I sighed and explained the whole situation. “Now we’re stuck in this fuckin’ weird carousel where nothing moves forward and nothing moves back.”
“Have you considered telling her you actually like her?” Colton questioned, potting his ball and flipping Josh the bird. “That might get you somewhere.”
“I casually mentioned us dating earlier and she brushed it off.”
“Ouch,” he muttered.
Yeah, no fucking kidding.
“She was in a bad mood,” I said. “I might have told her grandmother we got married yesterday morning.”
Both of my best friends burst out laughing. “Fucking hell,” Josh said. “Why did you do that?”
“It slipped out.”
“Maybe you should have tried that a few weeks ago.”
Colton hit him with the pool cue. “You’re welcome, man,” he said to me. “What are you doing now? You two?”
“Winging it, I think. Mrs. V came over yesterday when we were fighting and dropped off a cake that was a cross between a wedding cake and a baby shower cake. Ivy got distracted, ate a shit ton of cake, then took a nap before work,” I explained. “I haven’t seen her since she left for work last night.”
“I don’t get why you don’t just tell her,” Josh said, like he wasn’t harboring a crush on his best friend’s little sister.
One that Colton knew nothing about, for what it was worth, and I wasn’t going to be the one who told him about it, either.
“Because she’s gone fucking crazy,” Colton answered, potting the final ball of the game. “She’s pregnant, Josh. You don’t tell pregnant women anything. You feed them, pet their hair, and let them sleep.”
That sounded pretty accurate.
“What do you know about pregnant women?” Josh retorted. “You’ve been dating Amber for five years, haven’t proposed, and haven’t discussed a baby despite her telling you she wants one.”
An excellent point.
If Josh was making those, we were in trouble.
“I don’t know,” Colton said, putting down the pool cue so he could rescue a beer from the fridge. “She can’t ask me for a baby if she won’t move in with me. I told her I’m not proposing until we live together and know we won’t kill each other.”
“Didn’t you have to move out because Kinsley nearly killed you?”
“Yeah, but she was a teenager, and I’m pretty sure she slipped while she was holding that knife.”
“There’s a story I haven’t heard.” I laughed.
Colton popped the cap of the beer and said, “When Kins was seventeen, I told the guy she liked she had a crush on him. Turned out, she’d already told him, and he’d turned her down because he was dating someone else. She was so fucking pissed at me that when I got home, she was cooking and waved the knife in my direction.”
“Then she slipped and nearly cut off his toe,” Josh finished. “Or so she says. I think she was aiming for his tiny cock.”
It was hard to believe we would all be thirty by the end of next year.
No, really.
We would be. And I was the only one even remotely grown up with my birthday coming in a few days—not that it made me the oldest. That was Colton.
“Why don’t you move into Amber’s place?” I grabbed Colton’s pool cue and chalked it while Josh set up the table. “She lives in town.”
“It’s smaller than mine,” he replied. “There’d be no point moving into her two-bedroom apartment when we’d ultimately end up moving into a three-bed place, which is what mine is.”
He had a point.
“Makes sense.”
“What are you and Ivy doing? Who’s moving across the hall?”
Josh chuckled.
“Don’t go there.” I lined up the white ball and hit it into the pack, breaking it and sending balls across the table. “Eventually I assume we’ll have to either come clean or fake break up. If anyone asks right now, my sister is staying at my place so I’m keeping my apartment for her.”
“I think you’re doing the right thing,” Colton said, perching on a barrel that was narrowly passing as a bar stool right now. “You need to find your new normal before you tell her you have feelings for her.”
Josh shot him a look. “I think you should just lay your cards on the table. That’s what I’d want if I were her. It’s the easiest option.”
“How is it the easiest?”
“Because if it goes well, their relationship isn’t fake. Just the marriage. And if they break up for real, then they get their fake divorce and move on.”
“Bullshit.”
I hated to admit it, but as they descended into the pros and cons of me telling Ivy I had feelings for her, Josh had a point.
Ivy was the one who’d told me that women didn’t like hints, and after that, I had actually told Amanda straight up that I wasn’t interested. She’d still tried it a few times, but she’d mostly given up.
Maybe I needed to take her advice again and tell her straight.
We moved onto other topics of conversation, finished two more games of pool and at least four beers each before Colton and I split a cab fare and went home. I wasn’t quite drunk but not quite sober, and thank fuck I didn’t have to work tomorrow, because the best place for me to go right now was bed.
Until lunchtime tomorrow.
By some stroke of a miracle, I managed to make my way up to my apartment without running into any of my neighbors. The conversation from last night filtered through my mind, but I brushed it away.
That wasn’t a conversation that could be had right now. I needed the clearest head possible for that.
I unlocked my door and froze. My sister was sitting on the sofa, glaring at me in a way that made her look uncomfortably like our mother. “What?”
“Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
I frowned, shutting the door. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve called you twenty times and you didn’t answer.”
I dug my phone out of my pocket. “Fuck. It’s dead. What happened?
“What happened?” Anna hissed, her eyes flashing. “What happened is that your pregnant fake wife had to leave her night with her friends because she felt unwell. She then came home, threw up for half an hour straight, then came over here practically on her knees because you weren’t replying to her texts and she was too busy throwing up to talk on the phone.”
Guilt shot through my body. “Is she okay?”
“Sure, after I called her doctor’s emergency number and was reassured it was likely just pregnancy sickness because the name ‘morning sickness’ is a joke,” Anna spat. “After I held back her hair and got her not throwing up long enough that she could take a shower, I quite literally force fed her some saltine crackers and put her to sleep in your bed so I could keep an eye on her because you were fucking missing.”
“Shit.” I rushed through the apartment and into my room where, as Anna had said, there was an Ivy-shaped lump on one side of my bed. Her hair was fanned out across the pillows, and she was fast asleep, but she was paler than I’d ever seen her.