Page 100 of Badd Baby

"Thank you for talking to me, Mrs. Badd," Rune said.

"Please, call me Dru. And please don't take this as me trying to sway your decision one way or another, but I really do hope we get to meet in person sooner rather than later." Mom looked off-screen for a moment. "Bast is calling for me, so I have to go, but Rune, whether you end up with my son or not, you're having my grandchild. If you ever need anything, I'm here for you, no matter what."

Rune's eyes misted. "Thank you, Dru. That means more to me than I can express."

“Okay, gotta run. Love you, Dunc."

"Love you too, Mom. Talk to you later."

“Bye!" Mom waved at the screen, and then the call ended.

Rune slumped back against the wall with a heavy sigh. "Your mom seems amazing."

"I mean, I think she's pretty cool," I said. "But then, your parents are pretty cool, too."

She smiled at me, then went back to staring at the ceiling, which still featured a constellation of greenish-white glow-in-the-dark stars and crescent moons. "I don't know how to make this decision, Duncan," she whispered.

"Well, what's the decision?" I asked.

She glanced at me. "You, and me? Where I'm going to live?"

"Oh."

She frowned at me. "Oh? That's all you have to say?"

I laughed. "Rune, what am I supposed to say to that? I'm in love with you. I want to be with you. I've told you what I want—I want you. I want us. I want to be a couple and raise this kid together. And yeah, selfishly, I don't want to leave Ketchikan. I love it there. I love seeing my giant, crazy, weird family all the time. Get-togethers are wild, and we have them all the time."

She glanced at me, at this. "You do?"

I nodded. "Oh yeah. Not just holidays. If any of the family who lives out of state comes into town, we all get together, all seventy or eighty of us."

Rune shook her head. "Eighty of you? Jesus."

"I told you how many cousins I have. I'm telling you, babe, Badd Clan shindigs are a fucking hoot."

"I see Dad's brother and his wife maybe once a year at Christmas, and they never had kids," Rune said. "Mom's sister and her husband come over for Thanksgiving, and we go there for Christmas Eve."

"Do they have kids?" I asked.

Rune nodded. "Yeah, but I don't get along with them."

"No?"

"Nope. They're rude people. Mom's whole family is just…weird and rude. Aunt Kathy is cool, but her husband is a dick, and their kids were fucking half feral, growing up. They'd come over for Thanksgiving and trash everything. When I was seven, I had a big Barbie dollhouse that I loved. I'd just gotten it for my birthday a couple months before. My cousins totally fucking destroyed it the first day they were at our house and Aunt Kathy did nothing about it."

"Fuck that," I said. "If we ever broke anything that belonged to another cousin, we were expected to replace it. I broke Jax's Nerf gun once, and I spent a month doing extra chores to pay Mom and Dad back for having to replace it."

"Jax is…?" Rune asked.

"Uncle Zane and Aunt Mara's oldest son." I eyed her, hesitating. "And he's actually how I found you."

She arched an eyebrow at me. "I was wondering that."

"He's, um, sort of a hacker? He used your phone number and somehow got your parents’ address. I dunno how."

"And your Uncle Zane is where in the pecking order of your twenty-nine billion uncles?" she asked.

"Second oldest after Dad," I answered. “He's the Navy SEAL."