Page 141 of Love What's Left
Oh, shit.I wave to try to catch Josh’s attention. If he looks at me, I can nod at Bronwyn as a hint. I mime a yanking motion behind Janessa’s back, but Josh never takes his dark eyes off her.
Janessa cocks a hip and an eyebrow, tossing her long sable hair over a shoulder clothed in slinky black silk. “You don’t remember me,” she accuses.
He chuckles. “I think I’d remember if I’d met you.”
I throw both hands in the air in disgust.
“So, you don’t recall popping the heads off three of my Barbie dolls at the McRae house?” she demands.
Josh freezes. “Jannie?”
“No one has called me Jannie since I was nine.”
Josh recovers quickly. “It was transplant surgery on the dolls. I put the heads back on.”
“You put a Skipper head on a Barbie body and my color-changing mermaid head on Skipper’s body. It was major malpractice,” Janessa says.
“I bought you new dolls using every penny of my own allowance to pay for them.”
“They weren’t the same.”
“How can I make it up to you?” he asks.
She appears to contemplate her answer. “I suppose cake on the balcony is a start.”
Josh pauses long enough to shoot me a silly grin I haven’t seen in close to twenty years. I smile back and mouth,“Good luck.”
Then they’re gone, heading for the cake in the corner.
Sydney squeezes my hand. “That looked like it went well for you guys.”
I nod. “It did.”
“I tried to keep Janessa away, but all she said was ‘He's here,’ then she took off like she was on a mission.”
I laugh. “He doesn’t appear to be suffering.”
“It’s good timing for us.” Sydney grabs my belt, tugging, and I follow her without question. Maybe she wants to give them a chance to flirt more, because that was absolutelysomething.
When my wife drags me down the hallway toward our bedroom, I frown. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” With her free hand she pulls an ovulation test stick out of her pocket and holds it up.
My pulse accelerates, every cell in my body zeroing in on what this means. It’s time.We’re. Doing. This.“You took the testnow?”
Obviously, she did. Stupid question.
“It was sitting on the counter in our bathroom, and I just had a feeling, and I thought why not check it when I pee because I had the tests ready, anyway? So I did, and good thing too because I entered the ovulation window early.”
Most couples don’t jump straight to ovulation tracking and predictor tests or taking temperatures and vitamins. Most couples, from what I hear, just start having regular unprotected sex. But Sydney is Sydney, and I adore her for it.
We both started multivitamins and increased protein and folic acid intake because the health of the father directly impacts the mother’s and fetus’s health during pregnancy too. We both had full metabolic panels drawn up and genetic testing because, again, Sydney is Sydney.
We read the studies, had long conversations about the fact that we had alcoholism on both sides of the family, and weighed the data on nature and nurture.
All of that. But now, it’s here, and something primal takes hold inside me. It’s not about logic anymore. Now, it’s about hot, wet, hard fucking.
When we enter our bedroom, I kick the door closed behind us. Rufus lifts his head from the spot where he’s sunning on the windowsill, then turns his face away with a flick of his tail.
