Clarke gave me a tight-lipped smile.
I deserved that. I hadn’t planned on dropping the whole “Oops, I had a secret relationship with the sexy as fuck baseballcoach and now I’m carrying his spawn” bombshell during our bimonthly Dungeons & Dragons session, and yet somewhere between the charcuterie spread and Jo’s guava pastries, it had just spilled out of me.
To say my announcement had surprised my friends would be an understatement. Nessa was the only one who didn’t look like she needed a cold compress.
“Sooo,” June said, sitting up straighter on her floor pillow. Typically, we met at the tavern for D&D, but tonight, we had opted for a cozier spread at Smutty Buddies. “Now that everyone is caught up on who you did last summer, do you want to discuss next steps?”
“Slaying the orc queen, obviously,” Nessa answered quickly, even though she knew good and well that June wasn’t talking about the game.
We all knew exactly what June wasreallysaying. I still had options. It was early enough to end this pregnancy if I wanted to. There was no shame in that, not in this group, and definitely not in my own mind.
“I’ve decided to keep it,” I told them.
Judging by their expressions, none of my friends had pegged me as the baby type. To be fair, I hadn’t either.
I liked my space and control. I never cooed at passing strollers or daydreamed about names for my future children. The very thought of giving birth scared the ever-loving shit out of me, and I was starting to realize that I had an unsettling, deep-seated fear that my little parasite might grow up to become a serial killer.
Blame it on my love of true crime podcasts.
I had never done anything conventional, so motherhood had always seemed like a farfetched concept.
But as complicated and terrifying as it felt, there was something in me that had settled around the idea of having this baby. Like the part of me that had always braced forabandonment for as long as I could remember had finally found something—or in this case, someone—to stick around for. And that quiet certainty, however new, was enough to move forward.
“I know it sounds crazy,” I told them, voice thick with emotion. “And it probably is because I have no idea what I’m doing, but that’s never stopped me before. Besides, it’s not like I can do worse than my mom.”
Nessa sat forward, resting her hands on her tattooed thighs. “Badass.”
“Yeah,” June added. “Thatalone is how I know you’re going to be a great mom.”
I’m glad somebody thinks so.
Because the truth was, I was more scared of being a mom than I was of having a baby. And yeah, I knew those two things were supposed to be one and the same, but they didn’t feel that way to me.
Having a baby was physical. It was swollen ankles and hemorrhoids and, according to the pregnancy book I had downloaded to my Kindle, dry nipples, all of which led up to that moment in the hospital when someone put a tiny, squirming person in your arms. Terrifying, yes, but there was a beginning and an end to it.
Being a mom, though . . . that was something else entirely.
That was waking up day after day, trying to be someone new. Reliable. Selfless. Someone who could put another person first without resenting them, a feat my own mother had never fully grasped.
But what scared me the most wasn’t the pressure to be a good mother—it was the fear that somewhere along the way, I would stop recognizing myself. That I would vanish into the job.
And being a mother was a job—fuck anybody who said otherwise.
“By the way,” June said, shaking me out of my existential spiral. “I still can’t believe that you were secretly juggling that man’s rosin bags for months.”
“June!” Clarke cried.
Nessa buried a laugh behind her hands.
“Oh, come on,” June protested. “I feel like I deserve a little credit for that top-notch baseball innuendo.”
I massaged my temples, half-laughing despite the situation. This was why our “Bitchcraft” group got on so well. One second, we were battling an orc queen and foraging for magical fungi with levitation powers, and the next we were breaking down my emotional news like it was an episode ofLove Island.
Damn, Brooks would love that reference.
There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that any one of these foxy, queer weirdos—aside from Clarke, the “token straight friend” of the friend group—would offer me a place to stay or an alibi, if needed.
“Speaking of Coach Daddy,” Nessa said between sips from herEnemies-to-lovers is a valid life choicemug. “Does he know yet?”
