“She’s tough,” I say.
“Thank you Jake. I really appreciate you taking her to get checked out. You’re a good man.”
I almost choke.
If you only knew.
“Thanks,” I manage. “That means a lot.”
He nods, and stands to leave. “I’ll let you get back to it.” He lifts the mug in a little salute and disappears down the hall.
I slump back in my chair, staring at the ceiling. This is a disaster. A hopeful disaster, sure. A disaster with a tiny heartbeat at the center of it. But still.
I force myself to work the rest of the afternoon. Contracts, emails, a quick call with a client. By six, though,I’m done. I shut down my computer, grab my jacket, and head out.
In the parking garage, I sit behind the wheel for a minute, hands loose on the steering wheel, letting the quiet soak in. I unlock my phone and pull up a browser and type in “typical pregnancy cravings.”
The results are endless. Pickles. Ice cream. Pickles with ice cream. Spicy food. Sour candy. Things that should never occupy the same plate. One result says meat. That I can do.
I put in an order at Five Guys for burgers and fries. It’s way too much food for two people. While I wait in my car for the order to be ready, I let my head fall back against the seat and finally admit the thing I’ve been dancing around all day:I want this.
I want the baby. I want to be a dad. That part has always been there, humming under everything else like background music. Even at my lowest point after the divorce, when I was pretty sure the universe had stapled a “Do Not Resuscitate” sign to my love life, there was still this small, stubborn feeling that someday I’d have a family.
I just assumed there would be a more conventional route to that destination. Marriage, then kids. Not fireworks, champagne, and my boss’s daughter breathing “This is one night only” in my ear.
Six months. That’s roughly what we have before everything changes on a practical level. Six months to show her I mean what I say. Six months to earn her trust. Six months to figure out if we can be more than two people orbiting the same baby.
In my ideal version, yeah, we end up together. We raiseour kid under the same roof. We argue about paint colors for the nursery and names and who gets up for the middle-of-the-night feeding. We keep laughing the way we did that night, and she lets me see all the parts of her she keeps tucked away behind her walls.
But I can’t say all of that to her tonight without sending her sprinting for the hills, so tonight is simple. Tonight is “I’m here.” Tonight is “I’m not going anywhere.” Tonight is “I will show you with a hundred small actions that I can be counted on, and if you never want anything more than co-parenting, I will still be all in as a dad.”
I get a text that my order is ready and ten minutes later I’m pulling up in front of her house. The porch light is on. My stomach does a weird flip. I climb out of the car and head up to the door holding the bags of food in one hand and knock. When the door opens, whatever little speech I had queued up in my brain vaporizes.
She is beautiful. Barefoot in black leggings and an oversized sweater that hangs off one shoulder, dark hair down around her face in loose waves. No makeup. She looks softer than yesterday, less brittle around the edges, but there is still a tightness around her eyes that says she hasn’t stopped thinking either.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.” Her voice is a little tentative, but she smiles, and something unclenches in my chest.
We stand there for a second locked in eye contact before she shifts back and opens the door wider. “Come in.”
The house smells like sugar cookies and mint, and looks just as comforting as it smells. The living room has dark bluewalls crowded with framed vintage movie posters, built-in shelves crammed with paperbacks and scripts and notebooks. There’s a beat-up, overstuffed couch with a throw blanket crumpled in one corner and a half-empty mug on the coffee table. Her laptop is open on the small desk along the wall, surrounded by a perimeter of pens, sticky notes, and what looks like a stack of notebooks.
“Nice place,” I say, setting the food on the kitchen counter. “It looks completely different from when Blair lived here.”
“Thanks,” she says, closing the door behind us. “I told her I appreciated the beige, but my soul needed color.”
“Bold choice,” I say. “But it suits you.”
She eyes the bags in my hands. “Smells delicious.”
“I hope it is,” I say. “Google said meat, so I thought maybe burgers.”
Her eyes light up in a way I did not see yesterday. “Seriously?”
“Yeah.” I shrug, suddenly feeling self-conscious. “If you want something healthy I can go get something else.”
She stares at me, then laughs, this surprised, real sound that hits me right under the sternum.
