“Come on, kid. If you’re anything like your momma, you’re going to attack me and make me bleed every day. You don’t want to miss out on that, do you?”
Still nothing.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Richards,” the nurse said softly. “Sometimes they make it, and sometimes they don’t.”
The muscle in his jaw was twitching as he focused on the kitten, not saying anything. Then, he reared up onto his knees and cradled the baby in one hand with his other one over its front. That wasn’t what made me go flying backward, though. No, that was when he jerked it downward quickly, repeating the motion five times.
“Holy shit, I felt it move,” he gasped, pulling the towel away from its face.
Sure enough, a tiny little paw twitched, followed by another, but its chest wasn’t moving.
Placing his mouth over the baby’s, he gave it a small breath and then another one.
“Oh, I’m gonna be sick,” his dad moaned, wiping his hand across his mouth. “Son, I respect you trying to save that baby’s life, but what you’ve just done goes against all that’s holy. You just got cat amniotic fluid on your—”
A tiny, pitiful little mewl stopped Will mid-sentence.
Somehow, through shaking it and giving it mouth-to-mouth, Logan had saved the kitten’s life.
“It’s alive!” Mom cried into the phone. “He saved that baby. Oh my God, it’s a miracle.”
Cradling it closer to his chest, Logan smiled down at the now very vocal kitten, who was getting responding howls from Doyle. “That’s your new name—Miracle.”
I couldn’t help it, I burst into tears. Not nice little quiet ones, loud sobbing ones.
“Okay, thank you, ma’am, we’ll bring them all down to get checked out in a minute,” Mom thanked the nurse before hanging up. “Well, look at y’all go. Bet you didn’t wake up this morning thinking you were going to be parents by dinner.”
Dad, who was frowning down at the babies, looked over at me. “I don’t get it. How does a boy cat have babies?”
Mom leaned into him and whispered into his ear. “Oh, yeah, that makes more sense than what I had going on up here.” He tapped the side of his head.
“Hold Miracle for me, will you? I need to get a crate to put them in with the bed, and then we’ll take them down to the vet,” Luke said as he handed the baby to me. “She should be with her mother, but I just want to get them into a box, so the babies don’t walk off and lose her first.”
“Uh, sweetheart,” Charmaine called, tapping him on the shoulder. “Those babies can’t walk and won’t for a while. Let Miracle see his or her momma and get some milk while you get them ready to see the vet.”
Looking torn, Logan finally took Miracle from me and placed her next to her siblings, who were already feeding.
“How did you not see its nipples?” Dad huffed. “All this time y’all were calling it Prince and fat, and in reality, it had baby bottles on its stomach, a vagina, and little critters in its b
elly.”
Glaring at him over my shoulder, I snapped, “I don’t go around lifting animals to check their wieners and tits, Dad. That’s just perverted.”
Looking at me like I was the weird one, he shook his head and motioned at me to Mom, like she needed to deal with me.
“Funny thing about tits,” Will mused, shoving his hands in his pockets and looking like he was going to say more until Charmaine elbowed him in the gut.
What a day!
Chapter Fifteen
Logan
Walking into work the next day, I felt different. I’d turned a corner in my life, and even though we hadn’t discussed where our relationship was going, I knew Bexley well enough to say that she wouldn’t have had sex with me—three times in total—yesterday if she wasn’t on the same page as me.
What was that page? There were so many it could be. Well, I was brave enough to say that I wanted it with her. I wanted everything with her.
At our ages, did we actually need to sit down and say, “Will you be my girlfriend?” Did people still do that when they were twenty-five and twenty-six?