Chapter 11 Victoria
Victoria skipped into the kitchen in her workout pants and squeaky new Nikes.
Despite having to contend with Mark’s unctuous grin as he presided over the week’s company-wide meetings, the days had flown by as if they were hurtling towards an end goal.
Victoria had cheerfully informed the gossip-turned-planning committee—Deborah, Ellen, and Annalise—that she was diligently making her invite list for the baby shower.
So what if Victoria only had one name on it?
Two, if she counted her concierge OB! Victoria slid behind the kitchen counter.
“Do we have ingredients to make a smoothie?” she asked Ace, as if she needed a prop in hand to complete the “pregnant workout lady” costume. He eyed her suspiciously from his post in front of the espresso machine.
“Who are you and what have you done with my wife?” Ace asked.
“I told you! I have plans today with my new friend Liz.”
She opened three cabinets of pots and pans and place mats before Ace pointed her in the direction of the Nutribullet.
“Seriously. What’s happening here?” Ace asked.
“We’re going for a walk together.”
“You, as in the person who has said, many times, that walking is a geriatric excuse for exercise?”
Victoria threw half a banana, a scoop of almond butter, and a handful of berries into the Nutribullet.
“Friends walk together,” Victoria announced, rifling through the pantry for protein powder. “And I have a friend.”
“A real-life human woman?”
“Indeed. And I’m going to keep her.” They both laughed, Ace’s dimples making deep indents in his cheeks.
“No more four-hundred-dollar brunches that are going to make Liz feel uncomfortable,” Victoria said.
“Four hundred dollars? How much did you order?”
“Half the menu. But now, we’re going to do nonintimidating, inexpensive friend things.”
“Wholesome.” Ace hid a smirk. “What’s she like?”
Victoria thought for a second. “She’s funnier and smarter than she realizes. I haven’t gotten a read yet on what the situation is with her boyfriend. She has a terrible job she needs to quit—”
“Is she a friend or a project?”
“Who says she can’t be both?” Ace looked at Victoria knowingly. “Liz is great. She could just use a dose of confidence. I think she’s in a pivotal place. Maybe if she had an executive coach…”
“Lucky for her, now she has a very successful, fully realized exemplar of corporate womanhood by her side.”
“Make fun of me all you want,” Victoria said, turning on the Pulse button of the blender to drown out his words.
“You know I do nothing but live in pursuit of putting a smile on this beautiful face,” Ace shouted over the noise.
He caressed her cheek and they kissed deeply.
Behind Victoria, the smoothie churned, and then the motor of the blender started to burn, emitting a fatigued, grisly sound.
Ace jabbed his hand blindly in the general direction of the appliance and turned it off without breaking their embrace.
It was only after a few more minutes that he pulled back.
“When do you have to leave?” Ace asked suggestively.
“If I skip the smoothie, I probably have time,” Victoria said.
“Race you to the bedroom!” Ace said, then took off in a sprint down the hallway.
Victoria tilted her head back and laughed. Then she followed her husband to their bedroom and peeled off her workout outfit to reveal her naked, pregnant form.
“Yes, please,” Ace said.
Victoria moved to the bed and allowed her husband’s caresses to arouse her, grateful that pregnancy, thus far, had not impeded either of their libidos.
She lost herself in his touch, succumbing to the skilled movements of Ace’s hands, then guided him to enter her.
Ace pulled Victoria’s head towards his and kissed her as their bodies collided, building friction towards its eventual exquisite climax.
Afterwards, Victoria rested her head on Ace’s chest. He stroked her hair gently and Victoria thought about how lucky she was.
“I love you,” Victoria said, then craned her neck to look at the clock on Ace’s bedside table. “I have to get going, though.”
“A few more minutes,” Ace said. He reached his hand down to rest on the curve of her belly, which was growing more pronounced. “I’m going to miss you both when I go to London.”
“Us both?” Victoria repeated, amused. “Also, you’re already thinking about this? You’re not even going for two months.
“Of course I’m thinking about it. Are you sure you don’t want to come?”
Ace had made his money in commercial real estate, but he was also the silent partner in several restaurants along the California coast, one of which had sown offshoots in New York, Miami, Aspen, and now, London. Ace was flying over for the opening.
“I’m going to be taking time off after the baby as it is,” Victoria said. “I have to plant my stake in the office and make sure Mark doesn’t get any ideas about poaching my clients.”
“Fair enough,” Ace said. “But I’ll miss you. Hookers just don’t do it like this.”
“You better believe it.”
Ace watched Victoria as she got out of bed to get re-dressed.
“Are we going to do playdates with your new friend after the babies come? Mom and dad things? Birthday parties on the weekends at those indoor playground germ factories?” he asked.
“You sound very eager for all of that. Including the germs.”
Ace grinned. “I can’t wait to be a dad.”
“They said it would never happen…”
Ace stood up, came over to Victoria, and lovingly cupped her face in his palm. “Thank you for proving them wrong.”
Victoria walked on the sun-dappled dirt path next to Liz.
Tall stalks of wheat-colored grasses sprang up around them and wildflowers dotted the hills.
The area was teeming with native species of vegetation, and though adult Victoria generally appreciated the great outdoors as commodified by a five-star resort, she was spellbound as Liz led her down the trail and a not insubstantially sized lake came into view, its slate-gray ripples shimmering like a mirage.
“I live fifteen minutes up the road,” Victoria said, gesturing in what she thought was the vague direction of Coldwater Canyon, “and I had no idea this was here.” Victoria studied the alluvial vignette and marveled that they were ten minutes from the bustle of Beverly Hills.
“It’s kind of a hidden gem,” Liz said, pointing over to her right, where a serpentine trail made its way up the mountain. “You can hike over there without running into crowds of influencers in full faces of makeup or tourists with selfie sticks and little dogs in baby carriers.”
“Why get a dog you have to push in a stroller? And at what point do you stop calling that kind of animal a pet and start calling it something else?”
“I never had a pet,” Liz said. “I always wanted one, but Angela said it was enough work to take care of me.”
“Angela is your mom?”
Liz nodded. “I never called her that, though. She introduced herself to me as Angela and it stuck.”
“That’s hard to imagine. Isn’t there a reason all kids say mama or mommy?” Victoria observed.
“Yeah, but Angela only sees one version of things: hers. Unless she’s microdosing. Then she sees everything. All her lives. Because she has access to the Akashic records.”
“Oh. I’m starting to get a sense of her.”
“She’s…a lot,” Liz said. “She legally changed my name when I was four because I wasn’t living up to it.”
“Seriously? What was your name?”
“Sage.” Liz rolled her eyes. “So obviously, she did me a favor. But yeah. Angela told me that I was turning out to be a more conventional child than she’d hoped for and I couldn’t handle the weight of such a unique name.”
“Your mother said that to you when you were four years old?” Victoria looked over at her friend, agape.
“It’s a miracle I turned out halfway normal.
Sage is the name of the daughter Angela wished she had…
and I guess Mom is the name for the mother I wished I had.
” Victoria looked at Liz, her chest clenching with sympathy.
“I see all these women posting on Instagram, thanking their babies for choosing them to be their mommies, and I’m like, What?
Your baby didn’t have a say in the matter!
Because—trust me, if I had been given a choice, I would have picked differently.
Angela and I were just stuck together, two people who had nothing in common except DNA. ”
“I know the feeling,” Victoria said, a light breeze sending tendrils of hair against her cheek.
She brushed them away. “I always felt like an alien that had been plucked from my real home and deposited into this foreign place, with people who didn’t know what to do with me.
I used to wish I had been adopted because then there would have been a logical explanation. ”
Liz flashed Victoria a commiserative look, her hazel eyes warm and, Victoria thought, particularly attractive in this light; flecks of green leapt out from deep pools of amber.
“What’s your family like?” Liz asked. The seemingly innocuous question threw Victoria into rumination, sending her back in time.