Page 37 of Unexpecting

Luckily, J.B. isn’t a complete idiot. “Contrary to popular belief, I don’t try to have sex with every woman I meet,” he told me rudely. Then he smiled, his wickedly white smile that makes me melt just a little when he uses it. “Just you.”

Chapter Sixteen

“Headaches and nausea are some of the minor ailments common during pregnancy.”

A Young Woman’s Guide to the Joy of Impending Motherhood

Dr. Francine Pascal Reid (1941)

My head was stillaching horribly when I woke up a mere five hours later. It made my stomach feel queasy, and I was tired. It was like I had a hangover, but there was no way I should be. Over the years, I’ve developed a fairly healthy tolerance for wine. But if I had gotten drunk, at least my hangover would have been done and over with by ten, instead of this headache lingering for the morning and into the afternoon.

The only good thing was that it was summer and I didn’t have to deal with hyper five-year-olds at school. But as bad as the morning with the kindergarten class would have been, a day working in a wine store is a hundredfold worse. Seeing the bottles of wine, talking about which red would go best with the braised rabbit, and the constant slight aroma in the store did not help me feel better.

″You’re such a horrible friend,” was how I answered my cell phone when I saw Morgan’s name on the call display late in the afternoon.

″What did I do?” she cried. I could tell she was properly horrified. Morgan, for all her mathematical intelligence, is quite gullible.

″You kept me out too late, and now I feel like a big bag of poop,” I moaned. There was no one in the store right then, so I rested my head on the counter by the cash register. There was a bunch of things I needed tobe doing, but sitting with my head down seemed like a fine idea for the rest of the afternoon. “I think my head is going to explode all over these bottles of wine.”

″But you hardly drank anything!”

″I know. It’s totally not fair. What do you want anyway? Just to laugh at my utter, utter miserable-ness?”

″I would never do that to you, Casey. At least I wouldn’t do more than giggle. I wanted to see if tonight’s the night you’re going out with David.”

″If I survive that long.”

″Are you excited?” she asked coyly. “It’s been so long. Are you nervous?”

″A little—a lot,” I confessed.

Especially since I still had no idea why David didn’t kiss me back Sunday night. I mean, I had ideas, but I didn’t like thinking about them since they involved David considering me as just an unattractive, pathetically evil ex-girlfriend, or something along those lines. And I was also trying desperately to stop dwelling on it, because that just leads me into thinking about J.B. telling me he doesn’t like the thought of me kissing David. I just needed tonight to be over. Trying to prevent myself from thinking about all these different things was about to make my head explode.

″Do you really think—would you want to get back together with him? For real? What about what Brit said about it not working? And if you get together, what about the baby thing? Or would you just want to have a baby with him? And then you could marry him and not have to be alone forever. Or are you not thinking about all that, and is this some sort of catching up where you get to have sex with him?”

″I’m trying not to think about having sex with him,” I said, diving right into the important question and not dwelling on the fact that Morgan predicted me having a life alone with only a baby for company. “I think that might be jinxing it. But I am going to wear my lucky unders, and I did the whole shave this morning.”

″You need to wax. My girl is so good it’s almost painless.”

″Painless and waxing are not two words that can ever be in a sentence together. My Venus Divine does the trick nicely, and it never hurts. But back to David—I honestly don’t know what to think. It’s different than just a normal guy, because we’ve got all this history, but is that all it is? And what about the fact that I may or may not have broken his heart back then? Did he forgive me, is everything hunky-dory, or is he holding someevil bitterness inside him that’s just going to explode all over me? And what about having a baby? I was all set to give up men, and now here I am getting all worked up about one again! It would be better if this was just a normal date with a normal guy, and I could just trick him into having sex with me and get the conceiving thing over and done with. This is just too huge right now for me to deal with without my head blowing up.”

There was silence from Morgan for a moment. I didn’t intend to go off on a vent like that, but it just needed to come out and Morgan’s always a good person to vent to. “Do you think you’re maybe overanalyzing this a little too much, Casey? I mean, look at it as just dinner with an old friend.”

″But it’s not! It’s—”

″Maybe, just for now, pretend it is. That’s all—just casual, sharing some food. Don’t worry about everything else.”

″You think I’m nuts.”

″At times, yes, but I still love you lots.”

I took a deep breath and prepared to calm down. “Thanks. I needed that.”

″If I was there, I might have had to slap you.”

″That would hurt too much. Speaking of slapping—which is what I’d like to do to that good-for-nothing Anil… are you okay today?”

″I guess.” There was a catch in Morgan’s voice that made me wonder if I should have played the bad friend card and just avoided the subject altogether. “It just—it hurts. It was such a surprise, you know. I had no idea. Absolutely none.”

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