Better Than Your Ex

by Jimi Gaillard-Jefferson

  I felt her jolt. “I get that. You taught me that. I’m sorry the lesson was necessary. But I got it. I don’t have any secret spots or corners or whatever that you can’t get in to. No skeletons.”

  She nodded and lay in my arms.

  Okay. Okay.

  I talked to her. Constantly. Not about the baby. About my fears. About how it felt to not have her. How it felt when she came back. The weird place we were in. How I’d stay in that place for as long as she needed. That it was enough that she agreed to be friend and family and kiss me and touch me and cook dinner with me and dance to the beat while we sang off-key. That we could have as many conversations as she needed. She didn’t have to be sure of me in a day.

  “Guy told me he and O’Shea are taking a baby prep class,” she said one night over Vin Santo and cookies.

  It seemed best for me to stay quiet.

  “I signed us up for it.” She didn’t meet my eyes when she said it. But she smiled.

  She smiled.

  I made love to her until she cried that night.

  Cassidy

  I didn’t know what day the excitement arrived, but it did. It wasn’t the baby prep class. It wasn’t the dinner with his parents. It wasn’t the dinner with mine. It wasn’t the pictures from the ultrasounds that Cahir got from Fine because he still couldn’t see Zion. It was just…

  I woke up on a Saturday and shook him awake.

  He didn’t open his eyes; he reached for me. “I’m not going to the farmer’s market. The plants are taking over.”

  I laughed. “What’s the correlation?”

  “I always buy you more when we go there.”

  “I never ask.”

  “You look happy.” He pulled me down on the bed. “Why wouldn’t I give you what makes you happy?”

  My mouth was busy for a while. For a while his fingers yanked my hair. His eyes slid closed but only for a few moments. His mouth fell open with his groans and whispered words.

  When I was done and I kissed him until I was sure he knew what he tasted like, his lips curled in a lazy grin. “We can go to the farmer’s market, Poison Ivy.”

  I laughed until I cried. “I don’t wanna. I wanna shop for baby stuff.”

  His hand was tight on my wrist. Laziness was replaced with intensity and the closeness of his body. “What?”

  We said we didn’t want a baby shower. I hated the games. He hated people. And he said he had enough money; it wouldn’t hurt him to buy a nursery full of shit. What he didn’t buy our parents would trample over each other to get. Or Gran and I would make.

  “Baby stuff.” I smiled.

  The sheets were gone and the cool air he insisted on was a shock to my skin. He-well, he didn’t run, but it was close. He disappeared into the closet and was back in a moment with a handful of my clothes that he threw on the bed. He went back into the closet. Earrings, a handful of bracelets and a necklace were added to the pile of clothes. Shoes, panties, and a bra followed. He moved my things from one purse to another.

  And looked over at me. “You have twenty minutes to get all of that shit on your body.”

  “My clothes aren’t-”

  “Figure of speech.” He went to the kitchen and pulled out a pan, eggs, butter. “Get in the shower.”

  “You have to take a shower too.”

  He sniffed at himself. “Nope. I smell like you. I’m fine.”

  “I-” I shook my head and went into the bathroom.

  Eggs, fruit, toast and a kiss waited for me when I was dressed and in the kitchen beside Cahir.

  “Five minutes.”

  He was right. He did smell like me.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Cassidy

  “How ridiculous should we be?”

  We stood on a sidewalk on the East side of the City. On the street where all of the boutiques lived.

  “We can go big box store first. Or we can just go full on dumb and go in one of these places and severely overpay for every single thing we buy.”

  “Or,” I smiled when his hand slid into mine. “We can do this boutique thing and then we can go to Strawberry Fields and do some stuff there. And then we can drive to-”

  “Stay local. Make a day of it. Got it.” He kissed me. “Let’s go embarrass ourselves.”

  “How?”

  He didn’t answer. He dragged me into a store. We wrapped ourselves in baby blankets and asked if we could lay on the mattresses in the cribs. We took pictures of them to see which ones looked better from “a consumer driven post-modernist point of view.” We got on the floor and played with the blocks to see which of them could really hold our attention and make us want to play. I taught him how to cornrow using a dolls head. We both agreed he needed more practice.

  “I kind of want a girl,” he said after we apologized for holding a literary reading of the store’s children’s books.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Like I’ll be happy either way but…”

  “Is this like a princess thing?”

  “Like I want a kid to spoil with nice things? No. I’m having a kid with you. Nice things were a given. Have you seen your apartment?”

  “What about it?”

  “How much did you pay for rugs? Just rugs?”

  “I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

  We laughed.

  “No. Just…I’ve seen you with your father. How you call him when you’re lost even if I’m right there. Or when you wanna debate politics or understand how football works or go to a museum or…You know you called him once and said you just wanted to talk about yourself for a while?”

  I laughed.

  “Do you remember what he said?” Cahir smiled down at me. “He said, ‘You’re my favorite person in the world. Please do.’”

  I wrapped my arms around Cahir.

  “I want that. I want that kind of relationship.”

  “You’ll have it,” I said.

  He kissed me. “We should test out the baby bottles. Let’s go get some tequila and limes.”

  I laughed so loud it sounded like I was screaming.

  Cassidy

  “So.”

  I looked up from my Korean barbecue. “Oh, God. We need to talk.”

  “This is talking.” Cahir shook his head at me.

  “This is a piece of beef that could ruin your shirt.” I let it dangle from my chopsticks. “Are you sure this is the game you want to play?”

  “You picked out this shirt.”

  “And I can ruin it. I have all the power here.”

  “It’s not a bad talk. Release the meat.”

  “That’s not what she said.”

  He laughed. At me. With me. It made me warm.

  It was one in the morning. We both should have been asleep, but we were hungry. We burned dinner when we decided that putting our mouths and hands over each other, racing each other to orgasm, was more fun than cooking. We laid on the floor and laughed and eventually fell asleep. The growl of his stomach woke us. We tossed clothes at each other. Panties under the coffee table. His boxers bunched under a rug. A shoe in the kitchen, another close to the bed. My shirt almost all the way in the kitchen sink.

  I drove us to the Korean barbecue restaurant. I made him laugh when he realized I knew almost all of the songs that played. He ran a finger down my neck and I forgot the words. I forgot where I was.

  “What do we-” I cleared my throat and ignored the smile that crept across his face. “What do we need to talk about?”

  “Lawyers.”

  “I have no specific feelings about them.”

  “I figured.” His smile fell. “I’m talking about adoption lawyers, Cash.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We do need to talk.”

  “Yep.”

  I-I wasn’t a stupid woman. I knew what I agreed to. I knew there would be a baby and I would be a mother and Cahir would be a father and we would be linked in more than one way for the rest of our life. I ha
d baby things in my apartment and his. We built a crib. We went to another baby class. We knew how to handle the looks we got-the looks my flat stomach got. We talked about names. We decided to hyphenate the baby’s last name and grinned about the pretentiousness of it all.

  “There’s going to be paperwork. It can’t go through until Zion-When that happens-”

  “Is that going to happen?”

  He barely looked at me but that was enough. “Yeah. O’Shea hired a lawyer. There’s going to be a meeting. At Beyond.”

  “When did you find out?” I was proud of myself. My voice stayed even.

  “Today. The lawyer called me. Then O’Shea called me. There might have been something like an apology in there for getting to me after the lawyer.”

  I laughed. And was glad I remembered how when the rest of my body felt like it was racing towards something I didn’t need.

  “I-” He draped an arm over my chair and played with the curl behind my left ear. He always found that one curl no matter how I styled my hair. I left it down for him and thought that that was what love was-what compromise was. “I knew-I know I’m going to be a father. I know I’m going to have a child. I know I’m going to be its primary guardian. I know I don’t want Zion to have access to my kid. I know we’re doing this together. And I still sat in my office and just…didn’t know what to do.”

  The racing stopped. It stopped so suddenly that I was dizzy. I turned to him. “I love you.”

  “I love you.”

  “An attorney.”

  “Yeah. An adoption attorney.”

  “Because we’re doing this.”

  “Not just the classes.” He pulled my curl just a little as he wound it around his fingers in a pattern I sometimes traced over his chest. I didn’t know which of us taught the other.

  “Not just the shopping.”

  “A little person that’s going to need us.”

  “We need them. Right?”

  He looked at me. “That’s what I wanted to ask you. Do you need this? Babies are messy, expensive, disruptive. Your whole life, my whole life, they’re going to change completely. Do you want your life to change?”

  I nodded. “When should we go see the lawyer?”

  Cassidy

  We saw the lawyer the next day. At Cahir’s office. I didn’t think about that. The logistics of it. Not until Cahir gave me his executive chair and leaned against it. Not until all of the paperwork was laid in front of us and the attorney smiled at us and said he was so glad, so grateful that he could help us build our family in such a sincere way that I had no choice but to believe him.

  Then I looked around at the office that was maybe a little too familiar to me. I saw the place where I stood and asked Cahir why he left me. I saw the places where he made me call his name when there was no one to hear us but the darkness a few weeks later. I smiled up at him. He smiled back.

  “Places carry memories, right?” And he kissed me and turned his attention back to the lawyer and the stacks and mountains of paperwork.

  A small thing. Such a small thing. But everything inside of me was aflame. A gentle flame that told me it could be an inferno; we could be an inferno. We could bathe the world in a light that would make it so much more. And he was-Cahir’s attention was on the attorney. As if he hadn’t just changed everything for me in a way that was so quiet I almost didn’t hear it.

  I pushed the feelings down and tuned in to the attorney. I ignored the buzzing of my phone. A different buzz for each of my social media platforms. Another for customers. One for Delia.

  Delia.

  I would deal with that another day.

  I read through the paperwork and realized there was a legal definition for motherhood. That was what hit me first. Words mean things. They carry responsibilities. I knew that. I did. But there were laws. The number of people that could sleep in a bedroom together. How fast that number dropped if their genders changed.

  What had to be in the home, in my baby’s bedroom, if I didn’t want to be accused of neglect. The condition of their clothing. Their smell. Someone could call Child Protective Services if they were offended by the way my baby smelled. Would they find my herbs and flowers and oils offensive? Could celebrating my culture get my family torn from me?

  Weight and feedings and visits and growth charts. Intelligence charts.

  The attorney looked around the office. “I don’t think those things will be too much of a problem for you guys.”

  The flame inside me turned darker. Almost white in its blinding power. Because he was right. Money. Money would make all the difference. Money would mean that no one would think to look at us. They would never think our child could be hurt or abused. Any visits we got would be a formality. Any opposition-quickly squashed. Because of something as common and degrading as money.

  Cahir ran a hand across my shoulder, traced out the shell of my ear. I breathed. One deep breath after another.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You need a break?”

  I nodded. The attorney walked out before we could ask him to.

  Cahir sat on the corner of his desk and faced me.

  “I’ve never seen motherhood boiled down this way.” I let the corners of one stack of papers slide down my thumb. “I feel like-There’s no emotion in this. I didn’t expect there to be. This is the legal side of things. But still…”

  “But still?”

  “Motherhood boiled down to a list of duties that I don’t even really have to uphold because I have a decent amount of money and my partner has an obscene amount.”

  He looked away.

  “You can laugh.”

  He did. “I don’t think it’s obscene.”

  “No, no. Why would you?”

  We laughed together.

  “Is this all it is?” I gestured to the papers. “The size of a dresser or a bedroom? The quality of clothing? As long as there’s stuff and no bruises or cuts? As long as they smell ‘acceptable’?”

  “You know it isn’t. We know it isn’t. That’s what matters. The paperwork is here for us to do this right, Cash. That’s it. It’s just here to make sure everyone knows. You decide what kind of mother you’re going to be. We decide what kind of family we’re going to be.”

  That was true. Did that truth make things better or worse?

  Chapter Seventeen

  Cahir

  O’Shea had to know that her voice carried. She was never one to try to be silent but she had to hear Cassidy and I climb the stairs. Nadia had to know she yelled.

  “Fair?” Nadia’s voice was closer to a shriek. “What’s fair about breaking up a family?”

  “It’s fair because she has a choice,” O’Shea said.

  I didn’t know if Cash made a conscious decision to let her feet fall heavier on the stairs, but I did.

  “She can give up the baby. And keep her life. Or she can give up the baby and go to jail,” O’Shea said. “That’s it. She can have mercy and privacy or she can have the law. Guy’s lawyer says prosecuting her would be so easy a civilian could try the case. Ten years. She’d get at least ten years. Maybe get parole in three to five.”

  “Y’all probably don’t want to listen to too much more of that.” Guy was at the top of the stairs. He leaned against them. Dressed for work. Wore that easy smile that I heard was always there. Even when a situation called for violence. Especially then. “Let me show you where Arnold is.”

  Arnold, the attorney that had specific instructions to hide what a shark he was around Cash. He did his job well. She smiled at him, thanked him, before he left my office.

  Guy took us to Zion’s office and I wanted to laugh. Laughter would be better than the thing that blocked air from moving past my throat, that made me feel like I didn’t have enough of something without knowing what the something was. Arnold was there. And when the door to Zion’s office closed Nadia and O’Shea’s voices left us.

  He shook our hands and sat next to me at
the long conference table that dominated the long thin room that used to be Zion’s. I helped her find the table. The chairs. We found the lamps in an antique store. She told me not to worry about how much things cost-her sugar daddy was footing the bill. I shrugged. A work expense was a work expense. And I was different. I was personal.

  I breathed in a little too fast and coughed.

  Cash looked over at me. “I know. I know. But I’m here.”

  Always. And she got it. She knew to put her hand in mine and scratch a place just above my wrist. It was so jarring; it was all I could focus on. I didn’t even realize that the door was open and Zion walked in with her attorney.

  Cash’s thumb pressed into my palm. I let my world shrink to that one place. Her skin on mine was where I lived and everything I felt could float around me. I could pick them up, my emotions, touch them, examine them, and be safe from them.

  Anger was there. Not that she’d betrayed me. But because my first child should have been with Cash in every way. In a perfect world there would be no adoption. There would be no moments of hesitation from Cash as she tried not to think about exactly what she agreed to and all the ways she chose to link herself to me forever.

  There would have been the wonder of the first kick, the discomfort that came towards the end. There would have been food cravings and mood swings and my hands on her as I marveled at all of the ways her body changed.

  That was gone. I would never be able to give Cash that because someone stole it from me.

  Shock. Zion was pregnant. The hand that she rested over her stomach-my baby was there. Cash and I’s baby was there.

  Shock that it was Zion. After so much time I thought it would be different. I thought everything that made me who I was would chip and fall away until I crumbled all at once.