Oops, I’m Having My Best Friend’s Baby! (Oops!)

1. Amy

CHAPTER 1

AMY

A fter hours of deliberation, Amy decided to just make the phone call and be done with it. She knew she looked like a mess, her apron still around her neck over jeans and a ratty tank top she only ever wore at home, her short dark hair sticking up in weird places. Who even knew what her face looked like? Probably a mishmash of olive skin and smeared eyeliner at this point. But she needed to make this phone call, and it didn’t matter what she looked like, only what she sounded like, so she put on her friendliest, most chipper voice as the call was answered.

“Hi. I need to speak to Kai Nichols, please.”

Amy had spent an hour debating whether she should call or not, walking back and forth in her kitchen so much that there was probably a track in the floorboards. There had been multiple reasons not to call swirling through her brain, keeping her from just picking up the phone and dialing. Kai was a busy man. He ran a billion-dollar company and, unlike her, he worked the normal schedule that a human was supposed to. It was two in the afternoon, so he’d be busy. That was excuse number one for avoiding picking up the phone. Number two was that she hadn’t talked to Kai in… months? Really, had it been months? That was depressing. And somehow the length of time between calls made it infinitely harder to make this one.

They’d known each other basically their entire lives, then became best friends in high school and practically inseparable for years. But now Amy had to admit that it really had been months since they’d properly spoken, since they’d had a tangible conversation and not just texted a random meme through at two in the morning and getting an “lol” in return. That hardly counted as talking; it was mostly just checking that the other person was still alive.

All that to say, calling out of the blue and making a last-minute request was walking the line between potentially rude or downright bizarre and a cry for help. Especially when the request was to please go with her to their high school reunion, even though they had both hated high school with a fierce passion and vowed never to set foot in that place ever again. But here she was, phone to her ear, making the call because the reunion was tonight and Amy had agreed to cater the evening. Now, a few hours out, she thought she might implode. She should never have agreed to take on the catering for the event in the first place, and the anxiety spiral she now found herself in was entirely her own fault. Kai was going to think she was insane for ever agreeing to it. She was insane for agreeing to it. He was only going to point it out.

But the most important reason for not wanting to make the call, for delaying it all afternoon, the reason that she hated admitting this to herself even in the privacy of her own thoughts, was that she was utterly terrified that he was going to say no, that he wasn’t going to go with her. Then she’d officially be screwed, and really, it was no one’s fault but her own.

In the end, despite her reluctance, Amy called just so that she could force herself to stop pacing the floor like a caged animal. If she was going to panic, she wanted to at least be able to sit down and do it. Wasn’t it just the icing on the cake that Kai didn’t pick up? Instead, it was his assistant who answered in a perfectly polished, professional tone.

“I’m so sorry, ma’am,” she said, after Amy’s request to speak to Kai. “Mr. Nichols is very busy today and won’t be taking any calls. If you’re happy to leave a message, I can schedule a call at a different time?”

“Uh, well, it was kind of more urgent than… Are you sure I can’t just speak to him? It’ll be super quick.”

“Unfortunately not, ma’am,” the assistant said, her voice a perfect mix of professional sympathy. “I’m afraid a call will have to be scheduled. How does tomorrow at eleven sound?”

Amy stamped down the urge to roll her eyes. The woman was just doing her job, and she was happy that Kai had become successful enough to need an assistant to field phone calls like an armed guard… But it was kind of just rubbing salt in the wound of how far they really had drifted apart, that she needed him and couldn’t get in touch with him.

“It’s fine,” she said, trying not to sound annoyed. “I’ll try again later, I guess.”

Then the call was over, and Amy was still stuck in her kitchen panicking about the reunion. She wasn’t nervous about the food she had prepped and ready to go. Her food was good; she had that much faith in herself. Enough faith that she’d quit a very well-paying office job in favor of being an emotional wreck in her kitchen with barely enough money to clear her bills each month. Honestly though, it was still better than being stuck in an office every day. She’d been going insane sitting in front of a computer screen for eight hours at a time. She had no idea how Kai did it…

Amy wanted to sink into the floor. No. Actually, she just wanted to speak to Kai. No matter how long it had been since their last proper conversation or how long since the last time they’d really hung out — just the two of them — right now, she just wanted her friend to tell her that everything was going to be okay.

She tried calling again, but this time his assistant didn’t even pick up the phone, letting it go straight to voicemail.

Amy hung up in frustration, her pride taking a blow at the same time because even though she was desperate at this point, she didn’t want to literally beg on a voicemail message. The desperation needed to stay inside her own head and not be recorded for the world to hear, thank you very much. She had to draw a line somewhere, after all.

Begging might not be an option. But a somewhat dramatic performance wasn’t outside the realm of possibilities…

She called again, and this time, when the beep of the message recording started, she made sure to put a waver in her voice. High school theater still came in handy every now and again, even if she’d failed the class spectacularly.

“Sorry to bother you,” she said contritely. “But it’s just that Simon’s results came back positive… and…” She sniffed for dramatic effect. “I wanted to let you know, okay? I’ll stop bothering you now. I’m sorry.”

She hung up and waited all of a minute before her phone rang, Kai’s name flashing on the screen.

“Well, jeez,” Amy said brightly as she picked up. “Finally deigning to talk to me?”

“God, Amy,” he said in a rush of breath. “I had my assistant filter any calls that weren’t business today, and she just ran in and played me your message. I’m so sorry about Simon… He’s a friend of yours? I don’t think I’ve met him. But is he all right? What was the test positive for? What’s going on?”

Amy kind of felt bad at Kai’s outpouring of genuine concern. But only kind of.

“He is a friend, and the test results for being a very good boy came back a hundred percent positive. He also got an A-plus in the big stretches department.”

There was a beat of silence where Amy could only imagine Kai was blinking like an owl.

“Oh, my God. Simon is your cat, isn’t it?” he said.

“You forgot my cat’s name?” she deadpanned, managing to sound more offended than was strictly necessary. “How dare you.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t have trouble remembering if you didn’t name a cat Simon . People names belong on people.”

“May I remind you of your hamster named Lewis.”

“I was eleven…” His sentence was cut in half by a disgruntled huff, and Amy couldn’t help but smile. A lot of things had changed, but when Kai was frustrated, he still sounded just the same as that eleven-year-old boy. A huffy little engine, ready to take off.

“Amy,” he said, sounding stern. “I am actually kind of busy, believe it or not. So what is it you called for that was worthy of duping my poor assistant?”

Amy was glad they weren’t on a video call right now because she visibly grimaced. Putting it that way, she suddenly felt just a little bit ridiculous going to all this trouble to talk to him. But still… her anxiety about the reunion had her talking regardless.

“Are you coming to the reunion tonight?”

Silence followed before Kai answered. She kept throwing him curveballs, apparently.

“The what?” he asked, sounding genuinely oblivious.

“The high school reunion thing.”

“They still have those?”

“Yes, and ours is tonight. They even sent out proper paper invitations to all of our year group.”

“Yeah, and my assistant probably threw it out because she’s good at her job,” Kai said with a snort. “Why would I go and hang out with all of those people? Why would either of us?”

It was a fair question. High school hadn’t been fun for either of them. They might have known each other since they were little kids, but it was the hellscape that was high school that had bonded them together in a solid friendship. Both of them had been… different. Just different enough that they were excluded from the general populace from the outset, left to eat lunch in their own little corner, that sort of thing.

They were two kids from the poorest part of the already poor part of town, both of them too smart for their own good and beating the popular kids out in their fields with little to no effort. Kai in math and business studies, getting showered in scholarship offers from places like MIT for his obscenely good grades. Amy in track, where she got the same offers but turned them down only because food was where she really wanted to focus. And, no surprise, there weren’t really any scholarships or offers for someone who was into home economics. Kai had weathered the storm of their high school years fairly well, mostly just getting ignored by people, but for some reason that they had never really been able to figure out, Amy had always been the direct target for bullying. So it was an eternal mystery why she’d ever thought agreeing to cater the reunion had been a good idea.

“I was going to go, actually,” she said, stamping down the nerves in her gut. “Wanna go with me?”

“Do you want an honest answer?”

“I mean, it sounds like I’m going to get one.”

“Well… no. No, I don’t want to go with you. Because why on earth are you going to our high school reunion? Like, are you feeling okay? In the head?”

“I’m feeling just fine.”

“Then what on earth possessed you to actually accept and go to this thing?”

“I may have agreed to cater it…”

There was a deep sigh on the other end of the phone, and Amy braced herself for the speech she knew she was about to get.

“Amy,” Kai said, with all of the gravitas of a priest at a funeral. “Why?”

“A job is a job?” she said. But even now it came out sounding like a question rather than a confident statement.

“Are you that desperate for money?”

“No, but also, it’s money, so I maybe took the job without thinking through the psychological effects.”

“Amy, you know if you needed?—”

“Don’t offer me money, Kai,” she said sternly. “You know I don’t like it.”

He sighed on the other end. Ever since his tech company had hit meteoric success after innovating face and voice recognition software (or something, a lot of the lingo still went over Amy’s head), Kai had constantly been trying to give her money, to help her out, to “ease her load” as he so often put it. Accepting favors like that from anyone, even Kai, made Amy’s skin crawl, and she’d said no every time. She hated to admit it, but it was one of the reasons that they’d started to drift apart. It was something they’d never stopped being able to butt heads over.

“Anyway,” she said, moving briskly on from the same old argument. “We’ve established I’m insane and a sucker for punishment. So are you coming along?”

She hoped with every fiber of her being that he said yes, that she could manifest the answer into existence, but there was another pause which really didn’t bode well for the answer he was actually about to provide.

“Sorry, Amy,” he said. “I have a meeting with a potential business partner. A big one…”

“It’s fine,” she said immediately, stamping down on the wave of dread and disappointment. The only tone she allowed to creep into her voice was one of cheerful and understanding acceptance. She’d known calling was a bad idea…

“It’s just we’ve been dancing around this proposal for months now, and…”

“Kai. It’s fine.”

“Sorry, Amy,” he said, and she knew that he meant it. Because Kai understood — of course he did — how she was feeling in this exact second. Which was why she’d wanted to call him in the first place, because even though the answer was “no,” at least there was someone who understood.

“Just tell me it’ll be okay,” she said, voice gentle, not wanting to guilt trip him, but desperately needing to walk away from this phone call with something . “That’s all I need.”

There was a soft huff of laughter on the end of the line before Kai spoke again. “It’ll be okay, Amy. Keep your head held high, all right? You’re there to do a job, not take part in schoolyard politics. Knock ’em dead.”

Amy had no idea when the smile had appeared on her face, but it was nice to feel it there.

“Well, I made my little churro cake-pop things, so I’ll have no trouble winning them over.”

Kai groaned. “Don’t tease me with the churro pops.”

“I’ll make you some,” Amy said. “On a different day.”

“Deal.”

There wasn’t much else to say after that, Kai really did need to get back to work and Amy would have to head off to the high school soon to start setting up. They hung up kind of awkwardly.

Kai had said it would be okay. So it would be okay. Her gut was still churning with nerves, but her head at least was calmer. She could do this. She would be just fine. And there was the half-formed promise of getting together soon, of making churros and seeing Kai in the flesh. But it wasn’t a date. Amy squashed that thought and any associated feelings down deep, banishing them back to oblivion. Despite their long friendship, she’d harbored a crush on Kai, on and off, their entire lives, and it liked to flare up at the most inconvenient times. She’d never given herself the option of acting on it, though. Ever. That friendship was too precious to lose. It was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing, and Amy would never forgive herself if she ruined it. Drifting apart was one thing, but detonating a bomb because she got giddy every now and then was an entirely different matter.

Suddenly the storm of anxiety about tonight, her to-do list, all of it was a welcome distraction from the warmth in her chest that speaking to Kai had sparked.