chapter one
“Well, what do you expect, Skylar?” Baylor, reprimands me. “If you’re going to hang out at meat markets and drink like a sailor, you’re going to wake up in strange places. You can’t let the guy take all the blame.”
“Ugh!” I pout. I take a long sip of the strawberry margarita Baylor poured me as part of girls’ night. She may not be able to drink because she’s knocked up, but she can still make a good one. “He’s married with a goddamn kid. What right does he have to pick someone up in a bar?”
“Maybe,” she says, re-filling Jenna’s and Mindy’s glasses. “But if it wasn’t him, it would have been some other random guy, so does it really matter?”
She’s right. She’s absolutely fucking right. The past several years flash through my mind and my illustrious reputation of slutiness almost makes me choke on my drink. I rarely even bother to stay with a man long enough to like him. And if a guy has feelings for me? Forget it. Feelings lead to love. Love leads to broken hearts. Broken hearts lead to shitty lives. I’ve seen it firsthand. Okay, so maybe it all turned out great in the end for my big sister, Baylor, who was crushed by the man she loved when she was eighteen. But I vowed back then, being two years younger than her, that I would never let it happen to me.
So, here I sit, twenty-four years old and a bed post with enough notches on it to rival a cat’s scratching pole. I hang my head in shame while my sister and our friends try to sympathize.
I sigh. “I’m a terrible person,” I say.
“No you aren’t,” Jenna tells me. “You just don’t make the best choices, sweetie.”
Visions of the shameful choices I’ve made over the years trample through my head. “No—I’m a terrible person,” I repeat.
“Come on,” Mindy says. “It’s not that bad.”
I shake my head at my roommate. Mindy is my closest friend, next to my sisters, Baylor and Piper. She’s also the best waitress at Mitchell’s NYC, my parents’ restaurant. We have a walk-up apartment only a few blocks from the restaurant that I manage. We also have—okay I have—a signal for said apartment to alert the other one of us that we should get lost for a while. When we have a guy over, in our tiny apartment with thin walls, we leave the light on in the hallway out front. And in this very moment, it occurs to me, that not once has Mindy ever turned it on. Not that she doesn’t have anyone over. She does. But I guess she plans it when I’m working. Or they go elsewhere. She’s a considerate slut. I’m a selfish one.
“Not that bad?” I say. “It’s worse. I’m a self-centered slut and inconsiderate lush. I don’t even buy Girl Scout cookies. I hang up the phone on charity callers. I sleep with men who have families for Christ’s sake. Face it, I’m going to hell.”
Jenna fails at trying to sound like she’s not scolding me when she says, “Skylar, you do this every time. You get drunk, wake up in some random stranger’s bed and then tell us what a bad person you are. If you’re so tired of this happening—and I think I speak for the rest of us when I say we’re tired of this happening—then do something about it.”
I look from face to face as they stare at me to see what my reaction will be. They are all so damn perfect. Jenna, who is Baylor’s best friend and agent, is engaged to a batting coach for the Yankees. She volunteers her time working for a charity set up by the team that raises money to vaccinate kids in Africa. Mindy comes from a life of money, but refuses to live on her father’s dime so she became a waitress and is putting herself through college to become a physical therapist. And of course, Baylor is a successful author. She is finally with the love of her life and they are expecting their second child. Even my little sister, Piper, is off living her dream life backpacking the world with her best friend.
Everyone has something going for them. What the hell do I have?
Man . . . don’t want one.
Kids . . . hate them.
Happiness . . . overrated.
Dignity . . . absent.
Self-worth . . . on vacation with dignity.
The only thing I really have going for me is my job. I love managing Mitchell’s NYC. In fact, my parents have entrusted me with it almost completely. Yes, they still keep tabs and show up at least once a week to make sure I’m not royally screwing up their empire, but they’ve moved on to location number three in Long Island. My job is my life. My life is my job. And that’s pretty much the way I like it. Or I did until my epiphany ten minutes ago. But that was then and this is now. And now is when I tell myself to shape the hell up. Turn over a new leaf. Toe the line. Do something with my life. Become meaningful.
Oh, God. I’ve swallowed an existential pill and it’s regurgitating itself all over my fourth margarita.
“Okay, so let’s say I wanted to change,” I muse. “How would I go about that?”
They all share a look. I know what they’re thinking. I want to tell them to piss off, but they know me too well. They think this will all blow over. I’m sure I say ten times a week that I want to change something about myself. But they know as well as I do that I never mean it. Until now, that is.
“Well, what exactly is it that you want to change?” Mindy asks. “I mean there’s just so much to work with.” The other girls laugh, but I sulk in the face of the truth. She places an apologetic hand on my arm. “Skylar, you know I love you. You have my full support and I’ll help you any way I can.”
I look down into my alluring margarita. “I need to stop drinking.” They all nod their heads in agreement. “I need to stop fucking.” More emphatic nods. “I need to do something deeply meaningful with my life.”
It’s the last one that has them drawing their eyebrows together.
While they think it over, I take a drink. Baylor eyes me skeptically, watching me drain my glass. “I didn’t mean this second,” I spit at her. “Tomorrow. I’ll start tomorrow.
“The floor is open for suggestions,” I tell them.
Jenna turns to me with a playful grin. “You could become a nun. It covers all the bases. No sex, no drinking.” Her brows draw together in thought. “Wait, nuns can’t drink, can they? And you can’t get any more meaningful than serving The Big Guy, can you?”
“A nun?” Baylor offers. “This is my sister we’re talking about here. Let’s try to be a little realistic.”
I stick my tongue out at her like a petulant five-year-old.
“Oh, you could join the Peace Corps,” Mindy says. “You’d be helping people all over the world, and you’d have to go to really remote places that probably don’t have hot men and alcohol.”
I shake my head at them. “No. I love my job. I won’t leave Mitchell’s. It’ll have to be something else.”
“You could get fat,” Jenna says. “You know, to keep the men away.”
I roll my eyes at her. “First of all, there are guys out there who love fat chicks. And second and third, how does that solve my drinking problem and my do-gooder problem?”
“Yeah, I guess there’s that.” Jenna studies me, waiting for inspiration.
Baylor rubs her hand in a circle on her growing belly. “You could get knocked up,” she teases. “That would easily solve your first two problems. Men are fundamentally turned off by pregnant women unless they happen to be your own super-hot husband.” She sighs and I can tell she’s fantasizing about her man.
“Ewww. Please don’t make me picture you and Gavin having dirty pregnant sex.” I shiver with disgust. “And, me, pregnant? God, no. I hate kids.”
“You love Maddox.” She looks at me with soft eyes.
“Of course I do. I can give him back,” I explain. “It’d almost be a good idea if it didn’t mean I’d end up with a snotty-nosed brat and some unemployed loser for a baby daddy.”
Mindy sits up straight. “You could have a kid for someone else.”
“As in give one up for adoption?” I ask, my forehead creasing into a dubious frown.
“No, like you could be a surrogate,” she says excitedly, as if coming up with the most brilliant idea to trump all brilliant ideas. “You know, get knocked up in some lab and carry someone else’s baby and then hand it over when the thing pops out. It’s the perfect solution.” She holds her hand up and counts off on her fingers, saying, “You can’t drink. No man in his right mind would want to have sex with a knocked-up stranger. And to top it all, you’d be doing something totally awesome for someone.”
“And you could still run the restaurant,” Jenna adds.
“I could?” I look back and forth from Jenna to Mindy who are both nodding encouragingly. I think about what they’ve said. “Yes. I could.”
“What?” Baylor shrieks, her face arranged in a scowl. “I was kidding, Skylar. You can’t get pregnant.”
I shoot her a venomous look. “It’s not like you’ve cornered the market, big sister. I have a perfectly good uterus that’ll grow cobwebs if I don’t use it.”
Mindy ignores Baylor’s disapproving stare. “There’s a big demand for surrogates. A lot of women can’t have their own kids. They’ll pay you a goddamn arm and leg if you can give them a baby. My mom was recently telling me about this couple she knows who can’t have a kid because the woman had cancer.”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to do it for the money, Min. That’d kind of be against the whole do-something-meaningful premise.”
“There’s a slight problem, guys,” Jenna says, tapping away on her phone. “Skylar can’t be a surrogate.”
“What? Why?” I ask, disappointed that the idea would get debunked so quickly.
“It says here in order to qualify as a surrogate, you have to already have your own kid,” she says. “I guess they want to make sure you won’t change your mind and run off with it.”
“Makes sense,” Mindy says.
“Crap.” My shoulders slump towards the table. “It was a perfect solution.”
“Perfect solution?” My sister looks at me through incredulous eyes. “Skylar Mitchell, you mean to say you’d have actually considered it? That’s ludicrous.”
“Hell yes! Why not?”
“Why not?” she spits back at me. “Because your body wouldn’t be your own for nine months. Because you’d throw up and get hormonal and get stretch marks. Because you’d have some strange woman watching everything you do to make sure you didn’t mess up her kid. Because you’d fall in love with the little baby the instant it was born. Need I go on?”
“Those first things you said about the throwing up and stretch marks—that’s what’ll keep the men away. The second thing you said about the woman watching me—that will keep me from drinking and doing stupid shit. And fall in love with the baby—are you crazy? Do you remember how I gave little Maddox back to you every time he so much as looked at me the wrong way?”
I frown at them. “It might have been perfect. But if I can’t even qualify to do it, there’s no use harping on it.”
“Hold on,” Mindy says, not yet ready to concede defeat. “Who’s to say you have to go through an official agency? Why not just find someone who needs a surrogate and have their kid. It happens all the time.”
“What, like run an ad in the newspaper?” I giggle at the absurdity. “‘Womb for hire’?”
We laugh. Everyone but Baylor, that is. Baylor looks pissed. “Would you guys shut up!” she shouts. “Quit encouraging her. This is seriously not a good idea.”
Jenna snaps her head to Baylor. “Not a good idea? What kind of world would we live in if people like Skylar didn’t step up and do selfless things for others?”
Baylor rolls her eyes. “The exact same world we lived in two seconds ago,” she pouts. “She’s not doing it!”
“What if you and Gavin couldn’t have kids?” Mindy asks. “What if you wanted them so much you thought you would die from want. What if you didn’t have a sister to loan you her uterus, so some random woman stepped up and said she’d have a baby for you. Are you seriously going to sit here and deny that to someone?”
Baylor puts her hand on my arm. “Promise me you’ll think about it long and hard, and without margaritas flowing through your veins, before you jump into anything, Skylar.”
“So,” I ignore my sister and turn to Mindy. “A newspaper ad?”
“I guess you could,” she says. “But if you’re serious about it, I could probably hook you up with this couple my mom knows.”
“They aren’t going through an agency?” I ask.
“No.” She shakes her head sadly. “The woman, Erin, I think her name is, she had cancer so no agency will touch her. I think there’s also a family history of medical problems, too. I guess they don’t want to risk giving a kid to a sick woman when there are so many healthy ones who want kids, too.”
“That’s sad,” I say. “So I could give a baby to a woman who used to be sick and really wants a kid but nobody will give her one?”
“Yup.” She holds her drink out to me in a toast. “It’d probably pave your way straight to the pearly gates.”
I can feel the smile creeping up my face. It’s a feeling I haven’t felt in . . . well, ever. I want to do this. I want to give someone what nobody else can give them. I look at Mindy. “Let’s do this. Make the call.”
Mindy smiles and pats my hand. “You are an amazing person, Skylar,” she says. “But, if it’s all the same to you, I’ll let you sleep on it.”
“Wait, you can’t be serious,” Baylor says.
“As a fucking heart attack, big sister.”