Page 50 of Prayers for the Prickly

“That is a brilliant idea,” he sputtered right before he snatched his phone from his pocket and added the idea into his online notebook.

Leave it to my mate to still find a spark of creativity to latch onto moments after we received life altering news.

“You made your point,” I told him as I pressed a kiss to the top of his head and held him close. “I wouldn’t like waking up to learn that you’d left me alone in bed so you could start working well before it was supposed to be time for you to. I won’t do it to you again.”

“Thank you.”

“So, we know where we want the nursery, I’ve already got the dimensions of the room. I can design the furniture with rounded backs to fit the curve of the space just like the bedroom set, so we can best maximize it. I think we need to fence the entire space in, like a corral, so there is no chance of one of them crawling anywhere dangerous if we set them down. I’ll work on dimensions and mockup a few sketches to give you an idea of what it will look like. Once it’s finished, we can work on stocking it and acquiring nesting materials.”

“Oh good, because I want to nest on the third floor, too,” he explained. “I can lie there wrapped in blankets with the windows open and smell the scent of the breakfast you’re cooking for me on the hibachi. I want us to lie there and feed one another and feel the babies move. I want to start every day that way.”

“It will make the transition to the nursery easier, if you only have to move a few steps,” I said after thinking about it a little bit. “I’ll get to work on those plans later today, you start thinking about what you’ll want for furniture so I can design the room to fit our needs.”

“I will.”

“There’s some kind of bedroom warehouse place a few towns over if you’d prefer to shop for blankets there, that will let you touch them before you make your selection.”

“If they’re going to be for the nest then I have to touch them,” August said. “I’d be too paranoid about buying ones offline without being able to see if they’ll be too scratchy or not. I only want soft things in our nest. I’d love to take a trip to the bedroom warehouse with you.”

“Then we’ll go as soon as the space is ready,” I promised as I draped my arm around him and started guiding him down the beach again. “Would you care for a private celebration tonight? I can pick up a couple lobsters, some crab legs and a bunch of muscles and boil everything up if you’re still craving seafood.”

“Do you really think that’s what it is, my first craving?”

“If it is, it’s a healthy one and an easy one to fulfill. I can put in a call each day and have something fresh for you on the table for as long as it’s appealing to you.”

“If you could do that, it would be everything,” he said, going up on tiptoe so I could kiss him.

My body absolutely was craving seafood and had since I’d begun to suspect I was carrying hoglets. Knowing that I could have as much of it as I wanted made my inner hedgehog happy. In my head he lay sprawled with an obscenely full belly, sipping flavored lemonade with a platter of empty crustation shells on a table beside him.

“I can tell how much you like the idea,” Gregor said, his voice tickling my cheek as he spoke near my ear.

Giggling, I tried to wiggle away but that just led to him tickling me more. We wound up doing an awkward tickle-dance-wiggle-shuffle that left an older couple snickering at us. They waved when we caught sight of them, and headed off down the beach, still snickering over our antics.

Gregor laced our fingers together and we walked with our hands swinging between us as we stared out at another storm rolling in.

“Might turn out to be a candlelit supper tonight,” Gregor said.

Smiling at the prospect, I nudged his shoulder and peered up at him. “Can we have a candlelit supper just because, even if the lights don’t go out along the coastline again?”

“Of course we can. I’ll even hang a couple lanterns on the hooks over the table, it’s what they’re there for anyway.”

“Really? Now that I know that I think I’d like to eat by lantern light more often,” I declared. “After being in a kitchen with bright lights all day, soft lighting would be a welcome change and probably help my brain wind down easier.”

“Consider it done. I can also hang hooks over the nest once it’s been constructed, so you can lounge and snack by lantern light, too,” I offered, the image immediately taking root in my head.

We’d have to pick the perfect sized lanterns for the ambiance he wanted, so I could space them properly, and I’d have to measure the angle of the beams, so they’d be evenly placed. It wouldn’t even take an hour once we were ready to install them, and I’d get LED ones with different settings too, so we could change the ambiance if we wanted.

“Oh hell yeah, that would be awesome,” he declared while my mind raced to ponder if hooks for lanterns in the den might also be a welcome addition, too.

I decided to just go ahead and install them, after I started to picture what the room would look like bathed in soft light.

“We’ll need to stock the kitchen so I can start making sides to go with all the seafood I’ll be bringing home,” I declared as we continued down the beach toward my shop. “Once it starts to get hot, I was thinking of sticking to a variety of fruit salads and pasta salads with some green salads thrown in as well.”

“I’d love all of that, and pickled beet salad, too.”

“My mom makes batches each year from the overabundance of beets in her garden,” I told him. “I’ll pick up a few the next time I’m over there, as well as her recipe, in case you start craving a variation of them.”

“Thank you, I feel like I can eat them with everything right now. I ate half a jar while I was waiting for my lunch order to arrive and killed off the rest a few hours later while I was waiting for a batch of sugar to reach the right temperature.”

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