Page 159 of The Good Boys Club

“What?” he whinged in faux indignation. “Gravy is a great name. Bangers and Mash and Gravy. The perfect trio.”

“There is no way in hell we’re naming our baby Gravy.”

Mash snort-laughed. “You said baby gravy.”

“See!” Vindicated. “Can you imagine growing up with that?”

He sat on the edge of the mattress, his belly hanging over. “Fine, you may have won the battle, Cian Michael James Barker—soon to be Cassidy—but I’m about to win the war.”

I leant against the back of the chair—didn’t want to sit in case I creased my trousers and shirt—and held out my hand inviting him to continue, though I remained thoroughly sceptical.

So far Mash had suggested the following names . . .

Gravy . . .

Gibbous . . . after the moon phase.

Lucy Stirling . . . the whole name,“we can hyphenate if we need to.”

Seahorses . . . plural, as if one wasn’t bad enough on its own.

Custard . . .“I just really really love custard.”

Lasagna . . .“because duh.”

Persimmon . . .“sounds fancy as fuck.”

Theophilus . . . see also Persimmon.

Cerulean . . . I’d given up listening to his reasoning by this point.

And Duck.

Unsurprisingly, Duck was winning by a landslide.

The baby had been inside Mash for eight months now and I only ever referred to it as Baby. Mash started calling it Bean, because it looked like a kidney bean in the ultrasound scan. But Bean quickly turned into Jelly Bean, which was shortened to Jelly, and then lengthened again to Jelly-Belly, and then utterly bastardised with Jellifer-Bellifer.

Like Jennifer but . . . urgh, it hurt to even think about it.

I massaged my temples, keen to move away from Jellifer.

“You ready?” he asked.

I took a deep breath, reinforced my barricades. “Yup. Hit me.”

“For a girl . . . Wren.”

“What the fu—” I started to say, stopped, backtracked. “Oh . . . it’s . . . nice. Wren. I like it.”

Mash beamed. He drew an invisible line in the air with his finger. “Mash one, Bangers fuck all.”

I raised a brow at him.

“And for a boy . . .” he continued. “Or a girl, actually. I really like it for a girl too . . .”

Ah, okay, here we go.

Mash’s smile was all dog with a bone. “Oaklen.”

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