“Whatever. You’re like a worm on a hook, Miller.” Sarah curled her lip and continued to stare up at the silent house. “Why didn’t she flirt with me? What do you have that I don’t?”

  I touched my fingers to my pocket to be sure the flash drive was still there and began to stalk down the concrete walkway. I tossed my answer over my shoulder: “Sensible shoes and a girlfriend.”

  Chapter Six

  I was still thinking about Melody Sternbridge and Danika Laroque when I caught the bus to Julia’s condo at the end of the work day. As much as I hated to admit it, I’d outgrown public transportation. I needed a vehicle that could handle Minnesota winters; I would have to concede sooner or later and trade in my motorcycle for something with four wheels. I would never say that to Julia though. I would just show up one day with a car to park in her underground lot instead of my Harley.

  I heard Julia’s voice the moment I let myself into the condo: “Okay. Thank you for the call. Yes, I understand.”

  I wasn’t expecting her home so soon, not that I wasn’t over the moon to hear her voice after the day I’d had. Commuting to and from Prior Lake and then negotiating with a self-important social media celebrity had left me physically and mentally drained.

  Julia sat at the dining room table with her cellphone in hand. She still wore the clothes she’d worn to work that day, which suggested she’d only recently arrived home.

  I kicked off my work boots and left them in the front entry. “Is everything okay?”

  I’d only caught the tail end of the conversation, but Julia’s displeasure was palpable.

  She passed her hand over her face. “Yes. It was just the fertility clinic. They’re following up.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I hoped my voice hadn’t cracked. “Did you make an appointment?”

  “No.” A frown settled onto Julia’s beautiful features. “The timing couldn’t be worse. I’m still sorting out my father’s affairs. My mother isn’t settled at a new facility yet. I’ve just put in my two-week notice at the public defender’s office, and then I’ll need to establish myself my new firm—.”

  “Julia.” I cut her off before she could completely spiral out. I’d heard all of these excuses before. “Do you want a baby?”

  My question effectively silenced her. I watched her work the muscles in her throat and jaw. “Yes,” she said thickly. “Terribly so.”

  “Then the timing is perfect.”

  Her eyes squeezed shut as if to dam any unwanted emotions. The rest of her body was similarly tense.

  I took a few tentative steps closer to where she sat. “It’s only the first of many steps,” I tried to appease her. “Let’s see the doctor about freezing your eggs, and then we’ll go from there.”

  Julia opened her eyes. Warm caramel-colored irises stared back at me. “We?” she echoed. The single word sounded hopeful rather than critical.

  “I mean, I guess I shouldn’t presume anything.” I stumbled over my words. “If you want me to be there. If you want or need my help.”

  Julia’s eyes didn’t stray from my face. “You want to have a baby with me?”

  When we’d been in Embarrass, I hadn’t really had time to properly reflect on her $10,000 down payment for the procedure. The personal check had caused the Embarrass police to believe she’d hired a hitman to kill her father. At the time, I’d been too focused on clearing Julia of any wrongdoings that the end result—a live, human baby—hadn’t been on my radar.

  I didn’t know if I wanted a baby. I had never played with dolls as a child. I hadn’t considered what my wedding would be like, or if I even wanted one for that matter—all things I imagined most straight girls had done when they were young. But I wanted to be with Julia. She was the first and only thing I’d ever wanted. So, if she wanted to have a kid, I’d have to be on board with that, too.

  I still hadn’t answered her question. She stared, silent and waiting for my response.

  I wet my lips. “I’d do anything for you.”

  Julia’s lacquered fingernails clicked erratically against the plastic arm of the hard-backed chair in which she sat. Her restless knees perceptively bounced, reminding me of how I’d felt in the moments before we’d first met the woman who would eventually become my therapist. But we weren’t in the waiting room of Dr. Susan Warren’s office; we sat in the office of a different kind of doctor in a facility in a different part of town.

  After signing in with a receptionist, it had only been a short wait—too short, I thought—before the two of us were ushered down a long hallway to wait in the fertility doctor’s private office. I’d been fully prepared to bully my way into the doctor’s office to support Julia during her consultation, but the receptionist hadn’t asked any questions about who I was or why I would be accompanying Julia beyond the waiting room. It was honestly a little disappointing.

  I rested my hand on top of Julia’s to still and silence the plastic ticking of her fingernails striking the arms of the chair.

  She offered me a small, apologetic frown. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I reassured her. “Just remember to breathe.”

  It was a big ask. Just breathe.

  I kept my hand on top of hers and stroked the pad of my thumb across the top of her hand and the fine bones of her wrist. Her eyes shut and I heard her quiet exhale. I was surprised at how calm I felt. I’d never been in a situation like this before, but maybe seeing how rattled Julia was had unlocked a necessary strength within myself. I could be strong for her. I could be her rock when everything else seemed so unstable.

  “You’ve got this,” I murmured. “One bite at a time.”

  Julia’s eyes remained closed, but a small smile appeared on her pursed lips. “We’ve been eating a lot of elephants lately.”

  “Are you calling me fat?” I joked.

  Her eyes opened at that and they flicked in my direction. “Will you still want me when I’m fat?”

  “Babe, you’ll be pregnant. Not fat.”

  I swallowed hard when a lump leapt in my throat. Shit. Pregnant. A pregnant Julia. I exhaled loudly as if giving birth myself. Pregnant. I cleared my throat and shifted in my chair. The sterile doctor’s office seemed to have grown warmer in the past few moments.

  The change in my body language didn’t go unnoticed. Julia shifted in her own chair and turned toward me. “Are you okay, dear?”

  Before I could muster a single syllable, the door to the private office swung open and a man—presumably Julia’s fertility doctor—walked in. “Sorry to have kept you waiting,” he apologized.

  He was younger than I expected, but I was confident that Julia had thoroughly vetted whomever was in charge of her being able to have a baby. I involuntarily swallowed. Baby. Infant. Child. Fuck. A heaviness settled on my chest like a Kevlar vest.

  The man sat in the high-backed leather office chair; a large wooden desk divided the space between us. He flipped through several folders on his desk before settling on the one he desired. He seemed to consult some notes before finally acknowledging that there were two women, not one, in the room.

  The doctor’s grey-blue eyes trained on me. “Hello.”

  “Hey,” I tightly returned.

  Julia took it upon herself to introduce me: “Dr. Bryant, this is my partner, Cassidy. I hope it’s okay that she sits in on our meeting today.”

  “Of course,” the doctor readily approved. “It’s good for both of you to be on the same page and have an opportunity to ask any questions or vocalize any concerns before moving forward.” He looked purposefully in my direction. “Do you have any questions right now?”

  I had about a billion questions, but I doubted the doctor could answer any of them. Was I ready to co-parent? Would I be any good at it? Would the kid even consider me their parent if I wasn’t biologically involved? The heaviness on my chest intensified.

  “What, uh, how does this work?” I stumbled on my question.

  “Harvesting the eggs?” he asked.

  I nodded. I knew, in theory, how babies were made, but this was new territory.

  “Well, after today’s meeting, we’ll schedule a baseline ultrasound just to make sure everything looks okay. Then we’ll start stimulation hormones. We can start that as soon as your next menstruation cycle,” he noted. “The medications will stimulate the ovaries into producing multiple eggs, not just one. You’ll come back for frequent monitoring between that initial ultrasound and the actual procedure.”

  I hadn’t realized the preparation would be so intricate. I hadn’t given much thought to it; I hadn’t considered the procedure ever. But if pressed, I’d probably believed a doctor could just dig around in there whenever to extract eggs. The more I thought on it though, the more it made sense. It wasn’t like women just bebopped around with a pile of unfertilized eggs in their bodies like an Easter basket or something.

  “Would you like to schedule the surgery now?” Dr. Bryant asked.

  I sucked in a sharp, audible breath without intending to. Julia glanced in my direction. I forced a smile to my lips, but showed no teeth. I continued to focus on breathing through my nose as an unexpected wave of nausea wracked my seated form.

  “We use the word ‘surgery,’ but egg retrieval is minimally invasive,” the doctor insisted, as if sensing my mildly veiled panic. “The procedure itself lasts only ten to fifteen minutes, and that includes administration of anesthetic. No scars, no stitches, and a short recovery time,” he assured. “Some of our patients are even able to go back to work the day after the procedure.”

  “How convenient,” I managed to mutter.

  “Following retrieval, the eggs will be taken to an embryology lab to be frozen,” the doctor described. “They’ll stay in our in-house long-term storage tanks until you’re ready for them.”

  The doctor’s features began to soften and blur at their edges. The invisible weight on my chest had become unbearable. I worried I might pass out where I sat if not for Julia’s palm resting on my knee.

  “I’m not ready to make an appointment just yet,” Julia decided. “I’ll have to consult my calendar to see when I’m available.”

  The doctor bobbed his head. “Of course. The decision is totally up to you and your deposit won’t expire. I only caution you not to wait until you think it’s convenient or when the timing’s right. In my experience, if you’re waiting for that to happen, you might never go through with the pregnancy.”

  Julia rose from her chair and I followed suit. After thanking and shaking hands with the doctor, we removed ourselves from his private office.

  We didn’t speak on the way out. Julia remained silent until we were alone in the elevator. Even without looking in her direction, I could tell she was observing me. I could feel her eyes appraising me, looking for something.

  Julia pressed the button for the lobby floor. “This isn’t freaking you out?”

  “I’m terrified,” I admitted. “I have absolutely no experience with any of this. I’m a fish out of water here.” There was no use pretending otherwise. “But I love you. And I know how much love you have to give. I can’t be selfish and hog all of it for myself.”

  Julia regarded me with an acute intensity. “Are you getting everything you need from me? And I don’t just mean orgasms,” she noted before I could make a snarky comment. “I don’t want you to feel neglected or like a check box that needs to be ticked.”

  “You’re awfully good at ticking my box.”

  Julia frowned. “Cassidy. Be serious, please.”

  Julia’s daily schedule was already compromised. She worked long days at the public defender’s office and had suggested that her new position at Grisham & Stein would be even more taxing. Oftentimes she had more paperwork to consult after dinner while I watched mindless television before she shut everything down, exhausted, to go to bed. I didn’t reasonably see how she would be able to add a newborn to that schedule, plus regularly visit her mother once she was re-homed closer to us, but this wasn’t the time for me to bring that up.

  “A date,” I proposed. “Saturday. Let me plan everything.”

  I saw her small frown of hesitation. My girlfriend was terrible about letting go of control.

  “What are you hoping that will achieve?” she questioned.

  “I don’t have an agenda, and it’s not a test,” I promised. “I only want to spend time with you. Have fun with you. Think you can handle that?”

  The elevator lurched when we reached the ground floor.

  “I suppose I’ve earned a little down time,” she seemed to reason with herself.

  I couldn’t help my juvenile smirk. “I wouldn’t mind a little down time, if you know what I mean.”

  Julia surprised me by cupping me hard over my jeans. I sucked in a sharp breath for an entirely different reason than when my breathing had become labored in the doctor’s office.

  She lowered her voice even though we were the only ones in the elevator: “Play your cards right, Marine, and you’ll get all the down time you can handle.”

  Chapter Seven

  Going on a date with Julia was a little less dramatic these days now that we lived together. I could still leave and pretend to be picking her up with a bouquet of flowers, but Julia was too practical for those kinds of chivalrous gestures. She’d always been the one to drive since she refused to ride on the back of my Harley, so anything that might mimic a more traditional date with accepted roles had never really been reality for us.

  At the start of our relationship, I’d been so fixated on getting her to go on dates with me that I hadn’t been able to enjoy the organic, unforced way in which our partnership had evolved and grown. We hadn’t even had a proper second date before exchanging the L-word. I knew we didn’t require antiquated gestures and rituals, but it was the only way I knew how to get Julia to loosen the stranglehold she typically held over the power dynamics in our relationship. Only when she agreed to go on a date was I allowed to surprise and treat her.

  I waited in the living room while Julia finished getting ready. I hadn’t revealed my plans to her despite her repeated efforts to cajole those details from me, but I had given her instructions on what to wear. While the typical Midwesterner was probably most comfortable in jeans and a sweatshirt, Julia favored dresses and fitted skirts. While I had no complaints about the leg-baring outfits, it wouldn’t quite work for my plans for us that day.

  I hopped to my feet when Julia entered the room. She flashed an indulgent smile as she finished fastening small, silver hoop earrings. “Thank you for your patience, darling,” she approved. “I know you said nothing fancy, but I just couldn’t decide what to wear.”

  Her sweater and jeans combination was sensible, but somehow she’d managed to make the normally relaxed outfit choice look expensive. Her dark blue jeans hugged every modest curve as though they’d been tailor-made for her. The sweater was probably cashmere, and more expensive than any single clothing item I owned, but it was about as casual as Julia could manage if we were actually leaving the condo.

  “Good things come to those who wait, right?” I returned.

  She balanced on one foot and then the next as she slipped into ankle-high leather boots. “That depends,” she remarked. “Am I going to like whatever we’re doing or wherever we’re going on this date?”

  “I have absolutely no idea,” I said in earnest.

  Julia arched an eyebrow. “You’re not sure?”

  I shrugged. “If you’re the kind of woman I think you are, you’ll be into it.”

  She smirked at my response and started to head for the door. “That’s clever.”

  “Is it?” I questioned.

  She nodded. “Now I have no choice but to like it.”

  I took her hand in mine and kissed her knuckles. “You’ll like it.”

  “Figure or hockey skates?”

  If Julia was surprised that our date was to take place at a local indoor ice rink, her features didn’t give her away. When we’d been packing up her childhood home in the previous weeks, I’d lamented how many typical Minnesotan activities we hadn’t yet done together. I wanted to be greedy with her time and blast through my To Do list, but she’d reassured me at the time that we had all of our lives to tackle that list. It was exactly the kind of thing I’d wanted to hear from her, but I still couldn’t wait to start checking off activities.

  “Guess,” she seemed to dare me.

  I didn’t take long with my decision. “Hockey.”

  One might have expected, based on her refined, polished exterior, that Julia herself was delicate like a figure skater. But from what I knew of her childhood, she’d been a tomboy: climbing trees, fishing in ponds, skinning her knees. Julia wouldn’t have learned how to skate with figure skates and their befuddling toe pick. She would have skated on frozen northern Minnesotan ponds with the same kind of skates as her younger brother, Jonathan.

  I hooked pinkie fingers with Julia while we waited in line to rent our skates. The indoor rink was warm enough that we didn’t need heavy jackets, hats, or gloves.

  Julia looked down at our lightly locked hands. “Enjoying yourself, dear?”

  Her tone was bright and slightly teasing.

  “I’m totally geeked,” I wasn’t ashamed to admit. “I feel like I missed out on so much being in the military—like ten years of my life was stolen. I missed out on being young and having fun. This is what I should have been doing in my early twenties,” I said emphatically, “taking my girlfriend ice skating.”

  Julia smiled, no longer teasing me or my exuberance. “I’m happy you finally get to do these things. And I’m even happier that I’m the person you get to do them with.”

  “You don’t think it’s corny?” I worried. “Ice skating and holding hands and hot chocolate? Like we’re starring in our very own Hallmark Christmas movie?”