Jesse grinned and glanced at me. “Did you know that if you drink strawberry milk at midnight, you wake up in the morning with your face looking like a strawberry?”
Zara looked horrified. “What if it’s chocolate milk?”
“Same thing. Your face will look like chocolate.”
“What about banana?”
“You’ll look like a banana, which would be really funny – for us.” He opened the fridge and pulled out the cow’s milk, plain and simple, passing it me when I walked over.
Jez followed me back upstairs, carrying the milk and water for Zara, Zara following her happily into her bedroom.
I didn’t go in to say goodnight again, because I knew doing that right now would have Zara pull the dramatics and she’d ask for me to stay until she fell asleep or have me read a story. She was less likely to try the emotional blackmail with Jez.
Amber was sitting up, reading her Kindle, a sheet pulled up to the bottom of her bump. I put the drinks down on the bedside table and told her that Jesse was staying.
“Drama? I wonder what it was?” She put her Kindle down and picked up her phone. “I’ll text Genny.”
“Won’t she be asleep?”
“If she is, she’ll have ‘do not disturb’ on.”
I slipped back into bed and knocked off the bedside light I’d put on. Amber was texting something else so it sounded like Genny was still awake.
“What happened?” Jesse was a top captain, but he did like to party, and there had been a string of women before he’d worked out how to manage his life a bit better.
“I’m not sure you’re going to like this.” She passed me her phone.
Whatever had happened had already hit the tabloid press. Some woman had a go at Jez thinking she was Jesse’s girlfriend; she’d gone to attack Jez, and Jesse had gotten in the way. Now the bat-shit crazy woman was threatening to the press that she was going to press charges.
“For the record, before you start awkward conversations with your sister and Jesse about this, they hadn’t done anything wrong. Genny’s really clear about that, and she was there.” Amber took her phone back off me.
“I know.” I laughed as she settled back down into the same position as we’d been in before Zara had barged into our bedroom. “Jesse isn’t Jerrica’s type.”
“What is?”
“Arty. Moody. Wears cords and goes to wine tasting events. I used to love taking the piss out of her boyfriends when they came round.” I’d gotten rid of a few that were just complete drips fairly quickly.
I felt Amber’s breathing deepen. We weren’t resuming what started before the interruption. She was almost asleep.
In the dead of night, when everything else was silent, strange thoughts would crawl from under rocks and play with your common sense like a cat with a mouse. I wasn’t tired anymore; maybe I should’ve had some milk too, because I was now contemplating what happened when our son was six months old or so and whether Amber would want to move out.
Being woken up by my daughters wasn’t going to stop. I remembered Jez at sixteen, trying to creep in from having snuck out in the evenings when she was grounded. My dad hadn’t been fooled. He was up waiting for her, sitting in the bathroom, so when she opened the door to do whatever she needed to do, she saw him.
Her scream had woken the neighbours.
If Amber stayed, she’d be taking on Libbie and Zara. If she stayed, would I be enough, or was this just because I’d had the stupidity to use out of date condoms so she was now tied to me when I wouldn’t have been what she would’ve chosen?
She was who I would’ve chosen anyway. The only thing that had stopped me from asking her on a date was that I knew she didn’t want kids. I moved my hand from her belly to over her hand, feeling her bare ring finger.
Somehow, I needed to put a ring on it, but I needed her to know first that I would’ve chosen her even without the bump. Which meant I needed to find a way to woo her.
THIRTY-FOUR WEEKS
“Do you think she’ll like it?”
“Hell, if she doesn’t just show her the price tag.”
“This is Amber, she’s not going to give a shit about the price tag.”
