November II

"How precarious are things already?"

Raven said she needed to take Yang to a hospital, begging for help. That meant that people knew she was struggling with raising her daughter and might be tempted to take a closer look at the single parent if things continued to flounder.

"How could you make it worse?"

None of them, neither Summer nor Raven nor Yang, would stand to benefit from a distraction in the form of needless romance. Summer would lose focus on what truly mattered, the baby. Plus, as far as she knew Raven wasn't even gay. Taiyang was the one who left, and from what Summer had heard, it was a loving marriage before he did.

"What are you going to do?"

Nothing. Simple as that. Just do nothing, keep up the lessons, don't make any changes, and no one would have any problems.

Summer nodded to her own reflection in the mirror. As long as she followed the rules she'd just set out for herself, she wouldn't waste precious time doing something stupid like trying to slip into Raven's bed.

I hate this. I hate that all of those people who worried my sexuality might get in the way of my babysitting or child-caring are on the verge of being proven right.

It wasn't like one skipped lesson was the end of the world. Raven had just taken Yang back indoors, and they'd gone over the usual baby safety the next day, after Summer had gotten ahold of herself.

But what if one lesson became two? What if two became five? What if five became twelve? If it ever got that bad, Summer would just give up entirely, because twelve was absurd.

It doesn't matter. We'll never hit the big twelve because we won't hit five, and we won't hit five because we won't hit two. One is more than enough.

From now on, Summer would be the way she was always supposed to have been – perfectly stoic, separated from her new housemates in a professional but not distant manner, and with zero romantic inflection creeping up on her. Raven was her friend, but she wouldn't ever be anything more.

Summer would just have to live with that.

It's not like I've fallen madly in love with her or something. I just saw her as sexy for a single moment, and now I'm so caught up in my own head, trapped behind my stray thoughts that are tormenting me because I'm trying not to think about her, that I'm just repeating the same feedback loop again and again. The more I resolve to be better, the worse my mutinous brain gets.

The solution was simple – move on and don't think about it. Rather, it would have been simple if Raven hadn't continued to be so damn attractive all the time now.

It's the same outfit I saw her in for nearly a year! Graaaaaah!

Summer had no idea how this undesired shift from 'friend' to 'potential love interest' had come about, but whyever the reason, Raven was just…different in her eyes now. Summer had thought herself over winding up with a crush on every playmate she got close to back in the fourth grade, but here she was again. Except this time…

I've spent years with Ray. I know her. I do like her, and in a way that could be platonic. Or…Or it could be…

Could Summer wear sunglasses with pure dark shades to blind herself and just pretend? Could she somehow look away or close her eyes every time Raven got close? Could she…

There was the even more obvious solution. But to do that would be to become an utter monster.

If Raven said yes, Summer would never know if it was for real or out of fear of losing her babysitter. To even ask would be to put her in a situation no woman should ever be put in.

I won't do that, not to my friend. Not to anyone, but especially not to Raven.

Back to not thinking about it, then.

"This is gonna go bad so fast," Summer said to her own face as it stared back at her. Having a mirror in front of her often tended to help her eschew her more foolhardy tendencies, as it was difficult to say or think something stupid while having to look upon her own appearance as she said or thought said stupid thing. She always felt acutely embarrassed when she did something wrong in front of others, and her own reflection seemed to trigger that innate response just as easily as close friends or absolute strangers.

It's okay. This is probably just a small, short-lived thing that'll blow over as soon as Raven forgets to take a shower or farts or calls me a bitch. I didn't fall in love with her for five years, and I'm unlikely to now. Basic, physical attraction never lasts, not when the person behind it can be an utterly classless cretin.

Any moment now, Raven would bang a fist on the bathroom door, her hair unkempt as she picked her nose and demanded Summer vacate the toilet. Or maybe it didn't even need to be some particularly nasty inciting incident. Maybe she would just gradually come to see Raven as she always had – as a friend and nothing more.

"You have any tips on woodcarving that you want me to learn before I get started?" Raven asked.

Summer shook her head. Carpentry was something she knew nothing about, never having tried her hand at it or needed to, so the sum of their communal knowledge would have to be limited to scroll videos and research from books at Patch's local library, which had a distressingly limited catalogue.

During the time in which Summer babysat Yang, Raven had brought back planks of wood from the hardware store this visit into town. It wasn't all she did; Summer had gone over the map of Patch on her scroll and found that there were some business run out of apartments that Raven had missed since they lacked signage and directed her there.

But after this, I think that's it. Raven's going to have to give up on the job hunt and actually start taking care of her daughter. I've been doing it for most days so far, but I could just imagine how horribly things would go if Yang's first words are to call me mama.

Summer did speak to Yang in baby talk while Raven would out, but she'd avoided referring to herself or to Raven out of fear of such a happening. Mostly, she'd just gone over small objects like Yang's rattle or her blankie. It was assuredly months before Yang would even consider speaking (unless she was among the most gifted children on the planet), but the more words she heard, the sooner she would come to associate the speech with the objects in question.

Raven's current means of pretending she could perpetually ignore her daughter was by trying to build her a homemade crib. Summer wasn't entirely sure about that project, mainly since they already had a perfectly good storebought crib for the little girl. Any amateur attempt at carpentry Raven crafted would indubitably be worse than the professional one.

I honestly think it might be because I saw her trying and failing to build one. I know that Raven's always had a thing about proving herself to others, especially to me since I was the 'chieftain' of Team Stark as she called it in her early days. She wants to build one because she thinks that I think that she can't.

She was right, of course; Summer doubted Raven could build a crib. But it wasn't like crib-construction was a typical parental hobby. Raven was just overdoing things, like always.

But there's more to it than that, I suspect. It might just be another busywork task that she can force herself into to avoid her responsibilities with Yang. I know Ray loves her Yangling, and I know she wants only the best for her, but when the time to bond with her daughter actually comes around, she almost always weasels her way out of it, somehow. There's got to be fear, the same from before, that she might do something wrong and endanger Yang. Every parent has it.

But what every parent didn't have was Summer, an unpaid babysitter who was emotionally obligated to help. There were no downsides to Raven in asking Summer to handle Yang in her place, nor were there any risks of Summer saying no. Unlike a typical relationship where two parents would equally divide the work, the dynamic between Raven and Summer was one where Raven could call all of the shots. Furthermore, Summer was better with kids, making it easier for Raven to justify her own absence in her daughter's life to herself.

And if she gets a job, she'll call it being the breadwinner and say it's important.

It wasn't to say that Raven wholly ignored her daughter. But so far, Summer couldn't remember a time of more than a few hours where Raven and Yang were alone, and as far as she knew of those times, Raven mostly just put Yang away for her own safety.

She needs to play with her, to speak to her, to love her, before Yang's grown up without her.

Once again, fixing this home before it ever broke would fall to Summer. With all of the lessons they did, it would be easy to start some lesson on neurological stimulation of a baby or on the entertainment value of having a parent engage them, then slip away and let nature take its course. Once Raven got over her fears and self-doubts, Summer was sure she would make for a good mother. She'd certainly been doing far less risky behavior involving Yang after the month Summer had been in town.

To that end, they'd placed Yang in her highchair on the porch with a few plastic rings to keep her occupied, far away from any of the woodcutting or lumber working that was soon to take place (Summer mainly brought her alone just so she could get some sun and fresh air). All three of them were outside, with the adults standing on a tarp that had been thrown onto the backyard to give them a neat working area. Summer had dug around under the sink and found some safety glasses for the three of them (Yang's were tiny baby-sized sunglasses that were just the cutest!), and she'd insisted Raven wear safety gloves before she even start work.

"Why bother?" Raven asked. "I could literally put my hand in a vise, saw it at the same time, and let you hammer a nail underneath my nail, and my aura would be enough to protect me."

"Because," Summer said matter-of-factly. "Yang needs a good role model to look up to, and I refuse to let her think it's safe to operate manual or power tools without the appropriate PPE."

"Heh," Raven said. "Peepee. But Summer, she's not even two months old. She probably can't even interpret the sight of –"

Summer put her hands on her temples and let out a long groan. "Rayyyyy, I keep telling youuuuu! It's not the point."

"Then what is the point?"

"It's us, Ray! We need to…"

Damn it.

"You need to start thinking ahead, Ray," Summer said pointedly, hoping she wouldn't keep making these slips of the tongue. "If you have the mindset that it doesn't matter what happens to her, at what age do you shed it? When does Yang turn from a baby into a child? How long do you keep up unhealthy habits before caring that she sees them? If you can turn safety into a routine, then you won't forget to partake of it when Yang does start remembering things." Summer brushed her nose. "And I think Yang might be more perceptive than you take her for. She sees, even if she doesn't say."

Raven wasn't buying it; that much was clear. Still, she agreed to obey Summer, solely out of respect for her wisdom. "You know best."

"It's not just knowing best, Ray. Start thinking of why I do what I do."

Rote memorization of a million tricks and tips wouldn't matter if Raven couldn't see through them and figure out the ideas on childcare, the intent, behind them. If Summer told Raven not to hand Yang a bottle of bleach, Raven should look at that advice, think of the possibility of Yang somehow ingesting some of that, and know not to hand Yang a bottle of window washer fluid, even if Summer hadn't told her in a lesson. There would never be enough time in the world for Summer to list every possible thing that could endanger an child, so the only way to effectively do so was to teach Raven the methods by which babies were frail internally and externally and hope, no, pray that Raven caught on soon enough, before Yang drank a shot glass full of ammonia based cleaners and floated up to the giant playpen in the sky.

"Consider the saw a lethal weapon, like your katana," Summer suggested. "You know how easy it is to inflict harm with that, and although it's rarely unintentional, we wouldn't want to risk Yang picking up bad habits about swordplay, would we? Plus, there is the low but still present risk of friendly fire."

Raven shrugged. "Summer, I'm not an infant. You don't need to dumb it down to an analogy for me to get the idea of a saw being sharp. I just don't know that Yang will even remember this."

"Nor will Yang remember pain," Summer suggested, having hoped to not have to explain it this way. "But do we not care if she trips and falls, hurting herself?"

Raven winced, and Summer really hoped it was at the unpleasant hypothetical rather than the specific example that had got Yang admitted into the hospital. She didn't want to bring that one up, but if that was what it would take to convince Raven to wear safety glasses, so be it.

I'm not the crazy one here. There's an extremely small chance that a fragment of wood or something will snap off at just the right angle to prick Raven in the eye and hurt her. Sure, aura might fix that or negate the damage before it even happens, but Yang might notice and think she can poke her own eyes with her chubby baby fingers, free of harm.

It was just safer to play it safe rather than take needless risks. After all, what harm could come from wearing gloves and safety glasses?

And just because I said that, I'm not sure that Yang is going to somehow choke on her goggles and Raven will find a way to blame it on me.

Raven did follow Summer's instructions, though Summer noticed several instances where things could have been safer. It wasn't her house, though, and Raven was at least doing the bare minimum required to keep it compliant to the guidelines of the Occupational Safety and Health Organization, OSHO. It was certainly leagues better than the kind of stuff she'd been doing when Summer had arrived, so Summer held her tongue.

The two of them watched a video on how to build a crib by an accomplished carpenter channel on RemnTube, but that video referenced several techniques that neither of them ever recognized by name alone, so they ended up inadvertently going down the rabbit hole for a few hours, learning the fundamentals like planing, milling, and jointing.

In spite of Raven's grand designs for a completed crib by the end of the day, they didn't actually complete any work. They did manage to get their hands dirty (and by hands, Summer meant gloves because Safety is Never an AccidentTM) by imitating some of the basic techniques they saw in the video, but it was all general stuff – working on a single plank of wood to get the method down rather than actually constructing anything for the crib itself. From what Summer saw on the videos, she expected that it would take at least a day to properly complete the frame, let alone the entire thing, and that wasn't taking into account the time it would take to stain it, apply finish, paint a design, or dry the whole thing.

And that's for professionals. Who knows how many times Raven and I might screw this up? We could botch the last step and have to start over from scratch! It might not even completed this year.

But at the same time…

It's a harmless hobby. If Raven enjoys doing so, and it improves her mental health and sense of self-worth, and we do it without putting ourselves or Yang in peril, who cares if we waste a few hours doing it? I certainly can afford the materials, and there's tree aplenty to cut down if we run the hardware store out of lumber. Call it shore leave, not work, and it becomes a whole lot more palatable.

"It's getting late, so I guess we'll finish tomorrow," Raven said.

Summer doubted they would be doing any finishing whatsoever for the rest of the week, but Raven was being responsible by calling it quits when the sun began to set, so Summer agreed. "Tomorrow."

It didn't strike Summer until much later, when she was lying in her bed waiting for sleep to claim her, that she hadn't been at all bothered by the sight of Raven sweating, dirtied up, and covered in sawdust.