All familiar characters belong to Janet. The mistakes are mine alone.
Bobby and Cal amused my ladies while I made calls each to Tank and Kane. I didn't want to leave the room or my family, so I kept the details to a minimum. I stood on the other side of the 'entertaining area' of the suite, and watched as Cal kept hold of Olive and took up a position that has become a familiar one in the control room since my daughter was born. He sat down on the stone-colored, aptly-named love seat ... everyone in the room could feel the love he has for my baby. She will no doubt grow up to be a heartbreaker, but right now Olivia takes her role as a heart-healer seriously. Despite her newfound way of seeing her world, she's content to sit still and be the bright spot against her Uncle Cal's black Rangeman t-shirt, as well as the ultimate bright spot in his life.
I wrapped up my conversations, but allowed Olive more time with her RangeUncles and let Steph tease Brown a little more about being afraid of sharks and his hesitation to swim here because of it. I thought back to my earlier wish that Tipple ended up inside the belly of one, so my humor proved to be much darker than my wife's. Bobby stole Olive for a kiss and Cal got a hug from Stephanie before they left to get themselves settled in their own rooms. I was sorry for the time alone only because I knew I'd have to share what we found today.
Since Olive can apparently move when she wants to now, we decided to keep her amused as we talked by the three of us stretching out on the king-sized bed with half of the toys we'd brought with us. We were comfortable with everything except the subject matter. I filled Steph in on the details I felt she could handle, leaving out what Tipple had been doing with his own anatomy as he watched the mutilation of someone else's.
"With this job," Steph said, after a few minutes of total silence once I stopped speaking, "I keep seeing the worst people can do to each other, but I'm still shocked by it. It never gets easier to hear or see."
"Consider it an extremely good thing that you can still be surprised and sickened by it," I advised her.
I took my eyes off her face as she processed that and directed my attention to the beautiful lightweight doing a version of push-ups on my chest. I'll never get over the trust Olivia and her mother have in me. I can keep an entire group of men alive just from the training I've lived through, but that I'm the man who makes these two happy ... surprises me more than the gore of some people's lives startles Steph.
"I'm sorry I wasn't there," she told me. "I should've been there, especially when it came to what happened to his wife. You guys can take a lot, but not some a-hole hurting someone defenseless."
"I'm not sorry you weren't there for that."
Olivia distracted me from any unpleasant thoughts as she started talking herself by 'Bee-Bee'-ing me, which caused a bit of teething drool to land on my t-shirt. I used the short sleeve of my uniform shirt to wipe her mouth.
"You have no idea how hot that makes you look," Steph told me, while our daughter dragged her way to my face with her hands, elbows, and the tips of her toes.
"What did I do now?" I asked, letting my baby grab a small handful of hair from behind my ear and give me an extremely open-mouthed kiss to my chin.
She was slow in releasing me so my face is as damp now as hers was before I dried it.
"Just you letting Olive use you for a teething toy or a spit catcher is sexy as hell. I never thought that babies could be an aphrodisiac, but seeing the way you take care of ours definitely is."
"I'll have to do it more often if it produces those kind of results."
"Considering you run three cities among other things, I don't see how you can do more than what you already are. But I'm prepared to reward you creatively if you want to go ahead and try."
I know she's trying to replace the images in my mind of Tipple's dead body, and how Suzy and Leo became two more, with thoughts of her and I together. She knows she's the person I need when I have a bad day, and since she can't distract me in her usual way until Olivia is sleeping, she was producing mental visuals of our physical contact. With one hand spanning Olive's back, I rolled to my left slightly and kissed my wife. Our daughter was happy with the move since it got both of her parents within grabbing range.
"Muh-muh, bee-bee, ba-duh," she chanted in her own unique way, catching a fistful of Steph's curls and squealing at the prize she'd just acquired.
"Mama loves you and Daddy soooo much," she told our daughter, kissing Olive loudly without even wincing at the strain on her still-captured hair.
No matter what I've had to see or do, moments like these make every one of them bearable.
