CHAPTER TEN | VANESSA
After our meeting at the firehouse, I drove straight home and poured myself a gigantic bubble bath. I needed to clear my head and process everything that had happened: from making a fool of myself in front of an entire daycare center, to the way that Josh’s face had frozen when I finally spit out the truth about the pregnancy.
It was times like this that I wished I was a crier. There was something so simple and easy about crying your eyes out; the immediate release of emotions, the relief of not holding anything in anymore. I envied people that could cry. But…I wasn’t one of them.
I pinched my eyes shut, willing the tears to form, but they never came. Instead, I just felt more frustrated. I sank further down into the bath water, hiding my body entirely under a blanket of sudsy white bubbles.
My mind replayed the conversation at the firehouse. It hadn’t played out anything like the script that I had rehearsed for Summer, but it could have been worse…
It was obvious that I wasn’t the only one still hung up on that night we shared together. The way he kept alluding to the things that we had done together, and the way his eyes flickered with familiarity as they wandered over every inch of my body, from top to bottom…
I felt a hot contraction clench through my walls, just thinking about the way he’d looked at me. I reached my hand underwater, tracing the curve of my mound and finding the soft peak of my clitoris. I slid back into the bathtub, resting my head on the porcelain surround as I retraced the path his fingers had made on my body, all those months ago…
Maybe I couldn’t cry, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t find release another way. I thought about his body as my fingers explored under the water, and I thought about how he had used his fingers and tongue to make me come…
My body stiffened with desire as I lost my breath, racing towards a climax. I drove my finger harder into my slit, rubbing furiously, trying to replicate the way that he had felt…
But I couldn’t. I had reached the peak but, no matter what my fingers did, I couldn’t cross over and make the descent into pure bliss.
Frustrated, I drained the bathtub and toweled off. Then I got ready to meet Josh for dinner.
***
Josh was already at the restaurant when I arrived. He was waiting for me in a corner booth, and he had cleaned up since the last time I saw him: his hair was damp from a shower, and he smelled like Ivory soap and Ralph Lauren.
“Hey,” he stood up when he saw me, and then he shuffled awkwardly towards me, offering a hand to help me down into the booth.
“I’m just pregnant,” I reminded him with a playful smile. “My legs still work.”
“Sorry,” he grinned sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck. Still, he waited until I had slid into my seat before he sat down across the table from me.
“You hungry?” he asked.
“Starving,” I groaned, reaching for menu. My eyes scanned over the page and, even though I had eaten lunch less than three hours earlier, I felt my stomach rumble. “I think I could eat everything on this menu.”
“Go for it,” he told me.
I narrowed my eyes and glared up at him over the top of my menu.
“I mean it,” he said. “Order whatever you want. After seeing the amount of food that the guys at the station put away, nothing can shock me.”
Don’t challenge a pregnant woman, I joked dryly to myself. Then I felt my stomach tighten: that was the first time I had actually referred to myself as a ‘pregnant woman.’ I cringed.
This is going to take some getting used to…
“So,” Josh said, drumming his fingertips on the tabletop absently. “I was thinking about it, and…I owe you an apology.”
“You do?” I glanced up over the top of the menu again.
“Yeah,” he nodded. “When you told me that you were pregnant earlier today at the firehouse, I didn’t handle it very well. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t exactly handle it well when I first found out, either,” I shrugged, folding the menu closed and setting it on the table in front of me.
“Well I want you to know,” he said, “That whatever you want to do…I’m going to stand behind you one-hundred percent.”
“That’s sweet of you,” I sighed, “But you don’t need to do that, Josh.”
“Do what?”
“You know…feel obligated,” I said. “I don’t expect you to drop everything and play house with me. Really, I don’t.”
“Vanessa--”
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, too,” I said, “And I think that I want to raise this baby. But I want you to know that I’m taking full responsibility, and I don’t expect or need anything from you.”
The softness in his face suddenly hardened, and he narrowed his eyes.
“It’s my responsibility, too,” he said. “I want to be involved.”
“Josh…” my voice trailed off and I shook my head.
“What?” he snapped. “If you want to act like nothing ever happened between us, that’s fine. But you can’t pull that shit with our baby.”
Our baby. That was another phrase that was going to take some getting used to…
“I’m just trying to prevent this from being more painful than it has to be,” I said. “Nobody should be forced into parenthood. That just leads to resentment. When I was growing up, my father made it very obvious that I was a mistake, and that he didn’t want me. I think that’s what ultimately led to him walking out on my mom and I. And I’m not saying you’d do the same thing, but I don’t want my baby to feel like--”
“Our baby,” Josh corrected me, glaring.
“I don’t want our baby to ever feel like he or she was unwanted.”
“You’re not the only one with daddy issues, you know,” he snapped. I could see the anger flooding his face; his eyes were still and cold, and his nostrils were flared. “Maybe my dad stuck around physically, but he was checked out emotionally.”
“Josh...” I tried again, swallowing the lump in the back of my throat.
“I’m not going to check out on my kid,” Josh shook his head. “No way. I’m not abandoning them.”
“You say that now,” I said. “But what happens when that kid keeps you awake, screaming all night long, and you have work in the morning? What happens when that kid has a piano recital or a parent teacher conference, but you have to miss it because there’s an emergency at the firehouse? What happens when you can’t go out for drinks with the guys anymore, because instead you need to be at home making EasyMac for dinner and helping with math homework? What happens then?”
“What do you mean, what happens then?” Josh snapped. “I’d make the best damn EasyMac in the world and solve the shit out of that math homework.”
“Josh,” I sighed. “This is a big commitment…”
“And you’re acting like I’ve failed before you’ve even given me a chance,” Josh said. “Let me ask you this: what makes you any more qualified to be a parent than me?”
I gulped, because despite all of my stubbornness, I knew there wasn’t an answer for that. He was right.
“I’m not more qualified,” I admitted. “But I know that I’m not going anywhere.”
“Neither am I,” Josh said. “Just give me a chance to prove that to you.”
There was something so earnest and honest about the look in his eyes. I felt myself caving…
“Fine,” I said. “But there are going to be some ground rules.”
“Fine by me,” Josh said. “Name ‘em.”
“Rule number one,” I said, “We’re not dating.”
Josh raised an eyebrow, and for the first time since I had sat down at the table, that playful expression returned to his face.
“Do you really think you’re going to be able to resist me?”
“I don’t do relationships,” I told him sternly.
“Well you’ve already made that point abundantly clear,” he smirked.
“If we’re going to make this work,” I continued, “It has to be strictly business between us.”
“Ok,” he said. “I’ve got a rule, too.”
“Shoot.”
“No sleeping with other people,” he said. “At least until the baby is born. I don’t want my kid getting poked by some other guy’s pickle…”
“You’re disgusting,” I grimaced, even though there was secretly something that turned me on about him wanting me all to himself. “But fine. No sleeping with other people. And that rule applies to both of us.”
He raised an eyebrow and smirked, but he didn’t object.
“Think you can keep it in your pants that long?” I asked, nodding under the table.
“Fair is fair,” he shrugged. “What about sleeping with each other?”
My stomach flopped and my pussy throbbed. My mind flashed back to the bathtub, and that itch that I couldn’t quite scratch on my own…
“Only in moments of absolute desperation,” I said dryly.
His lips twisted into an amused smirk.
“You’re really something,” he shook his head.
Before I could ask him what he meant by that, the waiter popped up at the end of our table to take our order.
“She’ll have one of everything on the menu,” Josh told the waiter. “And I’ll have the chicken salad.”