Chapter Seven
Ian
I barely slept that night. I kept picturing Erin walking out the bathroom door, turning her back on me. She didn’t care what happened to me, if she ever saw me again, whether I lived or died. It was, I imagined, the same impression I used to give my own one-night stands—when I was in the habit of having them.
Once again, Erin had flipped the script on me.
I finally hauled myself out of bed at seven, went for a run, picked up some doughnuts at Stan’s, and drove them out to Park Ridge to visit Tommy.
As soon as he’d gotten married, Tommy moved out to the suburbs—though he liked to maintain that Park Ridge was barely a ’burb. It had great restaurants, mom-and-pop stores, and a train station—not to mention a movie theater! It was walking distance to the city! (Meaning the Edison Park neighborhood, which, if that was “the city,” I was father-to-be of the year.) I rapped quietly on the door of his large red brick Tudor and waited. After a moment, Susie, her long blond hair up in a messy ponytail, yanked open the door, let out a relieved sigh, and said, “Ian. Thank goodness you’re here!”
Susie had never, ever looked so happy to see me before.
She ushered me in, plucking the box of doughnuts from my hand. Susie was normally perfectly put together, but this morning she’d thrown on a hole-ridden Marquette T-shirt and a pair of Tommy’s boxers. I followed her back to the kitchen/family room, where six-month-old Maeve lolled in her playpen, squirming and complaining.
“Where’s Tommy?” My eyes scanned the first floor of their renovated, open-floor-plan home. This place normally smelled like vanilla and oil soap, but a mustiness had set in. Clothes, books, and toys littered every available surface—from the floor to the tables to Susie’s rowing machine.
“Who the fuck knows?” She whispered the f-word. “He left this morning to go for a run.” Susie rolled her eyes. Tommy was a long-distance runner. He could be gone for hours. “He drove the car to the forest preserve so he could run on the trail up to the Botanic Gardens, but I need to get to the store. Maeve’s out of diapers.” She shook her head. “All the stores in walking distance are closed right now.”
“I can run.” I pulled the keys out of my pocket. Erin wouldn’t let me do anything for her, but at the very least I could give my best friend’s wife a hand. At least that would make me feel a tiny bit more useful.
“No.” Susie pulled out her ponytail and fluffed her hair. “I’ll go. You stay with the baby.”
I tried to protest one last time, but Susie grabbed her coat and car keys and left the house so fast I felt a breeze. I spun around slowly, preparing for…I didn’t know what. For the baby to turn into a monster? For her to devour me in one gulp? I had never been alone with a small child before. I had a master’s in finance, but I had no idea how to act in the presence of a baby. Maeve lay on her tummy, in cobra pose. “So, you know yoga,” I said. “Impressive.”
She reached for a rattle at the other end of her pen, and then flipped onto her back.
“Show off,” I said.
Maeve grinned and shook her toy.
Quietly, slowly, so as not to disturb anything, I walked backward and perched on the couch. I perused the scattered books on the coffee table. What to Expect When You’re Expecting hid under one of Maeve’s knit caps. I pulled it toward me and flipped to four months. The baby—my baby, yeesh—now had fingers and toes. And eyelashes. They were probably able to yawn, make faces, and suck their thumb. Cool. Last time I’d seen the kid, it had looked like a maggot. Now it was doing actual things.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and opened my text conversation with Erin. We’d only messaged each other that one time—when she wanted to meet for coffee to tell me about the kid, and I’d texted her back thinking she meant “Coffee? ;)”
What a dumb-ass.
She and I had left things unambiguous last night. Still, there was some niggling part of me that couldn’t just let it be. I couldn’t sever the tie completely. She was carrying my child. I didn’t understand yet what that meant to me, if it meant anything, but I had to keep the door open, at least slightly, until I figured it out. Maybe that wasn’t fair to Erin or the baby, but none of this was fair. It wasn’t fair that I’d accidentally knocked her up. It wasn’t fair that I’d been so hampered psychologically by my mom leaving that I wasn’t sure I could handle a life-long emotional entanglement like having a child.
“It was nice seeing you last night,” I wrote. Such bullshit. That was the kind of thing you said to an aunt you ran into at the grocery store, not your baby’s mother whom you’d just boned for the last time. I deleted the whole thing and tossed the phone to the coffee table, which startled Maeve, who broke into a wail that her mom probably heard two miles away at Target.
I tiptoed over to the playpen and glanced down. She’d balled her hands into fists, and her face had turned red. “Maeve?” I whispered. “Maevie?”
She kept crying and crying and crying.
Holding my breath, I leaned over the side of her pen and lifted her up, gripping her under her armpits. She looked right at me, scrunched up her face, and squealed, “Waaaaah!”
I laughed. I full-on laughed at a crying baby. More proof of my wanton jackassery. But I hadn’t been laughing in a mean way. She just looked so ridiculous and cute and angry. Maeve had to see it for herself. Bouncing her against my chest, I walked her into the powder room, flipped on the lights, and turned her around to see the mirror. “Look at yourself, Maeve. You’re a mess.”
She stopped crying for a split second to check out her reflection, then started bawling again.
I hugged her against my hip and swayed to and fro, still in front of the mirror. “You remind me of the babe,” I sang, and I kept going, performing a one-man rendition of the magic dance song from Labyrinth. My voice lulled her to calm. The girl was a David Bowie fan. I knew I liked her for a reason. I walked her back out into the family room and turned on the Bluetooth speaker Tommy kept next to the TV. I searched for “Bowie” on Spotify and pressed shuffle. Maeve and I danced to “Under Pressure” and “Heroes.” She had forgotten how upset she was and was now giggling.
I picked up my phone and took a selfie of us, me and my goddaughter. This wasn’t so bad, not bad at all. I was actually having fun with a six-month-old. Maybe I could do this, even part-time. I could be a sometime dad, give Erin the night off when she needed one. I’d be a glorified babysitter.
Feeling confident, I composed another text to Erin. “It was nice seeing you last night. Did you know our baby has fingers now? Isn’t that amazing?”
I pressed send before I could stop myself and started bouncing again with Maeve. This was fun! Being a parent was a breeze. I was already such a pro at it. Look at me absolutely crushing childcare. I was Ian Fucking Donovan: Venture Capitalist and Expert Baby Wrangler.
Then Maeve scrunched up her face again. She turned beet red, but in a different way from when she was crying. Her eyes laser-focused on mine and she looked angry, possessed. For a split-second I considered calling my priest friend to come do an exorcism. But then a sound erupted from her that would haunt me for the rest of my days—a gurgling, bubbling, flatulent noise emanating from her rear end.
Maeve giggled, so I giggled, until I felt a warm wetness creeping under my left hand. “What did you do, Maeve?” I flipped her around. A brownish-yellow stain now covered the entire back of her green turtle-patterned PJs. “Oh, Maeve.”
I ran her upstairs to her bedroom and looked around. What was I even supposed to do in this situation? I’d never dealt with anything like this before. I’d left my phone downstairs, so I couldn’t exactly Google it. But Tommy was Tommy. He probably had an Echo in every room. I launched the Hail Mary pass. “Alexa, how do you change a diaper?”
From the next room came that gorgeous, life-saving robotic voice, “According to Wikihow…” and I breathed a sigh of relief. Alexa would get me through this. But then she kept going and going and going, step after step. Her instructions were more complicated than changing a tire on a semi. She wanted me to wash my hands and place Maeve on the changing table but keep one hand on her body while grabbing approximately one million tools and articles of clothing. I think Alexa incorrectly assumed I was an octopus. She used the word “genitals.” All of it went in one ear and out the other. The only step that truly mattered, I decided, was that I had to remove the loaded diaper and replace it with a clean one. That was the crux of the whole thing. I noticed a diaper holder contraption hanging from Maeve’s closet door, and I stuck my hand inside to hunt around. It was empty. No clean diapers. Because that was why Susie had been so eager to get to the store today…
Maeve was a mess. She was literally covered in her own poo. At the very least—for her comfort and my nostrils—I had to clean that up. I pulled a few wipes out of the warming container on the dresser. These flimsy pieces of garbage were not going to cut it. The girl needed a power washing.
We could do that.
From the guest room dresser, I grabbed the bathing suit Tommy kept for me to use in his hot tub. Now, how to put it on? I knew Maeve was just a baby, but she wasn’t my baby, and I definitely didn’t want to scar her for life. I placed her facedown, poo-up in her crib and shut the door as I pulled off my clothes in the hallway and threw on my bathing suit. There. I’d only left her alone for a total of about ten seconds. How much damage could she have done? I whipped open the door to Maeve’s room and found her on her back now, wiggling around, leaving a winding tire-track of crap all over her lime green microfiber sheet.
“We’ll leave that for your parents,” I said.
After carrying her into the guest bathroom and turning on the shower, I laid her on the bathmat and removed her dirty PJs and diaper, trying to breathe out of my mouth, and only when absolutely necessary. I grabbed whatever bottle of shower gel was available—something rugged and manly and smelling of pine, sorry, Maeve—and carried her into the state-of-the-art, multihead shower. Holding her tight against my chest—I would not drop my goddaughter in this shower—I aimed her backside at the nearest stream. Maeve giggled as the water hit her back and slid down her butt. With a washcloth, I wiped her off, all while singing more David Bowie tunes in her ear.
When she and I were both finally clean, I wrapped myself in a towel and used another one to fashion a sort of makeshift diaper around her bottom half. Cooing more Labyrinth music in Maeve’s ear, I opened the bathroom door and stepped out into the hall. Tommy stood there, stretching his hamstrings. He straightened up. “What…?” He pulled out his earbuds.
I handed him his baby. “You’re out of diapers. And I’m off the clock.”
Feeling utterly invincible, I picked up my clothes, changed in the guest room, and went downstairs. I checked my phone. There was no message from Erin, but I texted her anyway. “I just MacGuyvered a bath towel into a baby diaper. Pretty sure I can do anything now.”
She sent me back a thumbs-up.
…
Erin
He sent me a picture of a onesie from inside some gift shop somewhere. Denver, I guessed, since this was a Colorado Rockies outfit.
“That’s cute.” I sent the text quickly and flipped over my phone as Katie led my one o’clock appointment into my office. Ian had been messaging me regularly for the past two days, since Sunday morning, sharing tidbits about pregnancy and fetal development. Most of which I already knew, but it was kind of sweet—or whatever—that he felt the need to show me his dedication to learning about my pregnancy.
I’d kept the conversations a secret from Katie and Nat, though, because I wasn’t naive. I knew these texts could stop at any time, once Ian lost interest in the newness of being a dad-to-be and reverted back to full-time workaholic cad. Composing a message was easy. Actually showing up—and sticking around for the duration of an ultrasound—was hard.
“Erin,” Katie said, “this is Maria Minnesota.”
Feeling a bit frumpy, I stood and shook hands with the gorgeous tall young woman in front of me. “Nice to meet you,” I said. “You and Katie met at the gym?”
“We’ve been taking this cross-training class together. Your sister is strong!” Maria grinned at Katie, who blushed. That was the best possible compliment Maria could’ve given her. Katie’d been exercising around the condo for weeks—doing push-ups, lunges, squats, you name it—as her way of dealing with a year of being single. She told anyone who asked that she was in training for the inevitable zombie apocalypse.
“I told Maria where I worked, and she offered her services if we needed any help with fund-raising, so I snatched her up.” Katie, notebook in hand, perched on the couch in front of my office window.
I offered Maria a seat in front of my desk and returned to my own chair. “I’m sure you’ve heard,” I said, “our previous fund-raising chair had to step down suddenly after the Valentine’s Day party.”
Katie made a doing cocaine gesture, and then mimed locking her wrists in handcuffs.
“That was a huge shame,” Maria said. “Jennifer did a great job these past few years, but I think we need fresh blood and new ideas. I’ve run events for charities around Chicago, and I want to make this year’s Glenfield Gala the best ever. With my connections from food and travel blogging, we’ll be able to bring in huge sponsors, plus get donations and auction items from restaurants all around the city.”
“Sounds amazing, and I’m glad to have someone so experienced at the helm.” As school principal, I was a de facto member of the fund-raising committee, which was not remotely my bag. I could show up and shake hands, but planning galas and whatnot sat outside my realm of expertise. That was why I made Katie attend this meeting. She’d act as my assistant and run point, bringing me in only when necessary. “You’re an alumna, then?” I asked.
“No,” Maria said, “but my niece is in third grade here.”
“Is Minnesota your real last name?” Katie asked.
I shot her a look. “What do you need from me?” I glanced at my Apple watch, which had buzzed against my wrist. There was another text from Ian. “Did you know the baby can hear everything? We probably should talk about what music you’re playing around the kid.” I wiped the smile from my face and ignored the text. I’d taken to answering only every third message, just to avoid looking like a huge chump when the texts eventually dried up.
“What I need from you is an idea of what exactly you’d like us to raise money for. It always helps to have something concrete to show people—like a STEM lab or a new gym floor.”
Katie wrote down a note with a flourish. “STEAM,” she said.
“Hmmm?” Maria asked.
“Katie’s just repeating my party line,” I said. “STEM is great, STEAM is better. STEM leaves out the fine arts.”
Maria nodded. “Perfect. That should be our focus, then—putting the ‘A’ back in STEAM.” She waved a hand in front of her, as if visualizing the poster. “I was a theatre geek, myself. I’d love to see the school raise money for music or the visual arts.”
“Or…” I scratched my chin, as both women looked at me. “It occurred to me at the Valentine’s Day fund-raiser that we’re constantly raising money for our school, to give our kids a leg up.”
Katie raised her eyebrows. “Which is the whole point of doing a fund-raiser for your school.”
“Yes, but.” I stood and started pacing. The people here knew my history when they hired me. I’d told them upfront that I was a bleeding heart who longed to see all children succeed. All children. “This school serves a very, very small number of kids in the community. We raise all this money to enhance the education of about five hundred kids.”
“That’s…kind of what the parents pay the big bucks for,” Maria said.
I pointed to her. “But they also pay for us to teach their children how to be good citizens. We throw all these fund-raisers, and I doubt the kids even know what’s going on. All they see is that—boom!—they have a new gym floor or—pow!—brand new army of foreign language teachers.”
“What are you getting at?” Katie asked.
I stood at the window, gazing out at the parking lot full of nice cars, surrounded by beautiful, timeworn oak trees. At my old school, my office faced a chain link fence, with the alley and a graffiti-covered garage just beyond. No one threw fund-raisers for those kids. No Prince Charming ever showed up to bid forty thousand dollars on a lark for a date with Cinderella. “Let’s raise money for the Glenfield Academy arts program, yes, but then I propose that we split any money raised to develop a fine arts program at a CPS school.” I turned around, shrugging. “My old CPS school.”
“People won’t go for that,” Katie said.
“Yes, they will. Like you said, they know who they hired.” Maria rose from her seat. “Maybe they’ve never raised money for an inner-city school because no one’s ever told them they could or should. And I say we don’t limit it to the Gala, either. Let’s get the kids involved—selling candy, holding car washes. They should take some ownership of this project.”
“I love it,” I said.
“I’ll get in touch with Katie, and we’ll work out the details,” Maria said.
We all shook hands. After Maria left, Katie stepped over to my desk and flipped over my phone. “Yup,” she said. “I thought so. You’ve been texting Ian. You’re not…feeling relationshippy about him, are you?”
I rolled my eyes. “No. He texts me once in a while about baby stuff. That’s it. I never text him back. Totally innocent.”
Katie raised an eyebrow. “Never, or hardly ever?” She stepped forward and started doing stationary lunges, a somewhat endearing habit she’d developed.
“Hardly ever.” I sat in my chair and straightened papers. My watch buzzed with another text from Ian. I flipped the phone over before Katie could see. She missed it on account of all the lunges.
“I thought you were doing this on your own.” She dipped down and up, down and up.
“I am,” I said. “But I’m also not going to cut off communication with my child’s father just because of some proclamation about staying single for a year.”
“This isn’t about that.” Katie straightened up and stretched at her waist. “It’s about you. I don’t want you to get hurt. Ian’s married to his job, that’s it. He walked out on you after the ultrasound.”
I shook my head. “I am totally going into this with my eyes wide open. He’s showing interest now, which is fine. But he’ll get bored sooner or later, and I’ll be back where I started—alone and fine with it.”
“As long as you’re okay,” she said, “and as long as you’re not getting attached.”
“I am not getting attached,” I said.
…
Erin
Being a pregnant principal with a billion social obligations kind of sucked sometimes. There were very few events I could nope out on, even if I wanted to. But I made the executive decision to ditch a Friday night fund-raiser hosted by an alumnus and Republican congressional candidate raising money for a right-to-life organization.
I played the pregnancy card, which meant I was now lying on the couch, curled up with a full vat of buttered popcorn, ready to flip on America’s Sweethearts. I had decided to start working my way through the entire rom-com genre—from A to Z, and tonight belonged to me, Julia Roberts, John Cusack, and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Right before I pressed play, my phone buzzed.
It was a message from Ian. “Did you know about the listeria? Tell me you’ve been nuking your deli meats for at least two minutes on HIGH.”
I wiped my buttery hands on a paper towel and texted him back, “I don’t even eat deli meat.”
“Good,” he said. More little dots appeared on the screen, and I set down the remote. No point in pressing play until he finished telling me everything he needed to tell me. “So, what are you up to?” he asked. “Going to Anti-Choice Jerkstores Present…A Night in Atlantic City?”
So we were getting all personal now? I thought we were only supposed to talk about whether or not to use cloth diapers. And though I had fun chatting with him, admittedly, I didn’t trust him. He was still the guy who left me high and dry in Dana’s ultrasound room bathroom. But it wouldn’t kill me to engage in polite conversation. I should keep this going for the kid. I sent him back a vomit face emoji.
“Barf because you’re sick or barf because that event sounds terrible?”
I giggled. “The second one. I’m actually having a nice night in with popcorn and rom-coms.” At my current speed, I’d probably finish this bowl of popcorn before the meet cute.
“Sounds nice,” he said. “I could use a night like that.”
“What are you doing?” I asked. “Skirt chasing?” It was what I assumed he was doing at all times. I mean, I wasn’t delusional. Yes, we’d had two very fun orgasm sessions together, but I wasn’t foolish enough to think I was the only one he’d seen naked recently.
“I’m in Kansas City, in a hotel room. I’m supposed to meet clients out for BBQ, but I’m not in the mood.”
Mmm…pulled pork. I could go for that right now. I wonder if Smoque delivers? I’d ask Alexa later. “But BBQ,” I said. Ian didn’t understand how good he had it right now.
“I know,” he said. “But I’ve been here three days. I’m about to turn into a brisket.”
I pictured him sitting on the edge of his hotel bed, with a barbecued slab of beef as a head. It didn’t totally turn me off. “So, stay in.”
“Maybe I will.”
I glanced at the TV, which was stalled on the America’s Sweethearts Netflix menu page. I was always jonesing for alone time, probably because I was pretty introverted and had to spend my work day dealing with all kinds of people—large and small. Though schmoozing was a part of my job, I loved nights by myself when I could lie on the couch like a slob and eat ridiculous amounts of popcorn without judgment. But these nights always ended up making me a little sad, a little wistful. Watching bad rom-coms alone was fun, but not as fun as it was with other people. Nat and I used to do this together, when she wasn’t out with whomever she was dating at the time. Dirk, if he was around, would sneer at us from his recliner while he read some massive tome about world history or whatever, but Nat and I didn’t care. We ignored him and did our thing, laughing and eating and drinking. But tonight she’d gone to the silly Atlantic City event. “You have Netflix?” I asked Ian.
“I do.”
My fingers faltered as if trying to slow me down. “If you’re serious about staying in, you can watch America’s Sweethearts with me remotely. We can make fun of how Julia Roberts says ‘Kiki.’” I was half kidding. Ian was probably bullshitting me about wanting to stay in tonight. He wasn’t a stay-in guy. He had buxom, brisket-fed Kansas City women to meet.
And…nothing. No response. No little dots. He took my offer seriously, probably thinking this was me trying to trap him into some kind of relationship where we had babies and watched movies together. I’d been hunting for a little company, and, in the process, I’d crossed a line. And not just his. My own line, too. I was supposed to be doing this—all of this—on my own, not chatting up my baby daddy and asking him on a virtual date.
But then the phone rang, and I answered it on the first ring.
“Hi?” I braced myself for the “talk” I knew was coming. Ian was about to tell me that even being texting buddies was too much.
“So what movie is this again?” he asked.
“Um.” Were we seriously doing this? Was Ian Donovan opting to stay in on a Friday night to Mystery Science Theater our way through a bad rom-com? I spoke slowly, so as not to spook him. “America’s Sweethearts. Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones are sisters. CZJ is a big movie star who’s forced to promote a film with her ex-husband, John Cusack.”
“That sounds kind of familiar?”
“It’s not very good.” That was my way of giving him an out.
“Which is the point, right?”
Dude! He got it. Ian Donovan understood the appeal of sitting through a crappy movie you’d already seen. “It’s totally the point.” I picked up the remote again. “Are we actually doing this?” If he wanted to back out, this was the time.
“We’re doing it,” he said.
God, this was more stressful than phone sex. Asking him to talk me off would’ve been way easier. Our relationship was based on orgasms and the ramifications of those orgasms, nothing more. Opening ourselves up to movie-related inside jokes would mean taking our relationship to a whole new level. “When I say go, press play. Are you ready? Are you on the right screen?”
There was a pause. I imagined him in his hotel room, setting up the video. He no longer had brisket head. He was wearing a dress shirt and tie, which he’d definitely loosened using two fingers. “…Ready,” he said.
“Go.”
The title screen came up. “America’s Sweethearts,” I said, reading the title card. “Or Billy Crystal Gets His Nuts Licked by a Dog.”
“I wasn’t familiar with that alternate title.”
“It’s like Dr. Strangelove,” I said.
“Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb?”
I had learned to stop worrying and was loving this conversation. Ian was such a movie dork. “You really do know movies, huh?”
“I told you I did. My dad and I used to have movie nights together all the time when I was a kid. He showed me all the classics.” There was a pause. I felt every second of it. Talking about our families—this was certainly uncharted territory. “We still do it sometimes.”
“That’s so cool.” I’d never pictured Ian with a dad. His dad was my kid’s grandpa. So weird. I wanted to know more. “Like, what? Would you do that when your mom was out of town or something?”
“Or something,” he said with a hint of finality, shutting the conversation down.
Well, he gave me something, so I’d give him something. My family was going to be his kid’s family, too, after all. “I had to sneak out to my friends’ houses to watch movies.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. My parents were not screen people. We didn’t own a TV. At least not until I was fifteen and they adopted my sister. Then they were like, ‘Go ahead, Erin, watch whatever you want.’” That came out harsher than I meant it to. I totally understood what my parents were about. Before Katie, I was their only hope. They parented me like I was their one chance, their one shot. They weren’t going to do anything to jeopardize my future or my opportunity for success. Then when Katie came around, they mellowed. They suddenly had another outlet for their attention.
Something stirred in my stomach, and I grabbed my midsection. “Whoa, what?” That came out of nowhere.
“You okay?” Ian asked, his voice rushed.
“I think so.” I lifted my shirt, inspecting my abdomen, like there’d be anything to see with the naked eye. “There was just this weird feeling in my belly. Maybe the popcorn isn’t sitting well.”
“Pain?” he asked. “Are you having contractions?” I heard him flipping through a book on the other end.
“No. It didn’t hurt.” I searched for the words to describe what I’d just experienced. “It was more like an odd little fluttering.”
“Oh my God!” Ian shouted. There was a sound like he’d just chucked the book to the floor.
My heart pounded. “What? Is it bad? Am I dying?” I tried to take a few deep breaths. I knew this was too good to be true. I shouldn’t have allowed myself to get attached to any of this. I was losing my baby.
“No!” Ian said. “You’re fine! That was the baby. You just felt him…her…our kid move!”
“What?” I clutched my gut, still not believing I was okay.
When Ian spoke again, his voice was calmer. “The baby totally just moved.”
I was suddenly slightly less alone in the living room tonight. “No way.”
“Yeah. You’re almost at twenty weeks now. That’s about the time you’d start to feel it.” He paused. “Tell me all about it.”
I couldn’t stop beaming. That little whoosh under my flesh was my baby. My baby had made its presence known tonight. He or she was hanging out and watching America’s Sweethearts with their parents, like a real person. “Not much to tell,” I said. “It was literally a little flutter, like a butterfly in my uterus.”
“Can I be jealous now? I’m not sad to miss out on actual labor, but this is something a guy will never experience.” He paused. “I’m really glad I got to be on the phone, with you, though. For this.”
“Me, too.” My hand stayed on my gut as I blinked back tears, thanks to all the hormones and emotions. This was our odd little family—me, my one-night stand, and our fetus. This was our first movie together, our first family night in—like Ian used to do with his dad. I wiped my eyes. No use being sentimental over something so silly. Tonight was nothing special. This was no big deal. We weren’t a family. We were two strangers having a child together. We’d never have family movie nights together in the future. I’d have movie nights with the kid, and so would Ian, but separately.
“You know,” Ian said, “my mom was never around for movie night, but maybe when this kid is born, we can invite you to hang out sometimes, too. That is, if you’d want to.”
Oh, and now the tears were streaming. “I would like that,” I said. “Very much. And, Ian.” I swallowed, taking my time. This was a huge mistake. I should not be doing it. But thanks to the hormones and the baby moving and all of it, I had to take this leap. “Since you’ve been reading up so much on the baby stuff, you probably know that the twenty-week ultrasound is coming up.”
“Yeah.” His voice broke a little. “I did know that.”
“No pressure,” I said, “but if you want to come, I’d be happy to have you there.” I told him the date and time.
“I’ll be there,” he said.
I told him, “Awesome,” but my head said we’ll see.