Page 13 of Home for Nathan
“Anytime! I really think that we are gonna be good friends.”
Nathan hoped so too. He really liked Charlie, and the fact that Charlie was married and had kids made it kind of nice, because when the baby came, it wouldn’t be so weird. Not like hanging out with his single friends would have been in Denver or someplace like that. Not that he wasn’t single. He was, but he was going to have a baby, and Charlie had asked him to come up for lunch.
Apparently, Kaleb had taken the kids to some sort of alpha brunch that they were having at the truck stop or something like that, so it was just the two of them.
“Is it tacky of me to ask if you have, like, servants?” Nathan asked.
Charlie’s chuckle was light and happy. “It’s not tacky at all. We do have a caretaker who lives on the premises but not in the house. He’s in the old carriage house above the garage. And then we have a cleaning crew that comes in once a week and cleans the whole house. It takes five maids to do the work, which is just crazy but that keeps me from having to constantly be vacuuming and dusting and polishing and sweeping.”
“That’s wild, but I guess it’s good you give local people jobs.”
“Totally. We also, and this is embarrassing,”—Charlie’s cheeks went pink—“have a personal chef who comes in once a week and does all this meal prep so that I can just take stuff out of the freezer or the fridge if I don’t want to deal with making anything, or Kaleb doesn’t want to be a caveman and burn meat.”
“Wow. That’s not embarrassing; that’s really cool.” God, he was jealous.
“You think? I think it’s a little too much, but it is what it is, right?”
“Absolutely.” So now Nathan felt like the world’s biggest screwup. He knew he shouldn’t, because he was doing his best, but it was a little unnerving.
“Do you like to cook?” Charlie asked, and he shrugged.
“Yeah, I guess. I mean, I know how, kind of. I’m not, like, a gourmet person, but I can work my way around things.” He chuckled at himself, because he was ridiculous. “But you know, I work in the deli, so there’s lots of salad making involved in that. I can follow a recipe, make stuff.”
They headed into a blessedly normal-looking living area with a television and toys strewn about. They both settled on the overstuffed sofa that was like sitting on a cloud.
“So have you always worked in retail?” Charlie seemed so interested, and not in that nasty stalker way. He’d been a concierge at the big hotel, so that really made a lot of sense, but it was still unusual.
“That’s not what I went to college for, obviously, but I’ve worked in a lot, yeah. One day, I’ll get my loom and everything here and have space to set it up, and then I’ll show everybody the kind of things that I make.”
“Oh, so you’re a weaver.”
Nathan nodded. “That was what my degree is in—fiber arts. Little weird, I know, but I loved it so much.”
“That’s cool though. We need more artisans in the world. That’s neat.”
“Well, it probably wasn’t the most practical thing to be into, but it was my passion.” Nathan chuckled and shook his head. Now he was going to have to focus on paying for diapers. “We’ll see, you know, once the baby’s born and possibly in college, I’ll get back to that.”
They both laughed together. “You’re brave, honey,” Charlie said.
“Well, no, I mean. I’m pregnant, and the jerk said he wasn’t interested, that he wasn’t going to stay. That’s not brave. That’s just, you know, playing the hand you’re dealt.”
“Are you excited about the baby?” Charlie asked him, and he nodded because most of the time he was.
“If I don’t think about it too hard, I’m super excited. And then I think about it a little bit. About how it’s going to be really lonely. For a really long time.”
Which was a shame, because Zion was smart and gorgeous and… Nathan thought, maybe not as interested in him as he was interested in Zion. Zion was going to be a great friend, especially once Nathan got over this crush. He was going to put it all on pregnancy hormones.
In fact, that was great—blame it on pregnancy hormones. Not falling in love because he wasn’t going to fall in love with someone who didn’t need to have a baby that wasn’t even his.
Honestly, besides just acknowledging that Nathan was pregnant, they never talked about it. It wasn’t like Zion was like, “oh, I love kids”, or “oh, I wanna have babies.”
It was just, “well, you’re pregnant.”
That didn’t bode well.
He glanced up, because Charlie had obviously been talking. “Sorry, I was woolgathering.”
“You’re thinking about Zion?”
