Read While We Waited (The Reed Brothers #8) for Free Online

the contraction is over and blinks her green eyes at me.
    “Can I get you anything?” I ask her.
    She shakes her head. “Just be sure they don’t lay him on me when he comes out, okay? I don’t want to see him.”
    I brush her sweaty hair back from her face. “Are you sure?”
    “I’m sure,” she says quietly. “It’ll be too hard.”
    “We can still do this,” I say to her. “We can do it together.”
    She shakes her head. “It’s not what I want, Tag. I want him to have the best of everything and I can’t give him that.”
    Neither can I , I think. If not for my sister’s money, I wouldn’t be able to do anything for him at all.
    Julia came to me when she found out she was pregnant. I was over-the-moon excited, but she wasn’t. Not at all.
    “They can give him everything, Tag,” she’d said. “We can’t give him anything.”
    “We can do this,” I’d told her. I put my hands together like I was praying. “Please. Just say you’ll try.”
    “The adoptive family said they’d give me enough money to go to college,” she rushed to explain. “I can get out of here.”
    I looked around her dad’s tiny little cottage. As the pastor of the church, he was allowed a small house. That was how we’d met. Her dad was counseling me on responsibility.
    Julia sniffed. “I want him to have so much more than this. The adoptive family…they want him so bad.”
    I was away on a mission trip when Julia first found out she was pregnant. She’d sent word to Mexico, but it had taken a few weeks for me to gather enough airfare money to get home. My mission trip wasn’t supposed to be over for quite some time, but I’d come home straightaway after hearing the news.
    I never should have left in the first place.
    “I want him,” I said. I pounded my fist into my chest. “You can’t give him away without my permission.”
    “I could have just had an abortion and you never would have known,” she said quietly.
    “But you didn’t. And now I do know. And now I want him. You can’t give him up for adoption when he has a father who wants him.”
    She started to cry. “But I have dreams. And they’re going to pay for me to go to school. They like me. And they said we can visit him, that we can check up on him.” She was pleading with me.
    “How much money?”
    “You’re broke, Tag. Does it matter? Anything they can give him is better than what we can. Can’t you see that?”
    She was wrong. I could love him. “I want him,” I repeated.
    “And I want to go to school. I want to be better than…this.” She motioned to the room around her. My baby was no bigger than an apple at that point. And she wanted to give him away.
    “What if I gave you the same amount of money?” I asked.
    She scoffed. “Where would you get that much money?”
    My sisters. Jenny and Jessica. They’re loaded. “I’ll get it.”
    “Why do you have to make this so difficult?” She heaved a sigh. “Just let him have a good life.”
    “I will.” With me.
    Her eyes got big and wide. “You’ll sign the papers?”
    “No. I’ll get you the money.”
    Her face fell. I hated disappointing her, but I wasn’t going to let him go.
    “This doesn’t feel right,” she said.
    I crossed the room to stand in front of her and tipped her face up to mine. “None of this feels right. We should be a family.”
    She stepped back, creating a wide chasm between us. “You left.”
    “You told me to go!”
    “You said you needed it.”
    “It was for the church,” I rushed to say.
    “Sometimes I think you love your religion more than you love me.”
    “I can change,” I tried.
    She shook her head. “It’s too late.”
    Julia jerks me out of my reverie when she screams and bears down on my fingers. Her belly ripples and moves and the nurse tells me I can look down. I haven’t seen any parts of Julia in months, so I don’t feel quite right about looking at her vagina, but the draw is too strong. Her legs are parted and I watch