“Everything okay?” Winnie asked me.
I looked at Jack, who was staring off into the distance beyond us, like a changed man.
I grinned at Winnie. “Great.”
Jack opened his script again with a sigh. “Back to fictional peppermint blow jobs.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Winnie
I’d always been good at making plans—a little gift from having narcolepsy, I supposed, since I had to be eternally ready to salvage a day derailed by oversleeping or an emergency nap—and I’d gotten even better at it during the divorce. Any task, no matter how existentially terrifying, could be broken down into the smallest steps when you thought about it. Stop crying. Walk into the next room. Pick up the phone.
Et cetera.
So this evening, I finally made a plan for telling Kallum about the baby: choose a spot where I would absolutely,absolutely, have no way to climb him like a tree, no matter how much I wanted to, text him to meet me at said spot under the pretense of talking aboutus, and then walk all the way there without chickening out.
Not that I was going to chicken out. It was going to be totally fine! Kallum was easygoing to a fault. He’d probably absorb the news in the same casual way he’d absorbed the fact that Santa’s semen was more potent per ounce than liquid rocket propellant, and then tell me that whatever I wanted to do was cool by him. He’d say exactly what I’d emotionally prepared for him to say, that he wasn’t ready to be a father but would gamely pony up money to help, and that would be that. Secrets all revealed, my pregnant person duty discharged, and then maybe he’d agree that it wouldn’t do any harm to have as much sex as possible while we were here in Christmas Notch together. (I would of course bravely and maturely explain that another temporary sex fling wouldn’t induce me to expect more than he wanted to give on a parenting level, and he’d be so charmingly grateful.)
Mustering as much optimism as possible, I left my room and headed to the lobby, rubbing my belly as I waited for the elevator.
We got this, kiddo, I told my little bump.No matter what, we have each other.
Funny how love worked, sometimes fast, sometimes slow; sometimes exactly like the idea of love you had in your head, and then sometimes not at all. All my life, I’d wanted to be a mother, and I’d assumed the moment I learned I was pregnant, I’d be glowing with love like a little maternal star, but that wasn’t how it had been. It had taken longer, been interrupted by nausea and exhaustion, been threaded through with worry about money and perception and how I was going to manage narcolepsy and a baby at the same time.
But it was here. Different than how I’d expected, maybe, but here.
And we would have a beautiful life together, whatever happened with Kallum tonight.
I passed a woman checking in at the front desk, and then did a double take. She had on giant sunglasses and a silk scarf wrapped around her head like a 1950s movie star, but I’d recognize that pearl-and-pantsuit combo anywhere.
“Steph?” I asked, confused.
She turned away, ducking her head and tapping her fingernails on the battered wood of the counter, until I stepped closer, and she spun back to face me.
“Winnie, hello,” she said, taking off her sunglasses like she’d just walked inside the lobby. “Just the person I was looking for.”
“I am?”
“Ye-e-es,” she said, not very convincingly. “I wanted to let you know that I’ve decided to come to Christmas Notch for the week, what with you and Kallum being here, andDuke the Halls 2starting. Made sense to be where so many of my clients are.”
“Lots of sense,” I responded. “I had no idea you were planning on coming up?”
“It was a spontaneous decision. A spontaneous business decision. About business.”
My phone buzzed in my hand, and I looked down to see a text from Kallum.
Kallum:Just got cleaned up from filming the sauna jerkoff scene! Be there in ten!
“Ah, I need to go,” I said to Steph. “I’m glad you’re here though!”
She put her sunglasses back on. “Me too. More soon, Winnie Baker.” And then Stella the innkeeper approached and handed Steph her room keys.Keys.Plural.
Hmm.
Frosty’s Diner was empty when I got there—June being too early for most of the through hikers, and way too early for the leaf-peepers, apple-eaters, and Christmas enthusiasts—and I picked a booth in the far corner, grabbing a menu and reminding myself to breathe. I’d been with Kallum this morning! He’d had his fingers inside me last night! It was all going to be fine!
The bell rang over the door, and I looked up to see the young Santa himself striding toward me in jeans and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to expose his forearms. His face was faintly pink and glowing, like he’d just gotten out of a hot shower, and when he came closer, I realized that at some point between our coordination meeting and his sauna scenes, his hair and beard had been trimmed a little shorter, a little neater. I could perfectly see his lower lip now, soft, curved temptation itself.
