by Kris Ripper
And poor Cam was blushing again.
“Anyway,” I said, taking the spotlight off his bright-red cheeks. “There are a lot of things to think about. And it’s not quite as easy as just jerking off in a cup. Like, for best results he’d have to not come for a day or two before, which is kind of an awkward thing to ask someone.” Though Carlos would probably make it into some kind of chastity game and they’d both get off on it. I turned my mind away from . . . that.
“But consider yourself added to the list, Cam.” Dred smiled a little maliciously.
I elbowed her. And grabbed a fork. “Family-style cake. You people better not have germs.”
“So many germs.” Keith dug into the cake. “Oh my god. Oh my god. This is the greatest cake that has ever been baked. Is this . . . salted caramel that I’m tasting?”
“It really is. Salted caramel filling with a chocolate ganache frosting. And it cost a fortune, so enjoy.”
Keith made a sound, something between a moan and a sigh. “I am so enjoying.”
Josh quirked an eyebrow at him. “We might have to take some of this home. It’s obscene watching you eat cake, babe.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Dred advised, closing her eyes to better appreciate the bite she was chewing. “Be one with the cake, Keith.”
“I am so completely one with the cake right now.”
We left sometime later, full of cake, with some to take back to the farmhouse for Obie and Emerson and Baby James.
We were quiet for most of the trip. When I made the turn onto her street, Dred asked, “You want to come in?”
I couldn’t read her tone. I usually went in. If this had happened two days ago, I wouldn’t even be thinking about it.
But for that damn accidental kiss. I wanted to kiss her again, but I couldn’t say that. Fake-dating worked for me because it got my friend Jaq off my back. It worked for Dred because it got her out without actually requiring she date people. My whole role was to not be pressure. I couldn’t switch it up now.
“Did you start your new quilt yet?” Give me a reason to come in.
“Started sewing it, started ripping it out.”
I parked the car. “But, jeez, you’ve been planning it for months.”
“That’s quilting. Plan for a million years, sew for five minutes, rip for five hours.”
I wanted to go in. Was there any reason not to go in? Maybe we could accidentally kiss again. No. Bad idea, Suzanne. “So . . . can I see what you’re ripping out?”
“If you want to see my crap, sure. When’re you gonna bring over some fabric so you can get started on your quilt?”
“When I grow some ovaries. I still don’t think I can actually make a quilt, Dred.”
“Of course you can make a quilt. Everyone can make a quilt. Not everyone can make a show quilt, but everyone can make a quilt.” She sat back in the seat. “Take us to the fabric store. We’ll work on it today.”
I restarted my car, trying to tell myself that this was only a volunteer job to her, that it had nothing to do with wanting to spend more time with me. It definitely had nothing to do with that kiss. I wanted to ask her what she’d been about to say, earlier, when Emerson interrupted, but it wasn’t the kind of thing I could bring up randomly.
Maybe if I accidentally kissed her again . . .
No. Bad idea, Zane.
Distraction time. “You’re just procrastinating about your own project.”
“Yeah. I am.”
“I’m good with that.”
The moment stretched. We were idling at the curb. The car was in park.
I wanted to lean across the console and kiss her. But I didn’t.
Dinner on the third Sunday was always at my sister Andi’s, ever since she married her childhood best friend when they were twenty. Fast-forward sixteen years and here we were, sitting at her dining room table, me checking my phone every five minutes because I desperately needed the Andi-and-Jimmy show to be over.
She poured herself another generous glass of wine, and when she leaned forward I could see the professional lowlights in her hair. It was a nice job. Didn’t compare to my half-shaved purple, but hey, not everyone can be me. “You don’t understand the legal ramifications of this. You think you do, but you don’t.”
You think you understand, but you don’t should be on Andi’s tombstone. She forever believed she had the only relevant take on any given situation.
“We’re not being alarmist,” Jimmy said. The additional as usual went unspoken, but his furrowed brows communicated it clearly enough. “Really, Zane. I’ve done some research. There are some pretty gnarly outcomes.”
“Did you see any of the good outcomes, or were you only looking for the freaky stuff?”
“I’m sure there are good outcomes, but is this where you want to take a chance? An anonymous donor offers so much more protection for your family—”
“I don’t have a family. Big fuckin’ negative. No baby. Anonymous donors might well be the cat’s meow, but right now they’re just a huge money pit and I keep not getting pregnant.” Shit. Mayday, mayday. Do not cry, Suzanne. Do. Not. Cry. I checked my phone again. Quarter after 7 p.m. Also, a message from Jaq: You can come by here after you escape. We have chocolate mousse.
Oh, we, was it? So that was a here in the sense of at my girlfriend’s, which was interesting. They’d been together for seven months or something? I did math on my fingers and tried to tune out the grating sound of my sister warming up to an argument.
Both Andi and Jimmy were lawyers, a matching set, so cute you could put them on the cover of a magazine: Andi’s pale skin and long, brown hair; arm in arm with Jimmy, who was slightly taller with dark skin and short hair. In complementary business casual, of course.
They were trained in arguing. Me? I’d gone into real estate. I was trained in negotiation and gently, subtly nudging people to the thing that was best for them. I was no match for Andi and Jimmy when they really sank their teeth into something, and wow, I should not have told them about Tom’s potential donation to Team Future Kid.
Or at least I shouldn’t have told them until I decided what I was going to do. The thing with my sister was that you couldn’t convince her you knew better than she did, but you could convince her there was no point in arguing about it. But only if it was true. And at the moment I couldn’t figure out if the risk was worth the potential reward.
If I got a kid out of the thing, it was probably worth anything. I’d be willing to put up with an ugly custody battle and a dissolution of my friendship with Carlos and Tom. I didn’t think it would come to that, but I really wanted to be a mom. And I was getting more desperate with every cycle, which of course Andi knew.
Andi wanted a partner and a stable, monogamous relationship—but no kids. Ever. I wanted a kid, maybe two, but I wasn’t really invested in the idea of a stable relationship to go with it. That wasn’t part of my whole picture of the future. Have a kid was on my list. Find a stable partner was not. Between Andi and me, you could make one stereotypical woman, who wanted a family. Instead of two half-credit women who wanted such different things we could only understand one another intellectually.
“—aside from the not inconsiderable danger of the child itself discovering that you asked someone you barely know—”
“I don’t ‘barely know’ Tom! He’s been with Carlos for years!”
“Zane, do you really know anything about him? Or his family?”
“He’s from the Midwest. He came out here for school. What’s there to know?”
“His medical history for one! Is he estranged from his parents? If he is, I’d like to know why.”
“If he is, it’s probably because they wanted a nice, normal, straight boy and they got Tom!” I pushed back my chair. “I’m pretty much done with this conversation.”
“You’re not done until you make a decision, and I want you to have all the information you need to make an informed one!”
Jimmy shifted in his
chair. He didn’t get off on the Jaffe family dramatics. Well, he must’ve gotten off on it a little, since he’d been around long enough to know who he was marrying. In his customary role as peacemaker, he said, “Okay, okay, come on now.”
“Come on now nothing.” I stood up. “Control your wife!”
As I walked out the front door I could hear Andi sputtering in rage, which didn’t make me feel nearly as good as it should have.
The bitch of it was . . . they were right. There were a lot of risks. Starting with all the basic risks of having unprotected sex with someone, since you were shooting their jizz in your vag. And continuing to the real legal danger that they might not sign a paper relinquishing their parental rights when the time came. And they couldn’t do that until after the kid was born, which was messy on all sides.
Technically if I got pregnant I could sue Tom for child support. How shitty would that be?
I lingered on the front steps of their narrow row house until Jimmy came out to smoke.
“Thanks a lot, asshat.” He offered me a cigarette, which I took. “Happy BFN.”
It was our monthly ritual. Andi pretended she didn’t know. I was pretty sure she pretended not to know that he was still smoking at all, and I really didn’t smoke, except for this one time each month.
I took a drag and offered a totally insincere apology. “Sorry, pal. That’s what you get for marrying into this family. You have no excuse.”
“She’s taking a bath. So I’m off the hook for processing.”
“You’re lucky she’s not a lesbian.”
He waved his glowing cigarette in my direction. “Excuse me, unnecessary stereotype? And the lesbian I know best in the world never processes anything with anyone, so I have reason to doubt that one.”
“Oh, it’s true. So true.”
“Come on, kid. What’s really going on? I thought you were just as against known donors as we are.”
I blew smoke into the air and shivered into my hoodie. “What’s going on is I’m tired, Jimmy. I’m tired of doing this every month for over a year. I’m sick of taking my temperature and checking my cervix and looking at my cervical mucus.”
He shuddered.
“Looking at my cervical mucus, and waiting for it to go stretchy like egg whites so I know I’m fertile.”
“That’s gross, FYI.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“I hear all that, Zanie. I do. I get this is a fucking endless thing right now. And I know why you keep trying.” Unspoken: Unlike Andi, who thinks you should adopt already and save your money for the kid’s college fund. “But I don’t want you to make a rash decision because you’re starting to freak out, then regret it later.”
“I’m not starting to freak out, Jimmy.” I waited a beat before adding, “I’m so far into freak-out I’m numb.”
He shook his head, stubbing the cigarette butt out on the steps, then absently brushing away the ash. “You keep acting like it’s all fine.”
“What else am I gonna do?”
“At a guess—maybe indulge in a moment of honesty and actually tell me how you are for once?”
I’d always liked Jimmy. Most of the time I liked him a whole lot more than I liked Andi. But there was no way he could relate to how deeply my need to be a mother went, or how utterly inevitable it felt, that all I needed to do was keep trying and it would happen.
“I’m fine. I have a good job. I have a place to live in a safe neighborhood, good food to eat, excellent health care, and an extended chosen family. Oh, and a pain in the ass for a sister. You’re okay, though.”
“Jeez, thanks.”
I modulated my tone. “I know you’re worried about me, but I’m fine. I just wish this would happen already so I could move on with my life.”
“I wish you would see all the other paths you could take to get to where you want to go.” He kissed my cheek. “You coming back in?”
“Nah. Tell her I forgive her for being a butthead. That oughta help.”
“I’ll tell her you were willing to prostrate yourself in abject apology, but I told you it would only disturb her bath, so I finally convinced you to go home.”
“Actually, I’m going to Hannah’s.”
His eyes narrowed. “Oh. Jaq’s new girlfriend?”
“I did the math on that. Apparently they’ve been dating for like seven months.”
“Wow. That practically makes her family.”
“For real. Also, I’m gonna tell Jaq you said that and next time she sees you, she’s gonna kick your ass.”
“You just like promoting drama so you can feel like the only sane girl in La Vista.”
“You know that’s right, big brother.” I stubbed out my cigarette and stood up. “Thanks for the smoke.”
“Hopefully it’ll be the last one.”
“Yeah. Hopefully.” I kissed his cheek. “See ya, Jimmy.”
“Bye, kid.”
I got in my car and started to text Jaq that I was on my way. But stopped.
It wasn’t that late, but Andi had the right idea; I didn’t want to go to Hannah’s and eat mousse right now (well, okay, I kind of wanted to do that). What sounded even better than chocolate mousse was a bath, a book, and candlelight. Thank all the gods for the invention of self-lit ebook readers.
I texted, Maybe next time. Gonna go home and wallow in my own filth.
The car was still warming up when she replied: Have a good bath. XO.
Couldn’t beat old friends to understand your dumb jokes, right?
I tried really hard to relax in my bath, but I ended up spending most of it thinking about Tom, and what it would be like if I decided to use his sperm. It did feel like a risk, no matter how well I knew him. On the other hand, the idea of it—of trying something new—actually felt exciting. In a way that nothing related to trying to conceive had felt exciting in a long time.
Jaq and I went to the gym on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The only exception was that I didn’t go the day after I ovulated on an insemination cycle out of a totally superstitious belief that I might somehow, during vigorous treadmilling, jolt the egg and ruin everything.
It’s not a real thing. Obviously. The human race wouldn’t continue if reproduction were that fragile. But when you’d worked as long and as hard as I had to get pregnant, you didn’t take chances. And anyway, it was a good excuse not to go to the gym. Even Jaq didn’t argue with it.
Before she’d hooked up with Hannah, we’d always done something after the gym. We’d get tacos, or smoothies, or we’d head to Club Fred’s for a drink or four. Nothing says healthy like liquor and women, am I right? In the post-Hannah world, sometimes she’d meet up with us somewhere, or sometimes we’d cut our thing short so Jaq could get home.
Sometimes, like today, Jaq said, “My girlfriend’s sending me sexy text messages, I gotta go,” and kissed my cheek on her way out of the locker room.
It’s not like you could really be bitter at a moment like that. At least someone was gonna get laid.
I made my way to Fred’s all by my lonesome and took the stool next to Cameron’s. “’Sup?”
“Hmm? Oh, hi, Zane.” He looked up from his phone, and it took him a moment to focus on me. “I’m reading this historical romance. It’s weirdly captivating.”
“Why weirdly?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I didn’t think I’d be all that interested in Regency England, but I’ve been doing some Google searches—and apparently I am. The whole thing is fascinating.” He shook his head. “How are you?”
“Went to the gym, so I’m ready to drink all the calories I burned. Fredi! Give a thirsty woman a beer, would you?”
Fredi shot me a vicious glare, which had been my goal. “I’ll serve you when I feel like it, Jaffe! Hold your horses!”
“She hates me,” I confided to Cam. “Tried to sneak in one time and she’s hated me ever since.”
“You wouldn’t think she’d be able to keep track of everyone
who’d ever tried to sneak in here.”
“What can I say? I’m just that memorable.” I nudged him. “So. Josh and Keith, huh?”
“They’re here somewhere. Dancing, I think.” Cam could usually get away with pretending he hadn’t caught the nuances of whatever was going on around him, but the way he was looking anywhere but at me blew his cover.
“You don’t want to dance with them?”
“I don’t dance.”
Nudge, nudge. “So. Keith and Josh, huh?”
He sighed. “Yes. That is the answer to your not-question. Yes. Me and them.”
“Good.”
“Good? What does that mean, ‘good’?”
I studied him, thinking about how many times I’d seen him on this particular stool, how easily I could picture him in the Rhein’s ticket booth. “Good for you. Way to change things up, Cam.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“I really think you do, and it’s okay. Seriously.”
He cleared his throat. “How’s it going with Mildred?”
A beer landed in front of me on the counter, accompanied by another patented Fredi glare. At close range Fredi’s glare was unsettling, almost physical.
To say nothing of her growl. “You running a tab tonight?”
“I—”
“I’ll get Zane’s,” Cam said smoothly, pulling out his wallet.
“Why thank you, kind sir.” I tipped an imaginary hat to him.
Fredi grunted, took his money, and walked away.
“How’s it going with Mildred?” he asked again.
“So you bought my beer and now I have to answer your questions?”
He opened his mouth, shut it, and paused. “Actually, yes. I think that’s exactly correct. You owe me.”
“Listen, Dred and I aren’t really dating. We’re pretend dating. Fake-dating, if you will.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s a mutually beneficial thing where she gets out of the house and spends time vaguely ‘in the world’ and I get Jaq to stop making online dating profiles in my name.”