He was definitely going to fight her on this. But he started buttoning up.
“Okay, spill. What’s going on?”
“I’m pregnant.”
Zeke’s fingers froze on the fourth button. His gaze snapped to hers.
He immediately realized she wasn’t kidding around.
“Oh.”
Jill shifted forward on her chair, bracing her hands on her knees. She met his gaze directly. “Yeah. And it’s yours. I’m not very far along, but I took the test yesterday. And…” She blew out a breath. “It was positive.”
Zeke took all of that in as he finished buttoning his shirt. Then he sat for a few seconds, letting all of the thoughts and reactions swirl around in his head.
Jill was pregnant. The most fascinating, unique, beautiful woman he’d ever met was having his baby.
She was definitely not like any woman he’d ever dated before and he certainly hadn’t gotten as far as to think about what their relationship might look like even a month from now, not to mention a year or more. But he liked her more than he could remember liking anyone he’d slept with in…ever.
“I have to be honest with you,” she said after nearly a minute. “I’d never planned to be a mom. Like ever. I don’t think I’ll be very good at it.”
He blew out a breath. “Okay. Well, I was definitely not planning on being a father yet. But…I guess I’ve always assumed I would have kids.”
“So you want to have it?”
His first reaction was to say that of course he wanted to have it, but he decided he needed to actually think about her question. Not having it was an option after all.
It occurred to him that bringing a baby into his life, into their lives, would be a much bigger disruption to Jill’s than it would be to his. He’d have a ton of help. He’d spent his entire life in Autre and already had a house and a business. Everything he was doing now was essentially what he would be doing a year, five years, ten years from now. If he had a child to take care of, it would be a huge change, but it would not significantly derail anything about his life.
Jill was in a different position. She had just moved to Autre and didn’t even have a completely finished house. Of course, he could take care of that rather easily and quickly. But she was just starting a new phase of her career and he knew things weren’t going exactly the way she would like them to.
“I will help you however you want me to help you,” he finally said. “I have a huge support system. With you living right next door, we can easily share custody.”
She blinked at him a few times without speaking.
“What?” Zeke finally asked after several seconds had ticked by.
“You mean that, don’t you? Just like that? We have a baby together and keep doing…all of this.” She swept her hand around. “Seeing each other here and there and just…what? Passing it back and forth?”
Zeke lifted a shoulder. “Isn’t that what shared custody is? Or, you can move in here if you think that would be easier. Or, I mean, hell…if you want the baby to live here and you come and go, that’s fine. Like I said, I have a ton of people who will help.”
Jill stared at him. As in wide-eyed, open-mouth stared.
“You would actually take this baby and raise it and let me just visit…what? On the weekends? You’d have your family help out with babysitting and cooking and laundry and it would just be like your life is now, but with a little person living with you?”
Zeke frowned. It sounded like a good thing, but there was something about the way she said it that made it sound bad. But, with about three minutes to adjust to the news and think this through, yeah, that was all that was going through his mind.
“Yeah, I guess that’s what I’m saying.”
Jill pushed up from her chair and paced across his dining room, then turned back. “You realize that you and I are the last people who should be in charge of keeping another human alive, right?”
“Well…”
“Neither of us cooks. We barely shop for groceries. We barely keep our clothes clean. Neither of us keeps any kind of regular schedule. And we like that,” she added, holding up a hand when he started to protest. “For me, I keep everything else in my life simple so I can focus on the one thing that I actually care about. You roll with everything because you know that you have this huge safety net behind you. You can literally jump from one piece of scaffolding to another and not worry about falling because if you do, you know you have people who will put you back together.”
“I’m not understanding what the problem is. We would have that safety net with the baby too.”
“But that’s pathetic, Zeke. People shouldn’t bring children into the world if they’re not ready and able to take care of them. You and I barely take care of ourselves and now we’re going to have a child reliant on us?”
“You keep penguins alive. You worry about them all the time. You feed them and shelter them and take care of their medical needs.”
“They’re penguins.”
“They’re endangered. If they die, that impacts the entire population worldwide.”
For just a moment, she paused, seeming surprised and a bit mollified by the fact that he’d absorbed how important the penguins were, and that he was championing what she was doing. But she shook her head a moment later. “But I can leave the penguins alone. If I’m late to feed the penguins by a half hour, they’re fine. I mean, they get a little pissy, but they’re mostly fine. Or if one of them is sick, I take care of it, but then I go home. You can’t do that with a kid. You have to be there twenty-four seven. You can’t put them in a pen and leave them overnight. I’m pretty sure someone would call child protective services.”
“But if a kid’s sick and you can’t be there, you call Grandma or Great Grandma or Aunt Somebody,” Zeke said.
“Do you ever get tired of needing your family for everything?” she asked.
Zeke felt like she’d slapped him. “No. I don’t.”
“You are thirty years old. When are you going to start taking care of yourself? I mean, are you going to depend on your mother to do all the diapers? Are you going to call your aunt in the middle of the night when the baby has colic? Are you going to dump the kid off with your cousins when it has an ear infection?”
“First of all, I’m twenty-five. Second of all, hell yes I’m going to ask for help when I need it. Third of all—”
“You’re twenty-five?”
He frowned. “Yes. Just turned twenty-five a few weeks ago. You really thought I was thirty?”
“Well, I didn’t know that I was having an affair with someone nine years younger than me!”
His eyes widened. “You’re thirty-four?”
“Geez, you don’t have to say it like that.”
Zeke got to his feet and faced her. “That’s hot as fuck. But I don’t care how old you are. The fact is, we’re the same person. We both have adjusted our lives so that we can focus on what’s really important to us. For you, you whittled your life down to wearing the same shirt in various colors, surviving on peanut butter and jelly and cereal, and drinking your vegetables. You gave up on remembering birthdays or anniversaries. For me, I simplified my life by letting other people help me. None of that makes either of us a bad person. And we can adjust. We can grocery shop, we can learn to cook, we can learn to do laundry.”