Shep jogs across the street to me, waving his arms like I might not see him there, glowing like a firefly on the other end of the sidewalk. He keeps jogging, even though I’ve clearly stopped walking. His giraffe legs eat up two sidewalk squares at a time.
“Glad. I. Caught. You,” he pants, bending to put his hands on his knees. He sticks his tongue out and says haaaaaaaaaa, trying to get some of that extra carbon dioxide out of his system. A sheen of sweat shines on his brow and makes his blond hair an even darker gold than it usually is.
“Shep,” I say in surprise. “Did you run here?”
“No cabs,” he pants. “Train too slow.”
“Your cardio is abysmal.”
Still bent over, he scowls up at me in a friendly way. “I run across two neighborhoods for you and this is what you say to me?” He folds over farther. “Hee hoo. Hee hee hoo hoo.”
“Are you doing Lamaze breathing?”
“Seems apropos?” He stands up, pressing his long fingers into a cramp at his side.
I groan and roll my head to one side. “Pregnancy jokes? Really?”
His eyes grow serious. “Willa was guessing that you weren’t going to wait. For next weekend. So I came instead.”
He holds his arms out and I go straight into his chest, burying my forehead against his bony sternum.
“I’m sorry she didn’t come,” he says.
I feel ridiculously grateful that he said didn’t come instead of couldn’t come. His arms are just as tight as usual.
She didn’t come. But she knows me well enough to know that I was going to go anyways. I can almost, almost not be mad at her.
“You ready for this?” I ask him, tilting my head up and stepping back a foot.
His arms fall to his sides. “Yes,” he says resolutely. “What’s our plan?”
“Well, he’s the bartender on Saturday nights so I think we just go sit at the bar. I’ll ask to talk to him alone when he can get a break, and hopefully, he’ll be friendly.”
“And I sit at the bar and just be my charming self and then I’ll walk you home.”
The thing I love about Shep is that he’s actually telling himself this, not me.
“Sure,” I say.
He nods and reaches for the door handle. “Ready?”
“Yes,” I say, trying to re-create the surety of his tone.
He swings open the door, we step inside, and a Chihuahua bum-rushes us.
“Close the door! Close the door!” a woman yells, sprinting towards us.
Shep promptly tips his humongous foot in front of the Chihuahua’s chest and shuts the door. The woman drops to her knees, picks up her dog, and looks up at Shep with her lip between her teeth. “Thanks.”
His cheeks get pink looking down at a woman on her knees in front of him and he clears his throat. “You’re welcome.”
She flips her long, auburn hair back and slowly stands up. “I’m Melanie.”
Oh no. Hell no. My buffer is not tumbling face-first into a meet-cute when I’m supposed to be telling someone I’m pregnant with their zygote. “Hi, Melanie,” I say, baring my teeth in a chimpanzee smile. “I’m Eve.”
Melanie gets the picture and skedaddles.
“You’re a little scary,” Shep tells me happily as he trails along after me. There’re no seats at the bar so my plan is immediately shot to hell. But then, seating promptly becomes the less important issue because there’s no man behind the bar either. An unfamiliar woman pulls a pint.
I’m immediately and irrevocably stymied. I’m the one who planned an outfit for a week and walked for an hour to get here. The only thing he had to do tonight was be here. He’s already failed me miserably.
“Let’s sit in that booth,” Shep suggests gently, obviously spotting the problem at hand. “I’m kind of hungry anyways.”
He guides me to a corner booth in the back. We sit and his eyes scan around the bar. “Eve,” he says slowly. “What the heck is this place?”
I know exactly to what he’s referring. “It’s a dog bar. People are allowed to bring their dogs. You didn’t notice your new girlfriend’s Chihuahua?”
“A dog bar,” he muses, ignoring the girlfriend comment and looking around at the little dogs tucked into purses and backpacks. The big dogs sleeping under barstools. The medium-sized dogs sniffing one another’s butts and desperately trying to place themselves in this big, scary world. “Huh. Cool idea.”
I’d thought so too, the first and only other time I’d ever been here. “Oh, thank God,” I say, my eyes catching on familiar fur. “That’s his dog. He must be here somewhere.”
A one-eyed mutt of indiscriminate shape and size bullies his way through a crowd of human legs and beelines straight for the assortment of water bowls that line the back wall. He drinks primly, his curly tail poised perfectly atop his back like a donut.
“What’s his name?” Shep asks.
“Bones,” I reply, and consider calling for the dog. But I’m already worried enough that his owner won’t remember me. I don’t think I could handle getting snubbed by a dog tonight as well.
“No,” Shep laughs. “I meant the guy, not the dog.”
“Oh.” I laugh too and it feels good.
“Hi there, y’all want food menus tonight? Or just drinks?” Another pretty waitress. Do they only hire lookers in this joint?
“Just a ginger beer for me, please,” I say.
“Fries?” Shep orders, one eye on me, and I’m grateful he’s astute enough to know that I’m not interested in him perusing a menu for twenty minutes while I sweat my candied apples off and try not to think about what I have to do in a second.
“Sure.”
“And whatever IPA you have on tap. The stankier the better.”
The order makes the waitress laugh with surprise, her expression melting from busy service worker to potentially interested girl.
“Jeez, Shep,” I gripe when she leaves.
His light brown eyes catch the dim bar lighting. “What?”
“You’ve already had two women making googoo eyes at you and we haven’t even been here ten minutes.”
His mouth opens and closes. Opens and closes.
The waitress is back with his stanky beer in record time. “Here you go.”
“Miss?” I catch her eye. “Do you know if Ethan is working tonight?”
She looks at me like I just asked her if she knew the ABCs. “Ethan works every night.”
My eyes find the chick behind the bar and then flick back to the waitress. “Is he here right now?”
“He’s in the back.”
“Okay. Would you mind telling him that…a friend is here to see him?”
“Sure thing. Let me just get the order in for those fries.” She smiles hugely at Shep and walks off, her tray under her arm.
“Why didn’t you tell her your name?” he asks, taking a sip out of his beer. “Oh. She forgot your drink.” He catches the waitress’s eye and signals to the empty place in front of me. The waitress mimes smacking herself on the forehead.
“Because if she tells him Eve is here to see him and he doesn’t remember my name, that would be the ultimate humiliation.”
Shep’s eyes are immediately back on me, softening, warming, going desert gold. “Eve, who could forget you?”
“Thanks, Shep,” I say dutifully, because he’s known me forever, and he has to say stuff like that.
“Seriously.” His big foot nudges mine under the table. “There’s nobody else like you. You’re a dynamo.” He snaps his fingers. “You’re like a living, breathing Powerpuff Girl.”
That makes me laugh and think of elementary school afternoons in Shep and Willa’s basement, the two of us forcing him to be the third Powerpuff Girl.
But then the waitress is back, sliding my drink and fries to me and looking Shep up and down. I catch her eye and she gives me a nod, pointing towards the back of the bar and then heading there herself. There she goes. Wait! Come back! I want to shout.
“So,” Shep says, tucking into his fries. “You were last here…six weeks ago?” He squints into the past, as if he’s trying to remember what he was up to whilst I was off getting unintentionally inseminated. “I must have just moved in at Willa’s.”
Something crosses his face. “That wasn’t—Was that the weekend you, me, and Willa went out?”
I grimace. “Yep. It’s a long story.” It’s not.
Me and Willa took Shep out to cheer him up after his breakup with Heather. It was the first night in years it was just the three of us. No others, significant or otherwise. So we got properly drunk and silly. When they were exhausted, Shep and Willa grabbed a cab back to her house, but I was still revved up from the reunification of our trio and not ready to go home yet. I sent my cab packing and popped into this bar. I let the bartender flirt me all the way back to his place. There. That’s the whole story. But I can’t imagine telling Shep any of it.
Shep absorbs my gentle rejection. After a long moment, he tilts his head and sort of squints at me. “So, do you often, uh, pick up guys in bars?”
I turn to stare at him, and pink washes over his cheekbones. “Sorry, sorry, that sounded so judgy,” he murmurs, his hands coming up in a sign of surrender. “It’s not my business. I guess I’m just curious.”
Ah. I can understand Shep’s curiosity. He’d been in a relationship with Heather for literally a decade. I’m not sure if he’s ever slept with anyone else, to be honest. For him, sex-in-the-wild must seem like a fairy tale in some ways.
“I’m pretty sure he picked me up. His game was far superior to mine that night.”
“Do you have game?”
I laugh at the playful insult, but when I look up at Shep, his big, brown eyes are brimming with sincerity, curiosity, intrigue. I narrow my eyes at him and the blush on his cheeks deepens.
“I’ve been known to have a little game.”
He eats his fries for a while, a thoughtful expression on his face. “So, how’d he do it?”
My eyes are scanning the bar. I don’t see the waitress, Bones, or Ethan.
“What?”
“You said he picked you up. How’d he do it?”
I turn to concentrate on Shep because he’s big and safe and familiar. “Oh. I was sitting alone at the bar. And Ethan came over to me and leaned down and said, ‘So, you gonna hit on me or what?’ ”
Shep’s eyebrows rise and I can’t tell if he thinks the line is funny or absurd.
“It worked.” I shrug. “We chatted for a couple hours and then went back to his place.”
Shep says something but I’m not listening anymore because Ethan walks out from a back hallway, our waitress at his side.
Holy God, I forgot how beautiful he is.
Ethan is built like a geometry problem. Shapes on shapes on shapes. He’s tall, with round shoulders, a broad, flat chest, muscular butt. Tonight, he’s wearing a button-down and a pair of slacks. His burnished, coppery hair is set off by the dim bar lighting, shining like a garnet.
One look at Ethan and my armadilloed heart suddenly stretches and unfurls. I realize I’m not breathing, just watching him, and I nearly choke on all the air I suck in at once. This is apparently what chemistry feels like. From ten yards away.
I’m retroactively impressed with myself that I managed to bag a babe like that. How did I handle touching him without hyperventilating? I must have just risen to the occasion like an athlete at the Olympics. That night, the world expected great things from me. And boy did I deliver. So did he, if I recall correctly.
The waitress is pointing to our booth.
I wait, a tightness in my throat like I’ve swallowed too much food at once, as he looks in my direction. There’s a half second of nothing on his face, in which I have to come to terms with the fact that he picks up girls at this bar so often that he legit doesn’t remember me, Powerpuff Girl or not. But then—thank you, Jesus Christ, Superstar—his face lights up in recognition.
He starts moving through the people at the bar, his dog next to him. They both just sort of push through crowds, the destination much more important than the journey.
When he’s close enough that I can finally see the robin’s egg of his irises, he jams his hands in his pockets. “Eve.”
Somebody’s cut the puppet strings because I almost collapse into a pile on the floor when he remembers my name. “Hi,” I say, scooting out from the bench and standing up.
His hands stay in his pockets a split second too long and our hug is of the pat-pat variety. Not everybody knows how to hug short people, especially not short people they’ve banged against a closet door. I don’t hold it against him.
“Oh,” he says over my head, and steps to the side with his hand out for Shep. “Hi. I’m Ethan Rise.”
“Shep Balder,” Shep says, his fist too full of fries to shake hands with Ethan. His solution is to shove all the fries into his mouth at once, wipe his hand on a handful of napkins, and then shake Ethan’s hand. “I’ll go…over there.”
Shep disappears and I have the urge to call him back, make him sit between me and Ethan.
“He’s one of my oldest friends…” I explain to Ethan as I slide back into the booth. He takes Shep’s seat and leans his elbows on the table.
Something brushes my leg and I jump, wondering if Ethan is already trying to put the moves on me again. But then a furry brown head pops up at my thigh and Bones does his one-eyed scowl at me. Even though his lack of one eye always makes Bones look a little teed-off, I can tell from the wobble of his head that his tail is wagging under the table. I pat the bench next to me and Bones jumps up.
“Hi,” I say solemnly to Bones, giving his ears a scratch.
“It’s, uh, good to see you again,” Ethan says after a second. “You didn’t leave me your number.”
“Right.”
Honestly, it hadn’t even occurred to me. I’d left while Ethan was asleep, Bones seeing me off at the door. “Sorry about that,” I say, meaning it both casually and sincerely. “I…don’t do…that…very often.”
“Me either,” he says, letting out a breath.
“So. Rise, huh? That’s an unusual last name.” Involuntarily my brain conjures a pesky little hyphen that it inserts between his last name and mine. Hatch-Rise. I hate that I’ve even had the thought.
The thing is, when a man like Ethan fertilizes your egg, it’s a nearly impossible task to completely ignore the question of whether or not you might just end up together. In my darkest hours over the last few weeks, I’ve wondered to myself if a surprise pregnancy could just possibly be the meet-cute to end all meet-cutes? Haven’t I seen that movie before? Aren’t they secretly soulmates and their pheromones recognized it before their hearts did? His sperm, determined to one day wife her, clawed its way through the condom to tie her to him for all eternity?
Ugh. The cloying stench of the will-they-won’t-they perfume is so overpowering I nearly ralph all over the booth.
“I think it’s English?” he says, scratching at his neatly shaved cheek. “Or British, I mean?” He’s still talking about last names while I quietly wither away in a romcom hell of my own miserable making. “Are you all right?”
I take a deep breath and sip my ginger beer. “I’m fine?”
Honestly, at this point, his guess is as good as mine.
“I think Clarice likes your friend.” His eyes are focused across the bar.
I look over my shoulder to see Shep, red-faced and nervously laughing at something the waitress is saying to him.
“Something tells me she’d eat him alive.”
Ethan’s studying me when I turn back to look at him. His eyes zipping from me and then back to Shep. I can practically hear the words he’s thinking. Are they really just friends?
“You been playing soccer?” he asks instead. That’s right. We both like soccer. We talked about it that night.
I blink at him for a minute. He had legitimately paid attention. It wasn’t attention solely for the hope of getting me against the wall of his bedroom. How refreshing.
“A little,” I respond. I had to quit my favorite league because you knocked me up, but…
A silent second passes. I know that I’m making this awkward.
People can tell when you have something to say and aren’t saying it. I came here tonight and asked to see him. Which means it’s a fair assumption on his part that I want to connect again. Meanwhile, I’m fiddling with his dog’s ears and barely even looking at him.
His hands spread out, palms flat on the tabletop. His light eyes take in my nervous fingers on Bones’s ears, the scant inch of ginger beer gone from my sweating glass, my eyes I’m certain are open a little too wide.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asks.
All the jokes have left the building along with Elvis, my brain, and my plan. Bones’s presence at my side goes from comforting to nonsensical. Why are there so many dogs in this bar?
I wish I’d never learned Ethan’s last name. I hate that it’s a verb, just like mine. That’s my thing. I hate that he’s so achingly handsome I want to hide my face. I hate that I do hide my face, but just for a moment.
I wish Willa were here.
When I drop my hands in a pile on my lap, he looks genuinely alarmed at my behavior. Great, Eve, freak him out before you change his life forever.
Great. Great. Great.
“Ethan,” I whisper, reaching across the table, deeply relieved when he puts his warm, rough hand in mine. “Turns out I’m pregnant. And it’s yours.”