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MAC STRYKER IS THE hottest man I’ve ever seen in person and that was before he brought me food. He’s a god now.
Of course, that might be the stupid hormones. That is one thing they do talk about in the pregnancy books. I am basically hungry, tired, and horny at all times. Even while sleeping.
Is this cheese...product...supposed to taste this good? It’s basically salt and chemicals, I think. Creamy, rich, wonderful salt and chemicals. The last time someone brought me macaroni and cheese and covered me with a blanket, I was probably about eight. I think it tastes better when you don’t cook it for yourself.
I suppose it would be inappropriate to thank him by crawling onto his lap and rutting against him like the sex-starved lunatic I am. I understand that I am no prize right now. And it will probably be eighteen years until I have time to date once this kid pops out, and then I’ll be old and nobody will want me. I am basically never going to lose my virginity.
Well, the doctor broke my hymen to make my exams easier, but I hardly think that counts.
I moan a little around a forkful of food. Sorry, not sorry.
Mac eyes my baby bump suspiciously. “How long will you keep working?”
That’s a good question. “I hope to work right up until my water breaks, but I guess we’ll have to see how I do closer to term. I need to save as much money as I can so I can take time off after the baby comes. I don’t want to use up my savings before he or she gets here.”
“You don’t know if it’s a boy or girl yet? I thought everyone was into those gender reveal parties now.”
My turn to cock an eyebrow at him. “Yeah, how many gender reveal parties have you been to, officer?”
“Technically, that’s Detective Stryker to you. And none. But I do have a Facebook account. And Pinterest.”
“Wait. You have a Pinterest account?”
“Yeah. Same reason I know how to pick a lock.”
“What does picking a lock have to do with Pinterest?”
His face is so tight, like maybe the furrowed ridges in his brow are permanent. “People are basically stupid. I can get a whole lot of information from social media about perps. Where they are, who they’re with, what they like. Dark Tumblr is a place I wouldn’t suggest you spend much time.”
For a grouch, he’s kind of funny. “Noted. Anyway, to answer your gender reveal party question, I want to be surprised.” Aside from Joe and the girls at work, nobody really cares what the gender of my baby is anyway. It’s not like my parents are going to put a sonogram picture on their fridge.
Mac rubs the skin above his hand brace, and his lips press tighter. “Mac, are you hurting right now? You didn’t injure yourself more on my account, did you?”
He blinks his surprise and then realizes where he’s touching. “No, it’s fine.”
I don’t want to pull information he doesn’t want to give, but I’m so curious.
“I’m off work for a while,” he says quietly. “Until the hand heals...” There’s more he’s not saying.
“I’m sorry.”
Oh, wherever he’s going in his head is a painful place. I think maybe the conversation is over when he surprises me by saying, “I missed one.”
“Missed one what?”
“Explosive. It went off at my last call. I got hit with debris and fucked up my hand. If it doesn’t heal, I can’t defuse bombs with it anymore.”
Wow. I can pour a decent cup of coffee, but this guy defuses bombs and makes pregnant women macaroni and cheese. He’s got to be a shoe-in for Heaven. But his frown lines deepen, and I realize he doesn’t think so. “You feel responsible. About the bomb going off.”
“It was my job to find them all. Stop them before anyone got hurt.” He leans against the back of the couch. “Christ. I’m supposed to be talking about this with my group, not unloading it all on you.”
I curl toward him more, moving into the space that separates us. “Baristas are like bartenders. I’m good at listening.”
“This isn’t me. I’m not a talker.” There is real pain in his eyes. It finally distracts me from my horniness and propels me right into nurturing mode. I put my hand on his cheek, the stubble scruffs my hand. I hardly know him. I shouldn’t be touching him like this.
Asking him to bare his soul to me.
“Hey,” I say anyway. “You shouldn’t feel responsible.”
“My best friend died that day. Because I missed one.”
“No. Mac. No. Your best friend died because a criminal rigged up a bomb. You can’t take all that on.”
His breathing is shallow. “Can’t I? Christ. Why am I telling you this?”
“Because we’re friends now.”
“Are we? I’ve never had a woman friend before.”
“I don’t think it’s that different. Do you?”
The way he looks at my belly, like he suspects it’s another bomb he might be responsible for, is kind of endearing and a little dorky. “I think it might be different. I think it just might be.”
––––––––
One month later
“TELL ME WHY WE ARE watching this show again?” Tiny fucking houses. What is the point of that?
The show goes to commercial, and my only woman friend points the remote at the TV to turn it off. “Because it’s my turn to pick, and I am so tired of basketball. You’re like obsessed with it. I can deal with the constant bouncing, but my God, the squeaky shoes.”
I set my toolbox on the shelf and test the crib I just put together. It’s good and sturdy for Little Bloomer. I’m getting better at doing shit with my left hand these days. “Basketball is a great sport.”
She rolls her eyes and fidgets on the couch, so I join her and pull her legs into my lap and rub her feet while she moans, the sound of it like a steel jaw clenching my balls. She has no idea how sexy I find her little moans. Or pretty much everything she does or says.
After our first dinner together last month, I was worried that I had some kind of pregnancy fetish or something, so I took to the internet to explore the dark secrets of porn and no, God no, I am not perving on the fact that she is pregnant. Thank fuck. The internet can keep some of its dark secrets, pregnancy fetish included. It seems I’m just perving on her. I have a Hillary fetish. Everything about her turns me on.
But we’re just friends, for both our sakes. And it turns out, I like being friends with a woman. Except when she won’t let me watch the game.
Tiny fucking houses.
She shifts again, and I have to be careful to keep her from getting into close personal contact with my junk. I don’t need her to know how she affects me. Her trust is more important to me than the state of my ever-ready dick. Hillary needs me to be strong. So, I’ll be strong.
If it kills me.
“Thank you for putting the crib together. Are you going to tell me how the meeting was?”
“It was like every other meeting.”
The press of her lips tells me what she won’t vocalize. I wish I was one of those guys who could just talk about his shit for no other reason than it will get me back on the force faster, but I get there and close up tight. The only time I feel like the old-me is when I’m with Hillary.
Her breathing changes.
“Why are you so fidgety tonight, Hillz?”
She stares straight ahead at the television, but I don’t think she’s really paying attention. Since it’s off and she’s watching it so intently anyway. “I’m not.”
Okay, then.
I reach for the remote and turn the TV back on. I’m sure there’s a baking show on one of these channels. A commercial comes on for some sexy movie, and she groans and squirms some more. I turn it back off.
“What is going on with you? And don’t say ‘nothing’.”
“Nothing,” she says at the same time I say it.
“Baby, talk to me.”
She sucks in a deep breath. Shit. Baby is probably not the word you call your friends.
“If you must know, it’s your cologne.”
My face wrinkles up. I don’t wear cologne. “Do I stink or something?”
“No. It’s...” She covers her face in her hands. “Hormones. Just turn the TV back on, please.”
“What’s hormones? I am completely lost here.”
“I’m having some problems dealing with my hormones is all. And your cologne is interfering. I don’t know what it is, but it smells like sex and sin and orgasms.”
The air is sucked out of my lungs, and the ground is racing up to greet me like I’m falling out of the sky. Christ. “When you say hormones, do you mean you’re horny?”
“Oh my God. Can we go back to tiny houses now?”
She’s horny, and she thinks I smell like orgasms. My zipper cuts into my dick. I could give her orgasms. It would be my pleasure to give her orgasms. I’d love to make her come all over my hand. My tongue. My dick.
I take a chance that I know her as well as I think I do and can get her out of embarrassment mode and into what I like to call Spitfire Mode. In my most disciplined, authoritative voice, I demand, “Answer me.”
She glares, which is what I wanted. “Yes, I’m horny. Happy? It’s a little easier for you when you get horny, I’m sure. You just go pick a woman and let her smell you all the way back to your bed. But when you’re eight months pregnant and single, it’s a little more difficult. It’s just biology I’m dealing with. It’s not a big deal.”
“You think I just pick a woman and she follows me home?”
She waves her hands. “Well, look at you. You’re all chiseled and scruffy and smell so good. Who could turn you down?”
I’m trying to hold back my laugh, but she’s so damn cute when she’s mad. “Hillz, have you seen me pick up a woman in all the time you’ve lived next door to me?”
“Well, no. But the point is you can get it when you want it, and you have regular, normal biology dictating your needs, not super-amped up hormones that take over your brain and body when you’re least likely to get another person to look at you naked without running the other direction.” I don’t think she’s noticed that I’m still rubbing her feet during her epic tirade. “I have needs, Stryker. And no way to meet them.”
She has needs. My God. It’s been hard enough to keep off her thinking the last thing she wants is sex. Now this beautiful goddess is telling me she needs the D. What’s a guy supposed to do?
“Are you even supposed to have sex—?”
“Not another word. Can we just pretend this conversation never happened? Please? Did I tell you that my tips have doubled this week? I started wearing that apron that says ‘Baby on Board’ and now people are throwing money at me.” She pauses and looks into my eyes, knowing she hasn’t distracted me. “I’m never going to get laid.”
“You got laid pretty good the last time, looks like.”
She shakes her head. “I didn’t. I’m probably going to die a virgin. It’s all so unfair.”
That’s it. “I think you need to explain this to me. I’m no scientist but...”
The shade of pink on her cheeks goes angry red. “Do we have to?”
“Yeah. The whole Virgin Mary thing isn’t ringing true for me.” I haven’t pushed her since she told me she was a virgin in the hall on our first day. As soon as I figured out she doesn’t need any kind of intervention because she doesn’t think she’s carrying the next incarnation of Jesus or anything, anyway.
Her face screws up into the look I see most often when she can’t remember why she walked into a room. Which happens more frequently every day it seems. I checked and it’s a normal pregnancy symptom. As is the crying for no reason sometimes, which worried me at first. “He was drunk. Really drunk.”
“Who was drunk?”
Hillary rubs her pregnant belly. “You’ll think less of me.”
I squeeze her feet. “Baby, just tell me.”
She squeezes her eyes closed. “I was interning at an ad agency in Chicago. My boss was showing me some special interest, and I let it go to my head because I was young and stupid then.” As if seven months ago, she was so much younger. “I didn’t know he was married. He took me to a business conference and we were fooling around in the hotel room and he was so drunk. It was the least sexy night of my life, and he was just rutting against me but never quite made...entry. There was a lot of fumbling and then he slid the condom off and...finished...in the general area. Apparently, sometimes close matters in more than just horseshoes.”
Wait. What the fuck? “You got pregnant from a guy coming on you but not in you,” I repeat to make sure I’m following the story.
I’ll be damned. She really is a pregnant virgin.
“He wasn’t...in the hole. Just next to it. The chances of it happening are so rare. I have a unicorn uterus or something. If he’d left the condom on, it would have been fine. But he insisted the rubber was what was making it so he couldn’t come. He was such an asshole. Anyway, I guess he decided to just jerk it over me near my vagina, and I just wanted it to be over by that point.”
He came on her pussy, not in it. Fuck. I didn’t really think that could happen.
“When I found out I was pregnant, he didn’t believe me. Said we never had sex. Told me about his wife. And wrote me a check to leave town. So I came home. Got my college summer job back, alienated my parents, and here we are. A pregnant, horny virgin who makes coffee instead of ads for a prestigious firm. Who dropped out of college her senior year. Who is mortifying her best friend.”
I heard a lot in there, but I’m stuck on the last bit. “I’m your best friend?”
“Well, I hope so. I told you more than I’ve told anyone else.”
There’s something wrong with my ribs. They’re too tight and feel wobbly. Unstable. Everything could go wrong with this situation. But she has needs. What if she goes to get them served elsewhere? If I twist this enough in my head, it’s my duty to protect and serve her right? That’s my oath as a cop. Protect and serve. Fuck. I’m not just crossing a line, I’m barreling past it like a racehorse.
“You’re not going to die a virgin.”
“I’ll tell the line of men outside my door.”
That inflames me for a second, rage changing my vision to red. The thought of other men... Down, boy. “You’re not going to die a virgin because I am going to fuck you.”