be able to stop you.”
Walker took the diaper, all the while keeping a hand on Lilly ’s tummy. He stared at the strange, plastic rectangle that Amy said was a diaper, but wasn’t sure what to do. “Okay, so what’s next?” he asked.
Amy smothered a laugh at the enormous man holding a tiny baby with one hand and a diaper in the other. “Open it up and put the back under her bottom.”
He looked down at Lilly who immediately smiled and wiggled again, then at the diaper. “How does it open?”
Amy couldn’t help it this time. The laugh escaped before she could stop it. “Let me show you,” she said and stepped closer, opening the diaper and explaining the tabs. With deft movements, she slid the diaper underneath Lilly’s tiny butt, swished it through her legs and had the tabs closed securely.
Amy stepped back again, giving him room
Rachel Cantor
Halldór Laxness
Tami Hoag
Andrew Hallam
Sarah Gilman
Greg Kincaid
Robert Fagles Virgil, Bernard Knox
Margaret Grace
Julie Kenner
James Bibby