Never Cover up What We Did With a Dress

The following morning I woke in my bed, covered by my familiar array of blankets. I smiled and rolled over to see Manson, but he wasn’t lying next to me. Sudden worry engulfed me and I tore out of bed, racing into the lounge room. Small tears of relief began to fall as I saw the picture perfect Saturday morning I had been dreaming of forever.

He hadn’t left. In fact he looked as far from leaving me as I’d ever seen before. He was sitting up at the kitchen counter, Lily held tightly in his lap, and he was trying to feed her as best he could with his almost recovered injuries. I walked toward my little family quickly, wrapping my arms around Manson in a momentary embrace.

“Good morning honey.” He said softly, kissing my lips.

“’Morning.” I replied, walking over to the other side of the counter as I retrieved a fry pan and some ingredients to make scrabbled eggs, one of Manson’s, and my own, favourites breakfasts.

“Hungry?”

“Yes, actually. I just got up when I heard her crying and tried to fix her something, I hadn’t actually thought of myself.”

“Welcome to parenting.” I laughed.

“I can’t wait,” he said smartly.

“We’ll see about that.” I smiled back at him, cracking eggs into the now heated fry pan. I scrambled them around, pulling out plates and cutlery as we continued to talk about Lily.

“When did she wake up?” I asked.

“About an hour ago,” Manson replied. “I don’t think I’ll be able to get used to the early mornings.”

“Trust me, you will.” I replied.

“What makes you so sure?”

“Well… at first I was the same. As you can most likely recall I never got up on time.”

I transferred the eggs to separate plates, made two coffees and sat next to Manson with our meals, taking Lily from him and holding her up, away from my face, looking at her as I replied.

“But when I first started to hear her cry every morning… I couldn’t help but wonder if something might be wrong, even when I almost certainly knew nothing was abnormal. But then, and still now, I also get excited to see her face again. You will too. Even after a little over a night, you start to miss her.”

Manson just watched us as I kissed her forehead, drawing her closer to me as I rocked her steadily in my arms. She reached her arms and little fingers up to play with my necklace, and as I leaned down to her face, she began sucking at the tip of my nose.

I laughed and placed her in her high chair, beginning to eat my breakfast.

“You look so… beautiful when you’re around her,” Manson commented, “it’s almost as if she lights you up or something.”

I smiled and bent over to his chair, kissing his lips for the second time that morning.

The phone interrupted our casual conversations while we were eating, and I answered it, a true smile plastered on my face.

“Hey Ches.” Demi said from the other side of the line. “How are you?”

“Hey Dem,” I replied. “Good, you?”

“Great thanks. How’s Manson and everything?”

“Everything is… Fantastic. Prefect actually.”

I darted my eyes toward Manson and caught him smile at me. I smiled back with just as much warmth.

“That’s great… Umm… Look, I have a reason to call you.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked, suddenly interested. She sounded like she had some juicy news.

“Yeah.” She laughed. “When can I come and see you? I was hoping we could go out for lunch or something today.”

“Umm, yeah sure. What, just us? Or Tony and Manson?”

“Just us,” she said airily. “It’s something I want to tell you first. And I miss us, you know? When we used to live together and stalk old friends slash band frontiers…”

I laughed whole-heartedly and smiled at the memory. “Yes, those were the days.”

I hung up the phone after arranging where Demi and I should meet. Manson and I cleaned the dishes together. As he finished cleaning the second last plate, handing it to me to dry, I asked him what he was doing this afternoon.

“Nothing, why?” He asked, turning to me. The region of his left eyebrow muscles lifted his face, although I couldn’t say his eyebrow lifted because he waxed them off.

“Demi wants me to go out with her, so you’re babysitting, okay?”

He looked both disapproving and excited. But then his expression turned to worried as he stopped cleaning the last plate and turned to look at Lily. She was sitting happily in her bouncer, kicking her feet.

“What… what if I … break her?” He choked, obviously coming to the realisation that he’d be alone with our daughter.

“You can’t break her,” I replied, “you could probably seriously injure or kill her but…”

“Chesney! Come on, I’m being serious.” He said, but began to laugh softly.

“You’ll be fine,” I replied, kissing his smooth, pale cheek. “I know you will be.”