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I snickered. “You’re terrible. But I love you.”
My phone buzzed in my back pocket. I jumped up. “I bet that’s Holli. She can’t have been that far behind me.” I leaned forward to give him a kiss.
He accepted it, but then said, “No, no, I’ll come with you.”
Holli’s text read, I’m coming in, so I hope you’re naked. No sooner than we headed down the hall and toward the foyer, I heard Holli call, “Is anybody home? If nobody’s home, I’m taking stuff!”
“Hello, Holli,” Neil called, amused, as we entered the living room.
Holli came down the few steps from the foyer. “Hey, Sugar Daddy. Can I steal your wife for the evening?”
“Oh, please, take her. I beg of you,” he teased, and dodged my playful elbow to his side. “I hear congratulations are in order?”
This time, the elbow to the side was real, and he wasn’t as good at avoiding it. But I didn’t hit him too hard. “Excuse me, I was going to break it to her gently.”
“Deja told you.” Holli made a loud, prolonged noise of frustration. “I knew she would do that.”
“It wasn’t her fault,” I promised. “It was pregnan—”
“Pregnancy brain,” Holli finished for me. “So weird. So, so weird.”
“I’m sorry you weren’t the first to tell me,” I said, reaching out to squeeze her upper arm. “And I’m sorry I told Neil, too. But I didn’t tell Mom.”
“Then, we should go down there, right away,” Holli suggested. “I texted her on the way over, just to make sure she and the boy toy weren’t—” She finished her statement with the classic index-finger-through-ring-of-the-other-index-finger-and-thumb motion.
“Gross, shut up.” I turned to Neil. “Give me a kiss. And make something that high people want to eat.”
Holli and I changed into our suits and left for Mom’s house. We walked, rather than drove, and we weren’t far from the house before Holli said, “So. Does Neil know that you gave away your magazine today?”
It shouldn’t have surprised me that Deja would have already told her. If our situations were reversed with Holli and Deja’s, I wouldn’t have waited for Deja to leave the building before I called Neil. It was nice that the top was ripped off the whole can of sardines already.
“Yes,” I answered with a definite nod. “And he fully supports me.”
“I don’t,” Holli said, a hard set to her jaw. “This magazine was your dream. I don’t see why you and Deja can’t—”
“It wasn’t my dream.” There was no reason to let her go on thinking that it was or silently judging her wife over this. “It was an idea. The dream came from Deja from the ground up.”
“She said she really let you have it,” Holli said quietly.
“She did.” There was no sugar coating that. “But I deserved it. You know I did.”
Holli sighed. “Yeah. I do. She probably didn’t say anything I haven’t been wanting to say to you for a while. But you’re my friend. I don’t like other people doing my job.”
“At least, this way, there aren’t any hard feelings between you and me.”
We walked a few steps in silence before Holli asked, “But are there hard feelings between you and Deja?”
I shook my head. “No. Not really. I’m kind of grateful to her. I could have just kept going on the way I was, feeling inadequate for not putting in the work, but not wanting to put in the work because it was making me unhappy.”
“That sucks. I had no idea that’s how you felt. I just thought you needed to be on Adderall.” Holli was on that, herself, and had a bad habit of running around diagnosing everyone else. Her face lit up. “Oh, my gosh, I haven’t made a single Wilford Brimley joke, yet, today!”
Rolling my eyes, I laughed. “Let me get you your trophy. You know, you should really be worried about me. I’ve got some horrible disease.”
“Have you made your doctor appointment, yet?” she asked in what could have been a recording of my mom or Neil asking the same damn question.
“Yes, mother. I go in next week.” It felt like facing an execution. “I’m not going to be able to have any fun after all of this. It’s going to be nothing but rabbit food.”
“But you can afford the really good rabbit food,” Holli reminded me. She threw her hands out as though she were conducting an orchestra. “All the most gourmet lettuces from the most exotic gardens in the world!”
I lifted an eyebrow. “You smoked in the car on the way here, didn’t you?”
“A little,” she admitted sheepishly.
Mom already had the hot tub bubbling when we arrived, bypassing the front door to march around the side of the house and squeeze through the exquisitely manicured hedges.
“Ow, my hair!” I shrieked as it caught on a branch.
“Why don’t you just come through the house?” Mom demanded, exasperated.
