“Where did you get champagne?” Avery asked, her brows knitted together.
“Yes, this is meant to bemocktail night,” Nora reminded her.
“I got champagne from this bottle I brought,” Fiona replied to Avery, waving the bottle in question. Then she narrowed her eyes on her best friend. “Mocktails?” She shook her head. “I’m not a mocktail girl. Cock or nothing.” She waggled her brows. “In all senses of the word. My husband’s cock only.” She took a long breath. “And it may only be the booze I’ll be imbibing for the next nine or so months since I’m ovulating tonight and planning on getting pregnant the old-fashioned way… while shitfaced.”
She drained her glass to accentuate her point before pouring another and reaching over to top off mine. I’d only been sipping for something to do. Feeling awkward and not quite aware, I opened my mouth to protest, but the other women’s voices drowned it out.
“I thought you said you were one and done?” Avery asked Fiona, holding out her mocktail to be spiked.
“You said, and I quote, ‘anyone who willingly has more than one child is psychotic, masochistic, or a trad wife,’” Nora remarked with an arched brow. She was pregnant with her third child.
Fiona drained her wine. “Okay, I’m a fucking idiot. I long for morning sickness, hemorrhoids, vaginal tearing, sleepless nights, diaper blowouts, tantrums… I want to do it all again! I want to give June a big family, and I want my big, stupid husband to hold a newborn again. So fuck me.”
I sipped my drink again to stave off the uncomfortable feeling in my skin. That yearning. To live in that world. Really live there. To have a ring on my finger and a partner who adored me the way all of these women’s husbands did.
Oh, what a regressive longing. To be awife. A mother. Didn’t I have much bigger dreams than that? Hadn’t I already tried that once and gotten trampled over? Wasn’t I still, technically, someone’s wife?
I downed my drink then helped myself to more. There was more than enough, now that the mocktails had been abandoned by everyone who wasn’t pregnant, and bottles of champagne were materializing everywhere.
The bubbles were nice. As was the conversation happening around me. I tried to engage in it, but my mind was elsewhere.
My mind was in Beau’s dining room. Not going over the credit card bills.
Staring at his grey eyes, gluing me in place. Hearing him say,“I do like you, Hannah, and that’s the fuckin’ problem.”
What did that mean? That he liked me?
Except he didn’t. I had a wealth of evidence to back up that fact.
And yet… There’d been stolen moments, glances, the brushing of fingertips in the kitchen. I kept going over those things, using them like petals on a daisy.He likes me. He likes me not. He likes me.
“Hannah.”
I jerked out of my head, mortified that I’d been chanting, “He likes me,” like a lovesick teenager. I was meant to be getting away from Beau, not letting him take over my mind.
I gazed at Fiona, who was staring at me with an interesting expression on her face. She looked almost … sheepish.
“This was kind of a setup,” Fiona explained, her eyes on me as the door opened and closed.
Clutching on to the stem of my glass for dear life, my lungs stopped working at the prospect of some kind of blind date in front of these women. Surely, they weren’t that cruel.
I was not dressed for a blind date. I knew how these women typically dressed. They were all warm, approachable, and down-to-earth, but I had a practiced eye to recognize money—who had it, who didn’t. It had defined me in my childhood, had become a defense mechanism to ensure that I didn’t befriend people who would eventually find out I lived in a trailer and got my clothes from Goodwill, dropping me like a bad habit if I was lucky, teasing me mercilessly when I wasn’t.
All of these women had money. Even Fiona, the most casually dressed of them all, was in three-hundred-dollar jeans, a cashmere sweater, and had a huge diamond on her left ring finger. We were currently drinking in a house that required a code to enter, located on a sprawling plot of land, decorated with some of the nicest furniture and art I’d ever seen.
I’d spent my life protecting myself from the pain that came with befriending people higher on the socioeconomic ladder than me, yet here I was, surrounded by them, enjoying their company. And apparently, being set up on a date.
Did they think I was that pathetic? A charity case living with an asshole, unable to find a romance of her own?
“Lori!” Fiona exclaimed, rushing over to shove a drink in the hand of the pretty woman around my age who had just walked in.
Lori took the glass with a shy smile, saying hello to everyone. The cogs in my brain turned, oiled by champagne. This was a setup. For me. And Fiona had said that just as this woman walked through the door.
They thought that I was a charity case and a … lesbian? Don’t get me wrong, if I could choose who I was attracted to, it would be women. Men were horrid at best, deadly at worst. Such a flaw in nature, to make women attracted to and have to breed with their biggest predator. Unfortunately, I was attracted to men.
Grumpy single dads who hated me and whom I lived with, if I wanted to get specific.
My cheeks flamed with shame as Fiona ushered Lori forward. I panicked, looking for an escape. But there wasn’t one. Only a kitchen behind me, the rest of the women between me and the front door.
