Lindy had walked in, and my mouth fell open as I stopped talking.
“The baby dropped,” she announced.
“Is that dangerous?” I asked anxiously. “Should we take you to the hospital?”
“It just means she’s getting ready to give birth,” César told me. “It doesn’t mean it’s going to fall out or anything. Didn’t you read that book I gave you?”
“Kind of,” I said faintly. The book hadn’t mentioned that you would look like Lindy did right now.
“This is just because I’m so short and the baby is big,” Lindy told me, gesturing at her body. “It sucks. You know those giant machines that crush cars in junkyards? It feels like there’s one of those working on my bladder. But at least now that she’s lower, I can breathe!”
The rest of the family arrived and met Lindy, Katie, and Davis, but I stayed stuck in horror in my spot on the floor until Ellie asked me what I was doing standing there, and I snapped out of it. Mostly.
The rest of the guests started to come, too, a ton of Woodsmen players, Daisy from the exhibition game and her husband, Lyle the stadium security guard, and my friends from high school and college. It was great to see my friends, but it was hard to deal with their reactions to the baby. Like, they were so confused about how I had managed to get myself pregnant. “You never even wanted a boyfriend. But you wanted this?” my old friend Trista asked me, looking slightly sick as she studied my body.
“I’m so happy,” I told her, which was the line I was sticking with, no matter how true it was at the moment.
“And you and César…”
“We’re friends,” I said, over and over, to everyone. That made them nod very sadly and look sympathetic. “No, I don’t want him as a boyfriend,” I tried to explain a few times, but even to me, it sounded like a desperate lie. Who wouldn’t want César as a boyfriend? An idiot, that was who.
My friends talked about their lives, and they were doing the same things they always did: going out, having parties, hooking up. They talked about all the cool stuff they had planned for the summer: the trips they were going to take, the concerts they had tickets for, the music festivals, the everything. I felt more and more left out, and eventually I got sorry enough for myself that I decided I had to leave the party briefly. The soft, cold rain wasn’t going to deter me from going outside for my escape.
“Taking off?”
I turned around halfway through the kitchen, the door to the deck just beyond my grasp. “No, I’m not taking off,” I told Davis Blake. He had been lurking around the fringes of the party, talking some to César and to some of the Woodsmen guys, but not much to anyone else. Not that I was monitoring his movements…ok, I had been monitoring his movements, because I didn’t want him to be mean to César again, and I wanted to be prepared if he came at me.
I decided to meet this problem head-on. “You know, I’m fully aware that you don’t like me,” I told Davis. “I don’t actually give a shit, except that you better not take it out on César. He thinks that you’re his friend, even if I think you’re a douche. You can’t be nasty to him, or try to punish him for not agreeing with you about me. If you don’t give him the ball next season, or you try to cut him out of the offense or something, I’ll…I’ll kick your ass into next week.”
Davis Blake glared at me for another moment. Then he broke out into a smile that made me see why Katie and legions of other women found him so attractive. “Kick my ass into next week?” he repeated. “I’d like to see you try.”
“Don’t test me,” I said, but then I smiled back. It was a little funny.
“César’s a good friend,” Davis told me. “You getting yourself pregnant—”
“Ok, well, as my grandmother used to say, it takes two to tango!” I swallowed, remembering Ellie saying that about my own mother and her relationship with Warren Wilde. “Neither of us planned this but we are trying to make the best of it. You’re not helping.”
He had stopped smiling. “I don’t see you making it easy for him, either. I see you moving into his house to live off him, letting him take you on trips, quitting your job, and then pushing him away like you’re too good for him.”
“Too good for him? What the hell? I don’t think I’m too good for him! He’s absolutely the best there is, you asshole. No matter how you ‘see’ things between César and me, you don’t actually know what’s going on. You’re just imagining the worst. And you suck,” I threw in. “You think that César is too good for me, and maybe I agree, but I think the same thing about you and Katie.”
“You’re right about that.” Suddenly he smiled again. “She’s much too good for me. I don’t deserve her.”
“What? Who don’t you deserve?” Katie asked as she walked into the kitchen. “What are you guys doing in here?”
“Davis thinks—” I started to tell her.
“I think that you were right,” he interrupted me. “Maybe I didn’t know what I was talking about. Not fully.”
“I tell you that all the time,” Katie said to him, and laughed. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” He leaned way down to kiss her. “Let’s get back to the party.”
Katie looked at me, questioning. “I’ll be there in a minute,” I told her, and made myself smile back. I did take another moment in Katie and Davis’ kitchen, looking out at the water where César had told me that he sailed his boat in the summer. I had guessed what Davis had thought of me, but that didn’t mean that it hadn’t hurt
