“Reb lays around?”
“Well, she doesn’t really appreciate lazy day,” she said seriously. “But she plays in here and lets me be lazy.”
I looked around the room and scoffed. The comforter and a pillow from Molly’s bed were bunched up on the couch, a mug of something was on the corner of the coffee table, and toys were spread out all over the room. There was Play-Doh on the table, stuffed animals lined up in front of the TV, the pieces of some sort of board game tucked into the windowsill. Shit was everywhere.
“You made a mess,” I told Reb, fixing her crooked glasses. She nodded in reply, her little face serious.
“It’s okay,” Molly said, climbing back into her nest of blankets on the couch. “It’s lazy day—I’ll clean it all up later.”
See? That shit right there. It fucking got to me. She didn’t give a shit that her kid was tearing apart the house. As long as she was having fun and wasn’t getting hurt, Molly was totally relaxed.
“Let’s clean up a bit, yeah?” I said softly to Rebel, setting her down on the floor and getting down on my knees so we were at the same level.
“Can you help me put the Play-Doh back in the containers?” I asked, reaching for the clay. “Where’s the blue container?”
“You don’t have to do that,” Molly said, pushing her blankets off her lap.
“Lay back down, sugar,” I ordered, making her scrunch her nose at me. “We got this—no, that’s orange, baby girl.”
I helped Rebel find the blue container and we cleaned up most of the mess on the table. That shit was irritating as fuck, because the minute you stuck two colors together, there was no separating it again. Most of Rebel’s Play-Doh was a mix of colors that we ended up just stuffing into any container we found.
I threw Reb’s stuffed animals into a laundry basket, then wiped down the table and put the Play-Doh on top of Molly’s fridge. I didn’t want to deal with that shit again. When I went back into the living room, Rebel was curled up on Molly’s lap, and the only part of her visible was her little face.
“Room for me?” I asked as Molly put some kids movie on the TV.
“Come on in,” she said with a grin, lifting one side of the blankets.
I shrugged off my cut, laying it over a chair, then kicked off my boots before sitting down next to her. Rebel’s little knee dug into my groin as she crawled into my lap, and I huffed out a laugh at the scowl on Molly’s face.
“Women can’t resist me,” I told her, laughing harder when she elbowed me in the side.
We sat there quietly for a few minutes watching the opening credits of the cartoon, but before anything exciting happened on the TV, Rebel was sliding sideways off my lap. She’d fallen asleep sitting straight up. I caught her before she went far, and scooped her up in my arm like a newborn, her little feet dangling as I pulled her glasses off and set them on the table. When I turned to check if Molly had seen that Reb was asleep, I found her the same way, her head resting on the back of the couch.
The lack of sleep was catching up to both of them.
I carried Rebel into her room and lay her gently in her bed, pulling her blanket up around her shoulders. I didn’t want her to be cold since she wasn’t wearing any pants, but I didn’t see any other blankets in her room, so I grabbed a clean towel off the top of her dresser and laid that on top of her blanket.
When I was sure she wasn’t going to wake up, I left the room, feeling pretty fucking proud of myself that I’d put the baby down for a nap. Well, I guessed she was technically a toddler, right? Didn’t matter. She still seemed like a baby to me. Normally, Molly dealt with anything to do with Rebel. She did all the diapers and getting her things to eat, and getting out of bed at night when Reb woke up.
It made sense. She was Rebel’s mom, and I was just a guy that was hanging around. But it still made me feel like an asshole when we both woke up at night and only Molly got out of bed to get Rebel back to sleep. The kid wasn’t mine—but it felt wrong to not help out.
“Where’s Reb?” Molly asked blearily as I sat back down next to her on the couch.
“She fell asleep,” I replied as I pulled her against my side. “I put her in the crib.”
“Okay,” she mumbled against my ribs. “I’m so fucking tired.”
Her breathing slowed as her body leaned more heavily into mine. God, she was cute as hell. Her hair was a rat’s nest, and she hadn’t even tried to straighten it up while I was helping Rebel clean up her mess. She’d just left it that way, like she couldn’t be bothered to fix it. I pulled her body up and stretched out, situating Molly between me and the back of the couch. I pulled off her glasses and leaning over as far as I could without waking her up, I dropped them on the coffee table and snagged the remote to turn the volume up a little so I could finish watching the movie.