by Amy Brent
With a plate of bacon in one hand and a six-pack of beer in the other, I trudged outside. Maybe some fresh air would put a nice new spin on things.
I’d never been a morning person, but there was something about waking up the morning after an absolute explosion of events. It didn’t feel good. Everything still sounded uncertain, dangerous even, as if I were walking on thin ice and seeing the cracks snaking out all around me.
My hammock swayed gently in the breeze as if happily welcoming me back. It had been a while. When was the last time I’d kicked back and just enjoyed a good beer and some sunbathing?
Peeling off my shirt and tossing it aside, I clambered onto the striped fabric. As soon as my body settled itself into the soothing sway, I knew. This was exactly what I’d been missing.
Balancing the plate of bacon on my chest, I methodically gulped down my breakfast, washing it down with my beer. Maybe this wasn’t going to be the best solution for settling my stomach, but it would at least take the edge off.
Sure enough, by the time my bacon was gone, so were my worries. They seemed hazy, like little peas bubbling at the edge of the soup in my brain. Right now, I was digging deep into the liquid pleasure of the sun. It was lighting up my chest with all sorts of relieving warmth.
Good old New York summers. There was nothing like them. Sure, those Californians and Texans always crowed about their year-round good weather, but there was something about having nice weather when you hadn’t had it for a while that made you appreciate it all the more. What was so great about having the eighty-fourth straight day of sunlight? But after a choking winter and a drawn-out spring, days like these were really nice.
The sunlight encouraged my eyes to close. I sipped on the beer some more, my breath slowing.
“Okay, now I see why you had to take off work.”
Illuminated from behind by the sunlight was Mark. He looked like some kind of figure in a dream with his flowery Hawaiian shirt and ridiculous shorts.
“Mark?” I said, seized by the strange idea that if he was only a dream, he wouldn’t have a normal answer.
“Expecting somebody else?” he asked with a knowing wink.
“No. She came over yesterday though.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Mark said. “Hey, you guys in a fight or something?”
Reaching for my beer, I realized it was empty.
Crouching down, Mark procured two more from my stash. One he gave to me, and the other he took for himself as he flopped onto the big hammock beside me.
“Kind of,” I told him, sipping my beer.
I wasn’t really sure I wanted to get into it now, but the way Mark was looking—like a cat itching for a ball of yarn—I could tell there would be no getting out of this without telling him.
“Actually, she’s pregnant,” I admitted.
At this, Mark gazed at me so hard, he nearly dropped his beer.
“No,” he said.
His voice was as low and horrified as if he’d just found my desiccated corpse at the bottom of a ditch. In a way, though, this could have meant my life was over. Life as I knew it anyway.
“Yes way,” I said with a sigh. “She told me about a week ago. We still don’t know what we’re going to do.”
Mark was squinting at a particularly bushy bush, his mind clicking away. He turned back to give me a penetrating look.
“You don’t think she’s doing this to trap you, do you?”
Before I could even respond, he jumped off the hammock and started pacing.
“She totally is! She wasn’t getting enough money out of you, and things were going sour, so poof! She forgets to take birth control conveniently at the right time.”
“That’s bullshit!” I snapped, jumping off my hammock. “You don’t know her, and you didn’t see her face when she told me. I did. As screwed up as my situation with Kathryn is, she wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t screw herself over just for my sake or for money. No, she wouldn’t do that to me.”
When Mark turned to face me, he was wearing an entirely different smile. This one was triumphant.
“You love her,” he said simply. The word was so simple, yet it felt like a jab to the gut.
“I do,” I said unthinkingly.
Letting out a low whistle, Mark flopped back onto the hammock. After he took a sip of beer and placed it on the porch beside him, he put his hands behind his head.
“Knew it,” he said casually. “I just said all that to make you admit it.”
As I hovered over his now completely relaxed form, it dawned on me that he’d been serious. Mark had purposely said all that about her trapping me just to prove his point.
“You bastard,” I muttered darkly, smiling in spite of myself.
As I settled back on the hammock, Mark said blithely, “Business is business. So, are you going to tell her?” he pressed a few seconds later.
Over the rim of my beer glass, I glared at him.
“It’s not that simple.”
“Of course it’s not simple,” he scoffed. “This is your mistress we’re talking about, not some long-term girlfriend or wife to be. But if you love her, you have to tell her, man. You know you do. It’ll eat away at you if you don’t.”
I avoided meeting Mark’s insistent stare, which I could feel plastered on the side of my head. Right now, the only thing eating away at me was Mark’s nagging. He had no idea what he was talking about. As much as the situation seemed messed up to him, he didn’t even know the half of it.
“She wasn’t what she seemed,” I continued.
Peering over to see that Mark’s face bore as much understanding as it did when I started talking technical details about Virus Killer, I made up my mind.
Screw it. Why not tell Mark, too? I had told my parents after all, and it was going to come out sooner or later.
“When she responded to my online ad, it wasn’t because she just wanted to be my mistress,” I told him. “She was investigating me.”
That got Mark’s attention. Throwing his whole body to the side so he could face me head-on, he half-yelled, “What?!”
I nodded.
“Oh, it gets even crazier. Trisha Nichols was involved too. After I fired her, good old Trisha sent anonymous tips to the police claiming I’d been embezzling money out of Virus Killer. Of course, it was all bullshit, but seeing as the tips were anonymous, the police didn’t know that. First, they tried investigating me in a more passive way. You know, monitoring my emails and web searches and stuff. But that didn’t get them anywhere, so that was when—”
“Your little Kathryn got on the case,” Mark finished for me.
Silence, filled only with another one of Mark’s low whistles.
“So she’s a cop? Wow,” he said. Then he went silent, a rare occurrence where he was concerned. “Damn,” he finally said, an almost sad tone to his words. “That does complicate things.”
I lifted my bottle in a gloomy toast.
“Tell me about it.”
This silence seemed like one that would last for a while, but a minute or so later, Mark asked, “So, it was all a sham then? From beginning to end?”
“Not completely, I don’t think,” I told him. “Kathryn has said that the feelings she developed for me over time were real.”
“So the problem is…?”
I turned to glare at him. I wanted nothing more than to slap that unsympathetic look off his face. Mark, for all his benefits, sure had his flaws, too, namely that he was nearly incapable of a sympathetic thought unless the specific experience had happened to him.
Take when our old family dog died. Pippin had been with me since I’d been born, and when he passed away when I was eighteen, Mark’s words of encouragement had been, “Want to go for a drink?” That had been before he’d ever had his own dog.
Still, he’d been a good friend to me all these years, and I knew he sincerely wanted the best for me.
“The problem is,” I said patiently, “that she lied to me for
over a month. She looked me straight in the eye, Mark, and she lied to me about who she was and why she was with me.”
“Aren’t cops under oath or something not to divulge information when they’re on a case?” Mark asked with faux innocence.
Instead of responding, I chucked his beer bottle across my lawn. It landed with a neat plunk on a particularly grassy patch.
“Waste not, want not,” Mark said, ambling up to go fetch my bottle.
Finding it empty, he turned to me with a glare of his own finally.
“You dick.”
I blew him a kiss.
“Seriously, though,” he said as he returned, “if you care for her now, and she cares for you, what’s the problem?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “This is all new for me, so it makes me nervous is all. Anyway, we tried talking things over last night.”
Mark angled his head my way, his blond brows raised comically on his forehead. I groaned. We both knew what was coming.
“Do or do not. There is no try,” he said in his favourite mock Yoda voice.
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” I growled at him, although through smiling lips.
“You know I’m right,” he said, blowing me a kiss this time.
A few seconds later, he got up.
“Anyway, I’m off. I have a date for Hawaiian night at this club I can’t remember the name of. I would invite you but”—his eyes rested on me significantly—“clearly you have more important things to do. One important thing in fact.”
He paused for another minute to give me the full brunt of his significant stare.
“All right, all right,” I said, waving him away. “Bye, Mark.”
He wiggled his fingers in a little wave of his own.
“Bye, Eric. Good luck.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said to his diminishing back.
As soon as I heard his car start up outside, I called her.
“Eric?” Kathryn said, picking up after a few rings.
She sounded both surprised and happy, like she’d just been on an hour-long giggling spree or something and was now holding back laughter.
“Did I catch you at a bad time?” I asked.
“Not really,” she said, giggling. “Okay, pretty much. Sadie and I were just in the tub eating ice cream.”
“In the tub. Eating ice cream,” I said slowly so Kathryn could hear just what she had said and how the two things didn’t go together.
“Don’t say it in that tone,” Kathryn scolded. “You’d get it if you were a girl. You just make sure the thing is clean, throw in your favourite pillows, flop on in, grab the tub of ice cream, and then you’re good.”
As my brain tried to visualize what she was describing, she clarified. “Sadie and I call it tubs in the tub.”
“Tubs in the tub,” I echoed stupidly. “So, I take it you’re busy tonight then?” Before she could respond, I said, “You know what? It’s all right. Let’s see each other tomorrow.”
I could hear the pleasure in her voice as she replied “Yes. I’ll come to your place.”
My dick twitched with excitement. Looked like I was going to have a good night tomorrow.
Chapter 31
Kathryn
Tonight was the night. Or was it?
Sadie had been locked up in her room for the past few hours, not making a peep. The whole time, I couldn’t tell if she had been crying, and I was torn about whether the right thing to do was to comfort her or leave her be.
Sadie wasn’t like me when she cried. She didn’t hate being alone.
One time, while crying alone in a restaurant bathroom stall after a date gone horribly wrong, I’d even whispered to the girl crying in the other stall at the opposite end of the bathroom. We’d ended up having a good bitch fest. A few minutes later, we had exited said stalls to find that we had been each other’s sworn enemies in high school. After a good laugh, we parted, and I hadn’t seen the girl since, but it proved my point. I liked being around people when I cried to distract myself from the dizzying repetitive nature of my depressing thoughts.
Sadie, however, was different. Whenever I tried intruding on one of her cry fests, she summarily dismissed me. A few times, she’d even gone as far as to run away and barricade herself in the bathroom to avoid being seen crying. She said it was something about her childhood and kids laughing at her tears.
My dilemma was that, right now, I wasn’t sure Sadie was crying, and since I’d forgotten to tell her about seeing Eric tonight, I still had to break the news to her.
What kind of terrible friend would I be if I left Sadie when she was still feeling all vulnerable and horrible?
Yesterday had been a bit of a roller coaster. Sadie had alternated between sobbing alone in her room and emerging to watch movies with me. I’d managed to cheer her up, but today was a new day—most of which she’d spent in her room so far. Who knew how she felt right now?
When I knocked tentatively on her door, there was no answer. Knocking again, I said, “Sadie?”
Again, no answer. Steeling myself, I opened the door a sliver and peeked in.
Sadie wasn’t crying. She was fast asleep.
After hesitating again, I sighed. Whatever, I had to tell her.
“Sadie?” I said softly, going in and shaking her shoulder tentatively.
One enraged eye peeped open.
“Why?” she asked in a half-asleep tone.
“I’m going over to Eric’s tonight to talk things over. I just wanted to let you know and make sure it’s okay with you.”
I waited a second for her response, and her other eye peeped open.
“Why?” was all she said again.
Frowning, I explained. “Because I want to make sure you’re okay. Yesterday you found out your boyfriend was a cheating bastard, then took solace by watching five romcoms in a row with me, okay? So kill me if I’m worried about my friend.”
Another pause. I was just about ready to smack her stupid grumpy head with a pillow when she said, “Okay then.”
Catching a look at my enraged face with both half-open eyes, she started giggling.
“I was just screwing with you,” she said. “Of course you should go. In fact, I want you to go so I can nap in peace. I’ve been daydreaming about opening an Airbnb in fact.”
“Really?” I said.
She nodded sleepily.
“It’s what I’ve been wanting to do for a while now. I was just too chicken. And starting it now would distract me from the whole cheating ex thing.”
I forced a smile on my face. Seeing as Sadie had been bawling last night, now probably wasn’t the time to point out that we only had a free couch for potential guests to sleep on.
Despite her cheekily smiling face, I still wasn’t 100 percent sold on her wanting me to leave.
“Are you sure you won’t need me later?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“Kathryn,” Sadie said in the way she did when she had already stated her point and I hadn’t listened the first time.
“Seriously, Sadie,” I told her. “If you want me to stay, I can.”
“Kathryn!” she yelled, chucking a pillow at my head. “Go away!”
Dodging the incoming pillow by an inch, I fled to the door.
“Fine,” I yelled behind me. “Goodbye then!”
While walking to Eric’s place, I had time to think. I’d been so preoccupied with Sadie’s situation yesterday and even today that I’d had barely had time to think of my own.
Pregnant, I reminded myself. It was weird that I had to remind myself.
I’d always figured that with the way people described motherhood, once you had a baby inside you, everything became just peachy, like roses and kittens, and you craved peanut butter with sushi and other weird stuff. But I felt pretty normal all things considered.
Other than the fact that I was now walking to the home of a famous billionaire that was. The one I’d been hired to investigate, then had inadver
tently fallen for. What would tonight bring? And what did I want? Both questions seemed equally murky.
My whole relationship with Eric seemed so out of left field and unreal that it didn’t seem like we would be able to forge an actual relationship in real life, even if we both wanted to. Yet, whenever I thought of losing Eric and never seeing him again…
I shook my head. There was no point in going down that road yet. I would see Eric and see what he had to say, and we’d figure it out together.
***
As soon as my finger met with the cool stone of his doorbell, the door opened. Eric smiled thinly.
“Glad you could make it.”
“Me too.”
We stared at each other like actors waiting for the next cue so they could read their lines. But I had lost my script. What were you supposed to say where you were meeting your former boss who was now the father of your child? I was treading on new ground here.
“I didn’t want to order food or make any until I knew what you wanted,” Eric said, glancing my way.
His gaze rested on my outfit.
My cheeks burned up. Had I actually walked all the way here in my ridiculous penguin pajamas? Just how out of it was I?
Glancing over, I found Eric biting back a smile, but I said nothing. What did I feel like eating? My stomach was sure rumbling, but that didn’t give me any answers.
The answer occurred to me as soon as I said it: “Pizza.”
“Pizza?” Eric said, as if pizza meant something different to him that it did to me.
I nodded. “Pizza. Sorry, I’m just feeling like something low-key. Maybe it’s because Sadie and I spent the past two days hanging around the house.”
Eric nodded.
“No worries. I’ll order some right away.”
A few minutes later, we were sitting at his dining room table in his stiff-backed chairs, waiting for the arrival of the pizza.
The atmosphere was still awkward at best. Whether I should have broached the subject of our upcoming child or waited until we at least had food in our bellies was unclear.
