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“Can I ask you something, Beatrice?”
“Bee, please,” she insists with a horrified shudder. “‘Beatrice’ sounds like some old British broad who paints dainty little woodland creatures all day.”
“Like Beatrix Potter?”
“Who?”
“Uh…”
She laughs. “I’m just pulling your leg. I know who Beatrix Potter is. My mom used to read Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny to me when I was a kid.”
It’s strange: so far, Bee has been a phantom, a secondary character in this weird, surreal little story I’m living out. It’s easier in some ways to keep her that way. If she stays flat and lifeless and two-dimensional, I can pretend she isn’t real.
But when she talks about mothers and childhood stories, I feel a surge of fresh guilt. She’s got a life, too. A life of her own. A world of her own.
And I’m intruding on it.
If nothing else, I’m feeling guilty that I masturbated to a fantasy of her fiancé literally last night.
“Out of curiosity and the desire to end this awkward silence we’ve found ourselves in, what did your mother read to you?” she asks.
“The Bible, mostly.”
“Wow. Fun.” She chews on a hunk of croissant. “Riveting stuff.”
“It was her way of coping,” I explain sheepishly. “She lost my dad and found religion.”
Bee’s half-smirk is replaced with a frown as she picks up her glass of orange juice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you’d lost your father.”
“That’s not exactly—I mean, well, yeah, I did. Just not in the traditional sense. He, um… left us.”
Bee sighs longingly. “God, I wish my father had left me.” She says it so dryly that I have no idea if she’s being serious or not. Then she winces. “Sorry, that was probably an insensitive thing to say. I don’t really have a filter sometimes. Just for context, my father’s an asshole.”
I burst out laughing. “So was mine.”
The laughter takes the edge off things. Suddenly, it doesn’t feel so weird to be sharing breakfast with my baby daddy’s future wife. In fact, I’m not thinking of her in those terms at all. Right now, she’s just a fellow woman that I’m on the precipice of actually liking.
“I’m sorry—I distracted you. You were about to ask me something?”
“Right.” And just like that, we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming. I take a breath, nervous all over again. “How are you so cool with me being here?”
She shrugs. “Because I’m not a jealous person. Never have been. You’re here because you’re carrying Dmitri’s child. That doesn’t change the fact that he loves me. I’m smart enough to know that he can be both your child’s father and my husband and that those two things can exist in harmony with one another.”
“There’s just one thing…”
“Shoot.”
“Where do I fit into that equation?”
“You are the mother of his child,” Bee says frankly. “And I will be his bonus mom. As far as I’m concerned, it’s double the love. What could be wrong with that?”
She says it so succinctly that I find myself questioning my own emotional maturity. Apparently, she’s light years ahead of me. “That’s very… evolved of you.”
“Hardly. I’m a self-serving bitch.” She gives me a cheeky wink. “You’ll find out soon enough.”
A chiming sound from a panel on the wall draws her attention. “Front desk,” Bee explains over her shoulder when she sees me looking. She gets off her stool and presses a button to open the communication channel.
I can’t make out the words in the fuzzy, indistinct crackle that follows, but apparently, she can, because her face goes pale a moment later. “Here? Right now? Uh…” Her eyes flit around the kitchen wildly, like she’s looking for a place to take cover. “Uh… yeah… send him up.” Her knuckles are as white as her face when she hangs up. “Fuck.”
