Page 26 of Oops, I'm Having My Best Friend’s Baby!

“Like Amy said, it’s not that interesting a story, so you must be bored or drunker than you look if you want to hear it.”

“Oh, please!” Jess said, looking like a child wanting to hear secrets at a sleepover. “I bet it’s not boring at all and you’re just embarrassed because it will make you look all lovey-dovey. But I know you’re secretly a sap, so come on, tell us.”

Jason nodded emphatically at his wife’s statement, and both their gazes were locked onto Kai with laser-like focus. Amy was just thankful that she wasn’t the one under scrutiny because she was drawing an absolute blank of what to say that might, in any way, sound halfway convincing.

“Fine, if you insist,” Kai began, setting his wine glass aside.

This should be interesting, Amy thought while trying to not look desperately curious about what Kai was about to say. He’d always been good at thinking on his feet; it’s what made him a good business strategist. If he wanted to take the lead on this one, he was more than welcome.

Kai sighed and sat back in his chair and looked at Amy with a thoughtful, glassy-eyed stare, as though thinking through whatever he was about to say next. Either Kai was a much better actor than Amy had ever given him credit for, or he really was a tad drunk, which didn’t bode super well for how this was about to turn out. Amy sipped her drink and tried not to look nervous.

“My dad walked out on us when I was eight,” Kai said, and Amy nearly choked. Not in a million years did she think that was going to be what he said next, and she looked at Kai with wide eyes. Jason and Jess were also looking at him, not blinking, Jess’s mouth hanging slightly open in shock. Kai didn’t seem to notice, though. He was staring at nothing in particular while the rest of them sat in stunned silence.

“He walked out on my mom,” said Kai, lost in thought. “And even at eight I could see how, practically speaking, it was probably a good thing. No more fights, no more yelling, and he was always mostly at work anyway, so all of that seemed like a bonus. There’s probably some psychological stuff in there about ‘distancing yourself from abandonment,’ but that’s for a different discussion.”

Jason and Jess looked on in rapt attention with a slight edge of guilt at having prompted this particular story, while Amy watched on in absolute horror. Kai never mentioned his dad. Ever. Maybe three times in the entire time Amy had known him had Kai ever even come close to the topic, and never had it been as forthright as this. So as he continued, Amy’s whole body was frozen solid. She couldn’t have moved away even if she’d wanted to.

“My mom, understandably, wasn’t as cold-hearted about it as her eight-year-old son, but maybe that’s a good thing. Either way, it was just a different way of dealing with it. And she tried to hide it from me, how upset she was, but she wasn’t very good at it. And I was sneaky, so I saw… I saw how hard it hit her. Because she did love him.

“And I remember thinking, even then, if that’s marriage, I don’t want it. I mean one of the people involved is just going to end up walking away in the end anyway. Why waste my time, you know? So to answer part of your question about dating models and whoever I met at parties, that’s all that was. Dating. It was never meant to go anywhere. I didn’t want it to. I didn’t plan to. It was just a fact that I was never going to get married, end of story.”

Jess nodded along, chin in her hand and eyes wide, her natural empathy going into overdrive. Meanwhile Amy’s whole perception of her friend was under scrutiny. Did he really feel that way? That he’d completely sworn off marriage all because of his dad?

Then Kai looked at her and all thinking stopped. It wasn’t the glassy, half-drunk gaze he’d had focused at the floor. This was sharp, and it was bright, and it was all directed at Amy, leaving her nowhere to hide. And then he smiled, just a little, and Amy was more lost than ever.

“We’ve known each other since elementary school,” Kai said, his voice softer now. “But it wasn’t until high school that we got close. Two kids from the poorest part of town, both kids who didn’t quite fit in anywhere. We were inseparable the whole time. All we had was each other.”

“So you never dated before now?” Jess asked. “Not even once?”

“No, never,” Kai said, turning to Jess and allowing Amy to breathe again. “Just friends. For years afterwards, we were always just friends. Until…”

And his eyes flicked down with the slightest flash of a frown on his face. Amy knew in her gut that this was him thinking up a quick lie, a story of something happening, which meant that up until now every word had been the gospel truth.

“We used to have this tradition, in the latter half of high school when we could drive and then into college. We would stay up all night because that’s what teenagers do and then go through whatever drive-through we could find, get burgers that were never that great, and eat them in empty parking lots.”

A smile stretched his mouth as he thought about it, and Amy thought she might cry, not entirely sure why though.

“Anyway,” he continued. “Fairly recently we did that again, except this time it was in a sports car, not a vehicle strung together with duct tape and dental floss. This time we weren’t looking through the cupholders and the glovebox for an extra penny. Life was good, and here was my best friend and I, eating burgers under a parking lot light and I was… happy.

“And I don’t know why I did it, but we were getting out of the car to throw the trash away and stretch our legs and I grabbed Amy’s hand and started dancing with her there, this big ridiculous waltz type thing, going round in circles like from a period drama. It was just a spontaneous thing, you know, I just took her hand, and we started dancing under the street light, just the two of us. And I realized that all these years I’d been waiting for the sky to fall in, but that had never happened. Everything was fine, it was great. And here I was dancing with Amy, after all these years, and I realized that you can’t predict the future. Even if you could, that didn’t mean it would be bad, and I realized I was in love, and that even if there was still a risk of heartbreak, that if you found the right person, then the risk was worth it. And the right person had been under my nose the entire time. I was just too stubborn to realize it.”

He looked at Amy for the span of a single blink and then smiled, shrugged, and downed the last of his drink. “So there’s your story. That’s how we ended up here.”

Jess looked like she was about to burst with the romance of it all and launched into the story of how Jason had proposed to her, continuing the theme of the conversation. Jason just sat patiently beside her, not interrupting, smitten with his wife as always, and Amy was given the opportunity to think about what she’d just heard.

The thing was that, well, that whole spiel hadn’t sounded all that made up. The magical night dancing under a street lamp, sure, that had never happened. But the rest of it… the facts were all true — his dad walking out, his sporadic dating history, even their recent evening eating burgers in his car. The facts were true, so did that mean that the feelings he’d been talking about were real as well? Was that how he really felt?

Sometimes when you know someone for so long, you don’t talk about the deeper stuff, the painful stuff, because you think you know it all already. And then suddenly ten years go by and you’re living completely different lives, and it turns out you don’t know each other that well anymore, after all.

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