16. Lemon #3
Drawing back the curtain on the dressing room, Cora gestures for me to go inside. “Lemon, get undressed. I need to put Jerico down, then I’ll come in and help you, if that’s okay?”
“I’ll hold him,” Knight says, his gruff voice garnering all of our attention.
“Would you mind? I should have brought his stroller with us because I don’t like him to sit in his car seat for too long,” Cora says.
Striding forward, Knight takes the baby from Cora like he’s cradling a priceless heirloom or a fragile bomb. Once he settles the tiny bundle into his huge arms, we all fall silent, watching the stoic and kind of scary guy stare down at the tiny baby.
“God, that’s hot,” Leo whisper-yells.
“Yep, if he hadn’t already knocked me up, this is probably how I’d get pregnant,” Octy says on a happy sigh.
Rolling her eyes, Cora huffs. “We all have hot guys who look even hotter holding babies. Right now, we’re looking for a wedding dress.”
“I don’t have a hot guy,” Leo tells her.
“Do you want a hot guy?” Octy asks her.
“Maybe, or a hot girl. I’m not picky,” Leo says, winking playfully at me.
The first five dresses I try on are hard nos. “I look like a birthday cake,” I tell everyone as I shuffle out of the changing room in the huge princess dress someone picked for me to try.
“Oh wow, that’s…big,” James says diplomatically.
“So big,” I agree.
“I thought you were making your own dress,” Tori says.
Sighing, I try to tame the huge skirt, then stop, twisting my hands together on top of the net monstrosity.
“I tried to. I designed the dress I wanted, but I’m not a seamstress.
I can use a sewing machine, and I have sewn some of my own dresses, but I only know the basics, and that doesn’t stretch to making a wedding dress.
I made a pattern, and when I sewed the basic design out of calico, the bodice fit me, but when I made it again out of the fabric I planned to use for the dress, it was too small, and my boobs were spilling out everywhere and not in a sexy way. ”
“Do you think you measured it wrong? It seems a shame not to wear your own design,” Verity says.
“I checked it a hundred times, and the measurements are right. It should fit, but it doesn’t, and I have no idea why.
I’ve wasted hundreds of dollars’ worth of fabric because I’ve messed up the stitching or because it wrinkles instead of lying flat.
I feel like I’m letting Atticus down by buying a dress, but yesterday I just lost it.
I cried all over him and told him we should cancel the wedding.
Honestly, trying to sew this dress is making me feel like I’m losing my mind.
Yesterday I was crying and then shouting and then crying again in the space of five minutes. ”
“That sounds like me when I’m pregnant.” Cora laughs.
“God, me too. I felt like I was going crazy,” Bonnie agrees.
“Yep, no one warns you about how insane all the hormones make you feel,” James says, rubbing her pregnant belly affectionately.
“Jesus, if women were actually told the realities of being pregnant, I bet the world’s population would drop dramatically,” Cora says. “The sickness, the aches, the constant need to pee.”
“Sore boobs that seem to double in size almost overnight, not to mention how big your nipples get,” Bonnie adds.
The floor feels like it drops from beneath me as my friends talk about the worst bits that no one warns you about before you get pregnant. But I barely hear them through the buzzing in my ears.
Bigger boobs.
Crazy emotions.
When was my period due again? I’m on the birth control shot, and it’s up to date…right?
It is…I think.
I’m overthinking. There’s no way I could be pregnant.
Having a breakdown over not being able to make a whole wedding dress in a super short space of time doesn’t mean my hormones are going crazy.
It just means that I’m stressed from trying to do the impossible.
Crying all over Atticus and then being mad at him is all about the pressure I felt from him and not because my emotions are going haywire.
My boobs not fitting into the bodice isn’t because they’ve gotten bigger. It just means I can’t accurately measure.
I’m not pregnant. I’m not.
“Okay, so that’s not the dress. Let’s try another,” Cora says, thankfully taking charge and forcing me to push aside my crazy thoughts.
I try another five duds until I slip on a dress that makes me gasp when I spin around and look at myself in the mirror.
The light, floaty dress is a simple A-line skirt with a wispy botanical embroidered bodice finished with sequins and illusion cut-out details on the sides.
It’s nothing like the dress I designed, but it’s beautiful and ethereal and… perfect.
“Wow,” Cora gasps.
Tears fill my eyes, and I nod, my lip quivering as I fight not to cry.
“Is that the one?” she asks quietly, reverently.
“I think so,” I whisper.
“Do you want to show everyone?”
I nod again, silent tears rolling down my cheeks. Cora pulls back the curtain, and I step forward, struggling to stifle my emotions.
“Oh my god, that looks incredible on you,” Tori gushes.
“It really does,” Bonnie agrees.
“Hot mama,” Leo catcalls, wolf whistling loudly and making me laugh through my tears.
“Why are you crying?” Missy asks.
I shake my head, trying to smile. “I don’t know,” I admit.
Like she knows I need it, Leo marches toward me and pulls me into a hug. In her sky-high heels, she towers over me and has to bend down to wrap me in her arms, but I hug her back tightly, needing the comfort, even though I wish it was Atticus’s arms around me and not hers.
After it’s universally agreed by everyone that this is the dress, Cora and I go to find Jill, and I pay the almost ridiculously cheap price tag for it.
Octy, Betty, Leo, and Etta all have to get back to work, so they wave us goodbye, and Knight drives them all away while the rest of us pile back into the van and head back to Rockhead Point.
Instead of dropping me off at the warehouse, the girls insist on us all going for lunch, so after Bonnie parks at the curb outside a place they insist is amazing, we all climb out and head toward the front door.
The server seems to recognize Bonnie, and she leads us over to a round table near the window, pouring us all water while she takes our drink order. “Are you okay?” Tori asks from beside me. “You seem a little out of it.”
“I wasn’t really expecting to find a dress I actually liked today.
I thought I’d just have to pick from what was available, and I think now that I found a dress that I love, all the anxiety I’ve been feeling recently has leaked out of me,” I tell her, not mentioning that most of my dress-related stress has now become am-I-pregnant stress.
Tori might be my future sister-in-law, but her loyalty will always be to Atticus first. I get it, but because of that, I can’t tell her I’m worried I could be baby-trapping her brother.
Atticus and I haven’t really discussed children. He made an offhand comment about us having a family one day, but I’d guessed it was a way, way, way in the future suggestion and definitely not a right-now idea.
If I am pregnant, and he decides this isn’t what he wants right now, I don’t know what I’ll do. My mom chose to keep me when she fell pregnant unexpectedly, but I don’t know if being a single mom is something I’d choose for myself. In Montana, I have options, but…
Closing my eyes, I force myself to stop thinking about it.
Driving myself crazy over things that aren’t happening right now isn’t healthy.
Just because I’m feeling overly emotional and my boobs are enormous doesn’t mean I’m pregnant.
It could just mean that my period is due.
My birth control injection makes my periods super irregular, and sometimes I can go for months without having one at all, so if I am due to start a period soon, it makes total sense that I’d get some exaggerated symptoms.
That’s it. I’m hormonal, that’s all. It sucks that I could be bleeding on my wedding day, but it’s not the end of the world, and it’s better than having to explain to Atticus that I’m lumbering him with a baby a month into our relationship.
“Oh, sweetie, you should have said you were so worried,” Tori says, her face sympathetic.
“It’s fine,” I tell her, forcing my lips into a smile. “I found the perfect dress, and now I just need to wait for this stress to dissolve.”
“I know what will help with that,” Tori says with a giggle. “Can we have two cosmos, please?” she asks the server, then turns back to me. “It’s an oldie but a goodie, and I’ve been watching reruns of Sex and the City while Nero has been on shift.”
“A cocktail actually sounds perfect right now,” I assure her, refusing to question if I should be drinking alcohol.
After three cosmos, lunch is fun and loud and…
great. These women have integrated me into their group, and for the first time since…
well, ever, I have a big group of girlfriends.
And just like Octy told me the first time I met her, all of them have a Barnett love-at-first-sight story to tell about their own relationships.
Some of them are so crazy they sound like the plot of a romance book, but all of them ended with a happy ever after, and at least Atticus hasn’t attempted to kidnap me or convince me to marry him the day we met.
I get now why Octy told me that only these women would understand how quickly and easily I fell for Atticus and that none of them judge me, because it’s happened to them too.
Since I crashed into Atticus, my life has changed completely.
I’ve gone from being scared to step into my own home and dreading going to work each day to being happy, having a fiancé, a new sister, and three new brothers.
I’ve gotten friends, a great job, and for the first time since my mom passed, I feel like I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.
After we finish eating, we stroll out of the restaurant and onto the sidewalk. “Thank you so much for today,” I tell them all.