Chapter 2 Liz
Liz pulled the chicken out of the oven and inspected it for the “life-changing” qualities that a sitcom star turned lifestyle blogger had touted on TikTok.
Liz doubted that this twice-basted bird could make her boyfriend of eleven months suddenly declare his undying love or give Liz the courage to quit her soul-crushing job.
Still, Liz had to try. Even though she was about as far from a yoga-mat-toting, green-juice-chugging blogger as Preston was from proposing.
Liz sprinkled parsley on top of the chicken and, with full hands, jabbed at her phone with her pinkie finger before it plunged into lock-screen mode.
She saw the time: five minutes to seven.
Shit. Liz whipped into action and spun through her apartment.
She hid dirty pans and threw away used paper towels, hopefully removing any signs of effort so that this dinner, which she had labored over, would seem effortless.
Oh, what? This four-course gourmet meal? It was nothing!
Liz tried to arrange the place mats to cover the various water rings and other blemishes on her table.
She fluffed the throw pillows on her worn-in Jennifer Convertibles couch, tore off her rarely used apron—a gag gift from a bachelorette party that boasted penises dressed as vegetables—and cued up a Romantic Dinner Vibes playlist on Spotify.
As soon as Al Green started flowing through the Bose speakers, Liz paused.
“Let’s Stay Together” seemed…a little on the nose?
Maybe even desperate, or like she was trying to convey some kind of super-textual message like the sync music in the background of The Catch, the reality dating show she edited, if combing through hours of B-roll for something scandalous that had inadvertently slipped through the net counted as “editing.” Liz knew she should feel grateful to have a job on a top-rated show, but instead Liz felt her faith in mankind plummet with every day she spent witnessing gaggles of women fight to lock down “a catch,” fully aware of the other catch that the double entendre of the show’s name promised: One of the men wasn’t straight.
Liz had worked for this arguably homophobic cultural blight upon humanity for six of its eight seasons, vowing with each ersatz fight or booze-soaked hookup that she’d finally get on LinkedIn and get out of reality TV.
Meanwhile, Preston loved his job in the sports department of a top agency.
He met whatever professional tasks he faced with the boundless enthusiasm of a golden retriever.
Like the world owed him something, and wasn’t it fun?
The buzzer sounded. Either Preston was on time or Postmates was ringing her again because her stoner next-door neighbor had ordered enchiladas, then fallen into an indica stupor and forgotten about his craving.
Liz took a deep breath to steady her nerves.
Would she ever feel secure in a relationship, free of the sense of impending doom that clung to her like bad perfume?
Or were relationships just like this—as precarious as a polar ice cap?
Liz went over to the buzzer as it sounded again, loud and squeaky, like a goat bleating.
“It’s Domino’s,” Preston joked when she answered it.
“No tip if you forgot my breadsticks again,” Liz said, and let him up.
While she waited for Preston to climb the two flights of stairs to her apartment, Liz changed to a Dinner Mood playlist and paced her tiny kitchen.
As soon as she heard footsteps approaching, she channeled her best breezy blogger and plastered on a smile that she hoped came across as chill, low-key, and appealing.
“Sweet,” Preston said, taking in the Pinterest-worthy tablescape.
He offered her a bottle of wine and kissed her on the cheek.
Liz hoped he directed his affection there—where he might greet his sister or his mother—instead of kissing her on the mouth because she was wearing visible lip gloss and not for some other reason.
Like he’d suddenly lost all romantic interest in her. “You went all out,” Preston said.
“This?” Liz said, gesturing casually to the spread she’d agonized over for a week. “Oh, it’s nothing. Are you hungry?”
“Starving,” Preston said, taking off his suit jacket and slinging it over the arm of the couch.
Liz loved how comfortable he was in her place.
Even if he didn’t have a key. Even if they never discussed their future.
Even if their relationship seemed more like a mislabeled situationship they had slid into rather than something with legs they had intentionally sought out. Even—
“Should we pop that open?” Preston asked, pointing to the bottle of wine in Liz’s hands.
“I’ll do it!” Liz rushed off to find a bottle opener. Preston sat down at the table and started thumbing through emails on his phone.
“Just have to check something.” Liz wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or himself, so she just nodded while pouring cabernet.
“I’ll put it on silent in a sec,” Preston added.
“It’s fine!” Liz insisted.
Preston tapped out a few more emails, then put his phone on vibrate—his definition of silent—and slipped it back into his pocket.
“This dinner looks bomb,” Preston said, glancing at the roasted chicken, Mediterranean farro, kale salad, and sweet potatoes.
He helped himself and Liz fussed over him, acting like it was normal for them to have a home-cooked meal together on a weeknight.
Preston ate heartily, laying on the compliments, while Liz tried to choke down a few bites of influencer-endorsed chicken.
It was perfectly cooked, but Liz was too nervous to enjoy her culinary triumph.
She waited for Preston to consume enough wine to take the edge off a workday, then she cleared her throat.
“There’s something I need to talk to you about…”
Preston looked at Liz curiously and then a flash of something else—fear?—flickered across his face before he said, “Actually, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about too.”
Liz’s heart sank so low in her chest she was sure a rescue party would deem it a lost cause.
“Okay,” Liz said, her throat constricting and dry…like overcooked chicken. “Do you want to go first?”
“No, no. Ladies first.” Chivalry was not dead, though Liz wished, in this moment, that it was taking a breather. She didn’t know how to go about this, only that she needed to, somehow.
“Well…” Liz took a big gulp of air. “I know we weren’t planning this, and we don’t ever really talk about us in a where-is-this-going kind of way and—that’s fine!
Not everything has to be so target oriented just because we’re in our thirties and our friends are hitting those milestones and society—you know?
” Preston looked blankly at her but nodded.
“Anyway, this was—is—a big surprise, and obviously, you have a say in it, we’ll figure it out together—”
“Liz,” Preston interrupted, his brow furrowed. “What’s it?”
She looked at him. At his classic, even features and his blue-gray eyes that changed color like a mood ring.
“I’m pregnant,” Liz said.
Preston stared at her. The shock seemed to spread across his face gradually, like a rash, from top to bottom. First, his eyebrows darted up, then his eyes widened, and finally his mouth opened to form a perfect circle. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” Liz confirmed, as if she would ever play a pregnancy prank on someone whose feelings for her still felt undefined, as if she would ever joke about something so huge.
Liz twisted her hands in her lap underneath the table.
Preston sat there wordlessly for what felt like an eternity.
A torturous eternity. A torturous eternity from which Liz could wave at him from across the expanse of a galaxy and send him a postcard: Hi, from Hell!
“Are you sure?” Preston said.
Liz felt a little piece of herself crumble like a brick from an abandoned building.
While it was ridiculous for her to imagine that Preston would have reacted by leaping up, shouting like Oprah, and telling Liz that this had made him realize his deep love for her, it was still a fantasy she had unfortunately entertained.
“Yes…positive.”
In case Preston needed proof, Liz got up, went over to a drawer, and pulled out ten at-home pregnancy tests.
She carried them over to the table and placed them in front of Preston in a haphazard heap of EPTs, some of the sticks jutting out at odd angles like a bizarre game of Jenga.
Preston eyed the tests from a distance, either unwilling to touch them and validate their contents or reluctant to handle plastic sticks that had been held under a stream of her urine.
Liz watched Preston’s facial expression anxiously, trying to tease out its shifts like a meteorologist.
“They’re all positive?” he said.
Liz nodded. A candle dripped wax on the table and Liz didn’t wipe it away, beyond caring that it would congeal on the wood and have to be scraped off later with a butter knife.
“Wow,” Preston said. “Wow.”
Liz peered into the question marks in his eyes and marveled that someone who had been inside her body on a semiregular basis over the course of almost a year could do something, or not do something, and suddenly seem like a complete stranger.
Her expression, which she was trying to keep under wraps, must have escaped onto her face, because Preston leapt into preservation mode.
“Sorry, I’m just really shocked.”
“I get it. But, yeah, it’s not a joke. I’m pregnant. Knocked up. With child. Or at least, pre-child. With sperm that joined up with an egg.”
“ ‘Joined up,’ like they formed a band?”
Liz lifted a corner of her mouth into a tentative smile. Was Preston cracking jokes? That seemed like a good sign. “A tiny, two-member band,” she said.