Page 56 of Best Friends
“Three.”
We turn together, and there it is. Two pink lines, clear as day, impossible to misinterpret.
Positive.
The silence stretches between us, thick and heavy with implication. I stare at those two lines until they blur, my mind struggling to process what this means. A baby. Malcolm’s baby. Our baby.
“Holy shit,” Malcolm whispers, his voice full of awe.
“Holy shit,” I echo, and suddenly I’m laughing, the sound bubbling up from somewhere deep in my chest.
“We’re having a baby, C,” he mumbles, and then he’s laughing too, the sound rich and warm and full of joy. He grabs me in a bear hug and we both laugh harder.
His eyes are bright with unshed tears. “God, I love you,” he says, framing my face with his hands. “I love you so much, and I’m going to love this baby so much.”
“I love you so much,” I mumble, my eyes filling with tears. “I wouldn’t want to do this with anyone else, Malc.”
“Me neither,” he says solemnly, then breaks into that grin that’s been making my heart skip since we were kids. “Why are we so serious? We’re having a damn baby, C.! This is a fucking joyous occasion.”
I touch my stomach and laugh through my tears. “I think I’m in shock.”
“We need to call our moms.” He picks up the pregnancy test. “We should frame this.”
“Probably not. It has urine on it.”
He quickly sets it down again and wipes his hands on his jeans. “Oh, yeah.”
“We also need to call Chey.” I blow out a shaky breath and grab my phone off the counter.
“She’s going to be so happy for us.” He grins.
I meet Malcolm’s delighted gaze and my heart squeezes. I wouldn’t say coming out has been exactly easy, but it also hasn’t been as awful as I feared. Some people, like Harlan and Jeremy, were jerks about it—but then, they’ve always been jerks. Ourfamilies were the most surprised, but they were also supportive. Most people at work barely blinked when Malcolm and I let them know we were a couple.
Apparently I seriously overestimated people’s interest in my private life.
Malcolm puts his hand on my stomach. “This is one of the best days of my life,” he says quietly.
I smile. “Yeah?”
He nods and says somberly, “Obviously the best day was when you moved in next door to my house when we were kids.”
“I guess it was a good thing my mom never wanted me underfoot.”
He smiles as if remembering something from back then. “The day you moved in, and after the movers had gone, you were sitting on your front porch. You were wearing blue overalls, and you were glowering at a stuffed giraffe you were holding.”
“You remember what I was wearing?”
He nods. “Oh yeah. I remember every detail of that first meeting. I recall that, despite how grumpy you looked, I had an overwhelming urge to talk to you. So I rode my bike over to you and I introduced myself.”
I laugh. “I remember. You said, ‘I’m Malcolm and we’re going to be best friends.’”
He grins. “That’s right. You looked super suspicious and you said, ‘I don’t have friends.’”
Chuckling, I say, “And you said, ‘You don’t needfriends. You only need me.’”
He groans. “Yeah, I guess even back then I was a needy son of a bitch. I wanted you all to myself from the minute I laid eyes on you.”
My smile slowly fades and I lean in to kiss him. It’s a gentle, loving brush of lips, designed to show him what he means to me. When I pull back, I whisper, “But you were right, Malc. You are the only person I need.”
