Well, except when she’s at the stadium cheering the Jugs on. But her family understands that. Her family is so close they probably know she’s been having a weird semi-fling with Merrick Briggs since last season.
Joss doesn’t have family. She was raised by a single mom who was Joss’s hero until she passed away when Joss was in college, and that put Joss on a terrible path with an abusive husband who turned out to be an actual monster. She still grieves for her mom, and the way she talks about Gabe’sfamily, her eyes all dewy with affection, the way she’s already gone out to Minnesota twice and they’ve come here once and his mom is literally flying into town tomorrow to help with the early newborn days? Yeah, I don’t think she’d understand if I tried to explain why I haven’t seen my dad in two years.
Because I’m weak, and I can’t handle the bad days with him. I can barely handle the good days, and from what the nurses have told me, the good days are getting rarer and rarer.
“The cancer kind of messed everything up,” I tell Joss. It’s a good answer. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that answer. It’s what I tell Blaise every time he pushes me about saying we didn’t need a condom. It was just that one time, but he just keeps needling me about it, like he knows I’m lying and wants to wring the answer out of me instead of calling me out and being done with him.
So yeah, I told him the doctors said I couldn’t get pregnant after they removed my cancer-ridden ovary, and that’s why I let John fuck me without a condom. And since I haven’t started my cycle yet since having Donovan, I figured we were in the clear.
He spent half a second looking it up before waving his phone in my face as evidence that yes, absolutely, women are fertile before their cycles start again, even with only one ovary. Which I already know, but I . . .
I don’t know. I don’t know why I told him we didn’t need protection.
And after he hate-fucked me over it, he spent the rest of the day as gentle with me as he is with Donovan, holding me and snuggling me and making me breakfast for dinner, complete with those eggs he has such strong opinions about. So I guess we both got what we wanted.
“It’ll be good to see him again,” Joss declares with a huge smile, and God, her heart must just be so full with this perfect life she truly deserves. I can see why it wouldn’t even cross her mind that it might be painful for me to visit the man I’ve shared so many wonderful stories about.
He was a good man. Is a good man. Was. I don’t know.
“You’ll call me the second anything feels off, right? I can turn that car around any time. I don’t even know why I said I was thinking about driving up there. I take it back.”
Joss rubs her belly and basks in the sun, radiant. “Go. You need this. You’ve been all sad since Blaise left. You miss him.”
“Do not.”
She tilts her head just enough to side-eye me wickedly, the Lady Madonna with a dirty secret. “You miss his dick.”
I gasp, genuinely shocked. Joss doesn’t say stuff like that. She’s a quilter, for God’s sake. “I—what? No!”
“Don’t lie to me. Blaise kissed you when you dropped him off on Sunday.”
“He kissed me on my head! And he was already kissing Donovan, so it would have looked weird if he hadn’t.”
“His hands were all over you at the party on Saturday.”
“He was all pissy because he thought I drank too much.” Not even a joke. When I cracked open the second can of margarita, he got on my case. And yeah, okay, it turned out it was too much alcohol, but it was kind of Blaise’s fault because he made me feel like I had to drink the whole second can.
“And then dragged you to his old room?”
“Oh my God, he’s such a dick that he was making sure I pumped and dumped my milk.”
Right into his mouth.
While he fingered me.
And it should have been weird and gross. We’re not doing that again. But he keeps bringing it up again in the middle of phone sex, how badly he wants to suck the milk out of my tits while he fucks me, and it’s made me squirm in my underwear.
Dammit.
Joss waggles an eyebrow at me. “You know, I was warning Gabe that post-pregnancy sex might come with some unexpected lactation, and he was really interested in that.”
“Eww, gross. I’m leaving. Call me if youdrop a baby.”
Chapter 21
Blaise
Japan should be amazing.
