Page 20 of The Best Worst Thing

Small Talk

You sure you don’t want to tell him?” Mari said.

“I don’t know.” Nicole poked at a cherry tomato. “I told him about Gabe Wednesday. And then last night, I went over, and we just … did nothing instead.”

They were at lunch in downtown Manhattan Beach, tucked into a corner table of a mediocre cafe’s ivy-drenched terrace.

The afternoon sun bounced off the Pacific and back onto the sleepy storefronts of the swimsuit boutiques and optical shops that lined the stroller-filled, spotless sidewalks of Highland Avenue.

Nicole had done her best to discuss Mari’s work trip to Austin for as long as possible, but after twenty minutes of follow-up questions, Mari caught on.

“I mean, listen,” Mari said. “The pregnancy is superearly. And he doesn’t really need to know. It’s not like you’re the pregnant one. But what if he listened to your podcast? He’d find out about the transfer, and—”

“He doesn’t. He won’t. I asked him not to.”

Mari smirked, taking a bite of her avocado toast.

“What?” Nicole said. “Why are you making that face?”

“It’s just, it was so obvious to me he had a thing for you. I mean, from day one. And then when you left, it was like you never existed. I was there four more months, and he never asked about you again. Not even once.”

“Because we were work friends. You know how those things go.”

Mari stole a cucumber off Nicole’s plate. “Right. Your work friend who takes you on extend-a-dates. Who you won’t let listen to your podcast. Who you won’t tell you’re having a baby.”

“Right,” Nicole said, slurping down the last of her iced tea. Good thing Mari didn’t know about the books sitting in Logan’s closet. All fifty of them. “That’s exactly right.”

After lunch, Nicole walked back up the hill, took Nero out to pee, then lay down on her kitchen floor like a completely normal thirty-two-year-old woman. Fifteen minutes later, she rolled over and called her surrogate.

Valerie caught Nicole up on all the drama at the clinic, within her subdivision, and on last night’s Real Housewives.

They reviewed the logistics Nicole already knew from her own IVF pregnancies: If results from this morning’s second blood test showed Valerie’s beta-hCG had doubled properly, they’d do a third and final draw Monday.

If that one looked good, they’d schedule an ultrasound between seven and eight weeks—about twenty days from now.

That was when they’d confirm the heartbeat. Or heartbeats.

“Do you and Gabe want to come out early?” Valerie said. “Maybe stay with us?”

Nicole flinched. Thank god she’d called and not videoed. “Oh, we’ll probably come out separately. He’s working on … this thing. But we won’t miss the scan, okay? I promise.”

It didn’t feel good, lying to Valerie. But what choice did Nicole have? How could a woman like Valerie—a supermom, a military wife who ran a happy home with her eyes closed, a woman who’d let Nicole borrow her goddamn body—ever understand how Nicole had gotten herself into this mess?

“Well,” Valerie said, “just let me know. The boys are really excited about the pregnancy, and I know they’d love to see you again. Maybe, even if Gabe can’t, you could come a day or two early by yourself? Talk to him—see what works.”

Nicole closed her eyes. Mitch Winters was right about the relationships between carriers and intended parents. They were tenuous. They were breakable. They weren’t set in stone.

“No need,” Nicole said. “I’ll be there.”

After she’d hung up, Nicole stepped into her shower, cranked the temperature valve so high the scalding water burned her skin, then stood there until she’d adequately boiled her conscience clean. She’d only just crawled under the covers when her pillow buzzed.

Have you ever been to the Tar Pits?

She almost dropped her phone.

No, because I’m not a fucking dinosaur.

It’s more of a woolly mammoth situation. For the record.

Talking to you is like reading a deleted scene from The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

I’m 39, remember?

Nicole laughed. Loud enough that Nero, who’d been snoozing on the foot of her bed, turned around and huffed. She shrugged at him, then decided to shoot her shot.

Are you asking me to go? Or are you just sitting in your office, thinking about me?

The next response took a few seconds.

Yes and … no?

This strange feeling came over her. She was, in an instant, both intensely giddy and unbearably lonely. It was the kind of feeling, she knew, that was pretty much impossible not to act on.

And she knew that because the last time she’d felt this way, she was curled up in some twin-extralong bed, texting Gabe Speyer—the very hot, kinda douchey guy she’d been talking to for a couple of days.

The one from LA, the one who went to Vanderbilt, the one who was halfway through his MBA at Columbia.

The one who’d spent the whole rest of the night they met tracking her down, then parked himself outside the entrance to her dorm, where he just stood there—gorgeous, grinning—asking if she’d give a “dumb-as-rocks Wall Street fuckboy” like him a chance to buy her another drink. Maybe even dinner.

Funny, wasn’t it? How much she’d changed since then.

And how much she’d stayed exactly the same.

How, if she narrowed her line of sight enough, she was still that same girl: biting her lip, baking cookies with her roommates, hunting for an entry-level job in publishing and a decent apartment below Fourteenth Street.

Bummer. I was kinda hoping you were.

Immediately, bubbles. She flexed her toes. Waited.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I am thinking about you. I’m just not in my office. I’m in the copy room, of all places.

The copy room? He remembered that night too?

Her skin, suddenly, prickled. She had to bite her tongue and scrunch her face to stifle whatever strange little squeal was unraveling inside her.

Whatever wild little thrill was coursing through her bloodstream.

Once she was satisfied she’d suppressed it, she flopped face-first into her pillow and chucked her phone across the bed.

It landed with a thud where her husband used to sleep.