Page 8 of My Girlfriend is Not the Father

The hormones were already affecting Lucy’s brain, obviously. Wait – nope. Besides The Pill, she hadn’t started injections yet. And yes, maybe Lucy had been single for the last five years, and maybe she was a tad lonely – but still! It’s not like she hadn’t seen other attractive women in those five years. So why did the image of the six-foot-tall, purple-haired queen refuse to disappear?

It’s not that she didn’t want to date. But she’d lived in Stillwater, Minnesota, her entire life and was pretty sure she knew every single queer woman within a thirty-mile radius. And dating sites were like a weird meat … er … peach market, and she hated swiping to find a mate. She didn’t even like the internet that much. Her dad always said she was an old soul wrapped in a millennial body. Which was both true and not true. Frank Sinatra wasn’t spinning in the background on a vintage record player and she didn’t smoke cigars (gross). But she found comfort in driving around in her four-speed stick-shift, canary-yellow 1990 Ford pick-up over a more modern car. Phone conversations beat text messaging. Fishing over dancing. Knitting over bar hopping.

And the women these last few years seemed to want more. More excitement, more flare, more jet-setting, more … everything. She didn’t need more. She had Chucky, her rescue dog, Drew and Mason, and her dad.

After printing out the receipt for the man, she explained how to open a savings account, and escorted him to the new-account office. She peeked at her watch – sweet! Break time. She was hungry as hell. Unfortunately, she had already snuck her quota of cookies from the lobby earlier today. She rounded the corner and ran into her manager, Pamela. Literally. Boobs-to-boobs. Thank God Lucy’s double Ds cushioned the impact, but still. Ouch. ‘Ugh, sorry!’

‘You scared the crap out of me!’ Pamela slammed her hand against her chest and laughed. ‘I’m not a young woman anymore, Lucy. You have to be gentle with me.’

‘Um, aren’t you like only five years older than me?’ Lucy readjusted her purse strap. ‘And sorry. Break time, and I’m freaking starving.’

Pamela dropped her cell into her suit jacket pocket. ‘Real quick. Just checking if you saw the email from the director about the—’

‘Yep. Done, responded, and filed.’

‘You’re amazing. And the quarterly report for the small business div—’

‘Sent thirty minutes ago, uploaded, and I bcc’d you.’ Lucy got an extraordinary amount of satisfaction from her boss’s sigh of relief.

‘Did you happen to review the audit about the new—’

‘Accounts opened last week and compared them against our projected prospects? Sure did.’ Lucy dug her keys from her purse. ‘I need to validate one thing, and you’ll have it this afternoon.’

Pamela gripped Lucy’s shoulder as she passed. ‘What would I do without you?’

‘Cry into your daily sugar-free vanilla coconut latte?’ Lucy called out as she bolted down the hall.

‘True story.’

Lucy waved behind her head. ‘Be back in an hour.’

It’d be great to say that Lucy was on top of details like this because being a responsible employee, one her manager leaned on, one that leadership mentioned at team meetings as a ‘stellar example’, gave her a strong sense of personal satisfaction. And sure, a little bit of that existed. But in reality, she’d been gunning for a managerial position for the last two years, and was inching closer to cinching that deal. Rumour on the street was that the regional branch manager put in for retirement at the end of the year, and Pamela was a shoo-in for that role. Which left Pamela’s local manager position open. Which then left Lucy dreaming that next year at this time, her name would be on a shiny bronze plaque in the lobby, welcoming in all the customers.

At her car, Lucy held the door open to release a mushroom cloud of trapped heat, tapped the seatbelt to make sure it didn’t fry her skin, and took a U-turn out of the parking lot. NSYNC (don’t judge) blasted on her playlist, and after grabbing a huge deli-meat sub – yet another thing she’d soon have to temporarily say goodbye to – she pulled into the pharmacy for a few items. Of course, she gravitated towards the cleaning aisle. So many products, so little time. Lavender, grapefruit, grease-cutting power with an organic super oil!

Her phone buzzed. She pulled it from her purse and grinned at the icon of Drew’s face.

‘Dude,’ Drew said.

‘What’s up?’ She propped the phone on her shoulder and reached for an all-natural pet-odour eliminator.

‘I think we found the donor.’

‘What?’ Her breath locked in her throat. They found the donor … already? The surrogacy coordinator said this could take months. Months. Not like forty-seven seconds. Breathe, breathe. This is good news. Great, actually. Right? Right. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Yep. Mason and I just met up to review more profiles and … this one just stood out. We both agreed this is it. And, guess what? She’s a ginger! Or at least that’s what the profile stated.’

‘Shut up,’ Lucy said and dropped the cleaner into her basket, hoping that the bead of sweat gurgling beneath her pores wouldn’t spring across her forehead. She swallowed and pushed out a grin, even though Drew couldn’t see her. ‘That’s perfect!’

After Mason’s apparently superior sperm beat out Drew’s during the swimming test, Drew thought he had to give up his dream of having red-headed children. Not that this guaranteed mini-strawberry shortcakes, but it was certainly a shot. So really, this was actually perfect and exactly what her bestie hoped for. It was just all so … fast.

‘I’m thinking tomorrow I can swing by and pick you up for the psych appointment.’

She shifted the phone to her other hand and continued scouring the cleaners, doing everything she could to ignore her palpitating heart. ‘Why’s that?’

‘I checked out the Google Maps street site, and parking looks limited. And with Bertha—’

‘Betty Yellow.’ She corrected him on her truck’s name, as per every conversation ever about her vehicle.