I shook my head. “No.” Erin wanted absolutely nothing from me. She’d said so. Explicitly.
“Did you tell her you don’t do relationships?”
I nodded.
“Then I say go for it. Everyone knows the score. It’s a date, not a wedding.”
Scott got up to leave, and I stopped him. “Buddy, I’m—” The end of that sentence didn’t make it out of my throat. My eyes stung with tears.
Blinking hard, he nodded. Then he plucked the appointment reminder from my garbage can and placed it on my desk before leaving my office.
The baby.
Right now this kid existed only in my head. But if I opened up my life, it’d mean opening up everything. I didn’t do that. I had no room in my life for anything but work and my friends.
The kid didn’t need me. He or she’d have a great mom, and that’d be enough.
I ripped the card to shreds and tossed the pieces back into the garbage.
Chapter Five
Erin
Katie placed a hand on my knee, which, yes, had been bobbing up and down like a piston. “You’re nervous,” she said.
“I’m fine.” I nudged her hand off my leg and focused on planting my heel into the carpet to keep my foot from going a mile a minute again. I was fine. I was simply sitting in the waiting room of my gynecologist’s office—oh yeah, and obstetrics, yikes—waiting to get a first look at this tiny human growing inside me.
And I had to pee something wicked.
I crossed my legs, squeezing tight. “I am a forty-year-old woman with a forty-year-old bladder. They should not make me wait like this.” And my lower leg started pumping again, less out of nerves now and more to distract myself from the fact that I had downed four glasses of water in the last hour, and each and every one of them was ready to make a return appearance. I tried to focus on the Christmas music softly wafting through the waiting-room speakers.
“They’re not making you wait.” Katie picked up a magazine. “Your appointment’s not for another five minutes. You should’ve listened to the nurse’s instructions and drunk the water more slowly.”
“Yeah, well, what does the nurse know about anything?” I shot an evil eye at the receptionist, who, in all honesty, definitely had exactly zero to do with my current situation. She hadn’t told me to drink the water. Heck, she hadn’t knocked me up. Really, if anyone was to blame for my current state, it was Ian Donovan. Or the condom company. Maybe I should sue.
“You know,” I said, “this probably isn’t even a thing, having to drink water before an ultrasound. It’s probably just some big joke the doctors cooked up to make us ladies uncomfortable.”
Katie flipped through the Reader’s Digest. “You’re totally right, sis. I think you’ve uncovered the plot. These doctors, who have dedicated their careers to helping women, are really just trying to fuck with you.”
“See? You get it.”
Katie slammed the magazine shut and tossed it onto the table in front of us. “Okay. Enough about pee and how a vast doctor-driven conspiracy to make you uncomfortable is currently ruining your life. Let’s address the elephant in the room. Or, really, the elephant who’s not in the room.”
I bit my cheek. I did not bring Katie with me to talk. If I’d wanted a lecture, I would’ve brought Natalie.
Katie’s soft brown eyes found mine. She wouldn’t berate me. I should’ve known better. Katie didn’t play the blame game. My hormones had me all out of whack. I took a few calming breaths. “This whole situation sucks,” she said.
I nodded, my throat closing. It sure did suck. It sucked not being able to drink wine at the Sharpe family pre-Christmas party while everyone cooed over my cousin’s pregnant wife. It sucked that I had this secret growing in my womb the whole time, and I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, because I had no idea what to say. Hey, things are great. I’m single and carrying a stranger’s baby, no big deal. Look at how I’m simply crushing life right now!
“You’re sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, preparing to see your baby for the first time, and the father isn’t here,” Katie said.
“The father doesn’t exist,” I corrected her.
Katie opened her mouth to protest.
But I cut her off. “I know. He exists. He’s a living, breathing human being. But for all intents and purposes, he’s a ghost.” I nodded backward, toward the front door of the doctor’s office behind me. “He’s not here now. He’s not going to be here. It’s good for us—all of us—to get used to that.” I picked up the Reader’s Digest Katie had discarded, hoping a page full of inspirational quotes might take some of the focus off my bladder.
“Okay,” Katie said. “As long as you’re okay with the situ—”
Now it was my turn to toss the magazine to the table. “Dirk and I tried for years to have a baby.”
“Off and on,” Katie reminded me. “And, really, you dodged a bullet.”
“Only to be hit by another one.” I squeezed my pelvic floor. My God, I’d burst right then and there in the waiting room—death by bladder bomb. “I had a one-night stand—one stupid, regretful night—with Ian and now I’m carrying his baby. A stranger’s baby. What are the parents at my school going to say? What do I tell the kids?”
“You tell them nothing.” Katie shrugged in her typical way of thinking every situation had a black-and-white answer. Gray areas did not exist for Katie. “It’s none of their business. For all they know, you went to a sperm bank because you wanted to have a kid on your own—which you were planning on doing in a year anyway.” She shook her head. “But even the truth isn’t bad. I mean, when you think about it. You’re a successful, strong, intelligent woman who got pregnant and is prepared to raise the kid on her own. You’re, like, the model single mom. You’ve got your shit together.”
I blew out a deep breath. “Yeah, my shit’s so together that I got knocked up by someone about whom I know exactly two things: one, he’s a totally immature playboy who’s anti-commitment, and two, he’s a really good lay.”
“Hey, that’s not nothing!” Katie patted my knee again. “This is all very new. You’re shocked and scared and probably ready to chuck everything and move to a desert island or something.”
“That doesn’t sound bad.”
“I felt the same way after my divorce.”
I wrapped an arm around Katie’s shoulders, pulling her in close.
She rested her head on me. “But since then,” she said, “I’ve tried to stay positive, think about what’s good in my life now—I’m working out more, trying to better myself, thinking about a career.”
“You’re getting buff, by the way.” I squeezed her biceps and she flexed.
“I know your situation isn’t ideal, but I just want to point out that you’d be having the same fears if one of Dirk’s probably horribly pretentious sperm had knocked you up. In that Sliding Doors scenario, you’d still be a single, unmarried woman, and Dirk would be MIA for all of it. Because Dirk was and is a fucking tool.”
“Seconded.” A deep voice boomed behind us.
Katie and I spun around. There stood Ian in his work clothes—perfectly tailored pants, shoes with nary a scuff, a supple camel overcoat covering a blue-checked, button-down shirt that contrasted his Hershey’s chocolate eyes. A nervous smile flickered under his thick, trendy glasses and his hair stood a bit more on end than usual, like he’d been running his fingers through it all day.
“Hey.” I shrugged and faced forward. Whatever. He showed up. Big whoop.
Though try telling that to the butterflies in my stomach.
“Damn,” Katie whispered.
I nudged her in the side. She had to get her shit together. So Ian had come to this one appointment. So he looked good doing it. He was still not a person who could be counted on, and that was fine. That was our entire deal. Like Katie said, I was a strong, independent woman, and I was fully capable of doing all of this on my own. I didn’t need Ian Donovan. I needed no one.
The nurse opened the door to the office and checked a chart. “Erin Sharpe?” She looked up at us over a pair of reading glasses. I stood, squeezing my legs together. Oh, Jesus, the pee.
“Ready?” I asked Katie. She was the only one here I could count on, really. She was family. She was this baby’s actual aunt.
“You two go,” Katie said, picking up the Reader’s Digest again. “You’re the parents. I’ll stay here and memorize some puns to tell you later.”
Ian raised an eyebrow, waiting for me to make the decision, apparently. Well, fine. Whatever. “You’re here,” I said, heading toward the nurse, not waiting for him to follow. That had to be his decision. “Might as well come in, if you want.”
…
Ian
This was not like how I’d seen it on TV.
TV had prepared me for clear gel and a wand thing swishing over a swollen, pregnant belly. TV had not prepared me to see my one-night stand with her feet up in stirrups while an attractive, brunette doctor plunged, basically, a dildo inside…well, you know.
Because of one tiny tear in one shitty condom, I was now stuck in a completely foreign kind of relationship with someone I barely knew. We, for better or worse, would be bonded together forever. We were this kid’s parents. I, Ian Donovan, was going to be a father.
That was never not going to be weird.
I hovered up near Erin’s head, trying to find something to focus on that wasn’t the probe inside my fling’s snatch or the video monitor displaying the insides of her vag. But landmines lurked all over this room—there was the 3-D model of a woman’s reproductive system, the chart with pictures of healthy breasts, and the bottles and bottles of lube. Lube was freaking everywhere.
“Just so everyone knows,” Dr. Dana said, “since Erin’s forty, she’s technically at an advanced maternal age—AMA.”
“Geriatric,” Erin deadpanned.
“Advanced maternal age,” the doctor said. “We don’t use ‘geriatric’ anymore.”
“How kind of you.”
I could leave. I could actually tap out now, throw my hands up, and walk out the door. Erin wouldn’t blame me. It was what she’d wanted in the first place. She’d tossed me that card, but she hadn’t actually banked on me showing up. She’d known I wouldn’t want to come.
But come I did, and now I was standing in a room full of vaginas and lube, and not in a fun way.
“Usually AMA just means we’ll offer you more tests, more ultrasounds. Most of the stuff is voluntary. You know me.” The doctor, wand still all up in Erin’s business, patted her patient’s shin. “I’ll let you know what I think is necessary and what isn’t.”
I mean, but seriously. What was I doing here? I had an out. This kid’s mom was fine without me. She was an elementary school principal with a PhD in education. She knew more about children than I’d ever even pretend to know.
I couldn’t be the asshole, though. I was already known as the asshole in too many circles, and I couldn’t have Erin Sharpe, the woman who stole the wine, the mother of my actual child, thinking about me that same way. I’d see this through. I’d be her rock, whatever she needed. For the next nine months to eighteen years, I’d have to be Ian Donovan: Upstanding Father and All-Around Good Dude.
The doctor looked at me. “I’ll give you all the literature,” she said. “And I’m happy to explain everything, whatever you two need.”
You two? Oh no. Yeah, I’d just been thinking about being a dad, but “you two” was couple talk. The doctor saw Erin and me as a pair, which we most certainly were not. I wanted to shout, “No! We are two singular people who happened to have some bad luck with a condom!”
But I kept my mouth shut.
“Everything looks good,” the doctor said, patting Erin’s ankle and rising from her stool. She cleaned off the probe and tossed her gloves into the garbage. Then she held out a hand and helped Erin sit up. “You can pee now,” she said, laughing.
Erin swung her legs off the side of the table where she’d been lying. “Thank God!”
I chuckled, and Erin glared at me. “What?” she demanded.
I waited until the doctor had closed the door behind her, leaving Erin and me alone with the lube. “Nothing.” I hadn’t meant to offend her. “Just…nerves.” I gestured toward her, perched on the table, her feet in fuzzy socks dangling off the side. “I never thought I’d be…here.”
“Yeah, well, me neither.” She hopped off the table and took great care wrapping the flimsy paper sheet around her midsection—the complete opposite of how she’d acted the morning after we’d slept together, when she’d hopped out of bed all naked and cavalier.
I laughed again.
And she glared at me again. “Seriously. What?”
“Nothing.”
Eyeing me the entire way, she scooted sideways into the attached bathroom, shut the door, and locked it. I sat in the guest chair near the door, a safe, vagina-free spot.
When I’d left work today, Scott had shot me a wink, a pair of waggling eyebrows, and a comment about gynecologists. He assumed I was off to get laid, which was less embarrassing than the truth—that I was going to spend the afternoon standing next to the female stranger carrying my baby while we watched its heartbeat flickering on screen for the first time.
The kid. Our kid. The image of that tiny bean on the TV screen had been etched into my brain.
That was my child. My DNA. They were going to be half Ian Donovan. For better or worse, present or absent, I would be a major part of that kid’s story. The way I handled this would shape this child for their entire life.
Scott and his mom kept popping into my head, as they had since he told me about the cancer. He could lose his mom. Heck, she could lose him, for that matter. There were no guarantees. Scott and his mom had been there for each other, relied on each other, and now he was looking at, potentially, the rest of his life without her.
My chest ached.
I had been fine, fine on my own, floating in and out of (but mostly out of) other people’s lives. People loved me in the short term, for a night or even a weekend. But I was destined to disappoint anyone who put their faith in me, because my life was my life, and no one else’s. I pulled away from anyone who dared to get close to me. Erin got that. She seemed fine with it. But the kid, the kid would expect me to stick around, and maybe they’d be better off without me right from the start.
Maybe having no father was better than having me as a father.
I grabbed my coat from the rack and slipped it on without a sound, watching the bathroom door, willing Erin to stay inside until I was gone. This was the right thing to do. It had been stupid and reckless to show up here. And even when I met her at the coffee shop, she’d seemed to understand that I was not prepared to be a part of this kid’s life—or hers. Erin had been fine with it.
So why wasn’t I? Why did I have to go and mess it all up by showing up for this fucking appointment?
I turned the doorknob as quietly as possible, ready to slip out unseen. But I nearly ran into Dr. Dana, about to knock. “Oh,” she said, “Hi. Here.” She handed me a photo. “Here’s your baby,” she said with a wink.
Blinking, I stared down at the black-and-white picture. The embryo looked like a grain of rice, if anything. It was a blob. Nothing. A white speck. But it was my baby.
My. Baby.
I clutched the photo to my chest, where my heart slammed against my bones, trying to escape. I sympathized. I needed to escape, too. I waved the picture at the doctor. “I have an appointment.” My throat had dried up like a desert, and my words came out in a series of croaks. “Tell Erin—”
The doctor nodded, her eyes narrowing in contempt. Nothing I wasn’t used to. I’d returned to my normal, my stasis—women glowering at me with disappointment. “I’ll tell her you had to go.”
I shoved the ultrasound into my pocket as I ducked my head and hustled out of the building, not even pausing when Erin’s sister yelled at me to wait.
Chapter Six
Erin
Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.
I tossed dress after dress after top after pants from my closet. Then I flopped onto the ground, clutching an ugly pink taffeta party dress that made me look like a swirl of cotton candy. I held it up to show Natalie, who teetered on the edge of my bed, texting. “I guess this is the one.”
She glanced up from her phone and recoiled in horror. “That?”
I shrugged. “This is it. The only option. Nothing else fits.” Everything I’d bought in my post-sex, pre-pregnancy badass phase no longer fit my growing form. “I may need to go maternity shopping.” I let out a dramatic faux sob. At eighteen weeks along, I could no longer pretend I had “burrito bloat.”
Nat checked the time on her phone. “But we need to be at the hotel in thirty minutes.”
“Maybe I should just not go.” I hugged the pink dress to my chest. If I wore this, I’d look less like Cinderella and more like the pumpkin that turned into her coach. “You can cover for me. I’ll play the sick card.”
She shook her head. “Can’t. You’re the draw, my dear—the brilliant new principal with all the fresh ideas. The only way people will pony up money for your new elementary foreign language curriculum is if you’re there to sell it to them.”
“Shit,” I said. “You’re right.” I’d made this bed. I knew going into this job that schmoozing came with the paycheck.
I hoisted myself up from the floor and Nat held out a hand to help me, but the gesture was too little, too late. “I’ve got it,” I said. “I can get up from the floor, because I can do anything on my own. I’m going to have to, after all.”
Nat frowned. “Honey.”
I waved her off. “I’m fine, I’m fine. You know that.” Pity for me was verboten. We didn’t discuss how Ian had left me high and dry after the ultrasound. He was never supposed to be there in the first place.
Knocked-Up Cinderella Page 7
