2. “CAN YOU STAND UP,WILL YOU JUST FALL DOWN?” #2
Her parents had moved south ten years ago, chasing a sense of belonging her mother had hungered for her whole life, a place to finally fold herself into something larger than the family she already had.
Her father followed the way he always did, content to want whatever his wife wanted.
They expected Jocelyn to come along, to become the kind of daughter who fit the restrictive life they’d craved.
She was twenty-one and already allergic to conformity, so she stayed in Hideaway Bay where her unshakable independence was born of sheer desperation and a need to survive.
It had been the best decision of her life. Her friends were here. Her roots were here. She didn’t want to rearrange her life around someone else’s idea of happiness, even her mother’s, so she chose independence, and it suited her.
Thank Odin she’d stayed, because now that Wren married that wondrously horny, emotionally constipated mountain man Greyson Hawthorne, things were getting very real. Wren was already pregnant with their first little belly goblin, and lots of additional babies were sure to follow.
Which led Jocelyn to her next stop…
She and Wren had been best friends since the moment Jocelyn transferred into the third grade. Now was her shot to play the cool, eccentric aunt, which was possibly the closest to motherhood Jocelyn would ever get.
Wren’s pregnancy was lifting the ban on Jocelyn’s soft, squishy side—but only slightly because she had a reputation to keep.
She’d always thought the biological clock thing was bullshit, but her damn clock had been clanking ever since Wren announced her pregnancy.
Not cool, since Jocelyn thought it best not to have kids—a decision she’d based on her own insecurities about motherhood and the knowledge that anything long-term scared the ever-loving shit out of her.
That decision still held, no matter how many mixed signals her body sent lately.
Maybe it was her age. Thirty-one hit a lot harder than thirty for some reason.
Her choices now carried the threat of permanence, which made her question everything and doubt some things she never previously mistrusted.
Basically, the intrusive baby thoughts were annoying, so she kept batting them away, but her brain felt the strain.
So much had changed. While Jocelyn enjoyed a successful career built on fictional men whose emotional availability put every real man to shame, her friends were living the real deal.
Greyson and Wren were the exception to the rule.
They had that magical romance thing that usually only existed in fictional love stories, but they were real.
Their love was real. So real, it sometimes suffocated Jocelyn with quiet envy.
But she had a town full of people who loved her. She didn’t need to belong to one man. Hideaway Bay absorbed her unfiltered, eccentric personality with groomed acceptance. That was enough.
Whatever this biological longing was, she didn’t plan to evaluate it too deeply. She was the kind of woman who knew exactly who she was and what she wanted. She did not shift gears on a whim. That was for sure.
Hopefully, once the newest Hawthorne arrived, the baby fever would pass.
She didn’t want kids, not long-term, which was usually how they worked.
This was just a mild touch of FOMO—fear of missing out. It was a hankering for a maternal gene she was pretty sure she’d been born without. Nothing more.
The thought alone of herself as a mother would be catastrophic, so she never gave it much serious thought.
Wren, on the other hand, would be a fabulous mother. She’d make homemade baby food and organic soaps. She’d be a natural at nursing, and even make her kid’s clothes. She’d have picnics in the grass and probably do other grainy hippy shit Jocelyn would never even think about.
Wren had the kind of patience and sweetness no one ever accused Jocelyn of having, which was why they made perfect sense as best friends. Also why The Universe gave Wren a fertilized embryo and Jocelyn an IUD.
Drift and Dwell, the local home goods store, occupied the ground floor of a converted warehouse at the far end of Harbor Street. Its windows, dressed with artfully weathered rope and glass floats, made the whole storefront look like a Pinterest board washed ashore.
Inside, the air smelled like beeswax and dried lavender.
Jocelyn spent twenty minutes in the candle aisle, holding each pillar to her nose until she found exactly the right scent.
Driftwood and sea salt were the winners, clean and coastal without veering into sunscreen territory.
The cotton wick would burn steadily, without competing with the food.
She added eighteen navy candles to her basket, setting them carefully atop a stack of cream linen napkins. Next, she found a bundle of jute twine thick enough to wrap the centerpieces, pausing to calculate how many spools she’d need.
“Forty to fifty guests, eight guests per table, plus the buffet area…”
Her head hurt within seconds of doing math, which was exactly why she chose to work with words rather than numbers.
She had to make favors for each guest, still finalize the invitations, go over the menu with the chef at Wine & Barrel, figure out the music, and do about a million other little things no one thought of until the last minute.
Her heart suffered a strange little pinch that felt oddly close to anxiety.
Six weeks. She only had six weeks to pull this together. October twenty-fourth had sounded like ages away last month. Now, it was breathing down her neck.
“Fuck.” She cleared the shelf, grabbing all six spools and shoving them into her basket. “Better to have extra than come up short.”
As she finished locating items on her list, she realized the pressure she was feeling regarding the upcoming baby shower was probably nothing compared to what Wren was going through with the upcoming human being about to plop out of her.
Wren was having a baby. A literal human, small and helpless, completely dependent on others for survival.
The sense of impending doom sent a cold sweat down Jocelyn’s spine. She had to remind herself this wasn’t her kid. She only had to pull off ‘cool aunt’ and ‘goddess mother’, then her responsibility ended.
Thank the under lords.
Old Lady Larkin rang her up with the glacial efficiency of a woman who considered haste a character flaw and had organized her entire existence around avoiding rushing.
Her weathered hands, deformed by rheumatoid arthritis, showed fragile bones beneath her translucent skin.
The woman was as delicate as a bird and would likely be blown away in a strong wind.
“Planning something?” She folded the napkins into tissue paper with the methodical precision of an origami master who charged by the hour.
“Just decorating.” Jocelyn kept the lie clean. Small towns had ears under every awning, and the guestlist could easily balloon the moment anyone caught the scent of a celebration for one of their lifelong locals.
“For something special, I would think,” Mrs. Larkin observed in a shaky voice. “That’s a lot of napkin rings for a woman who lives alone.”
She gave Mrs. Larkin a tight smile. “I’m going through a Martha Stewart phase.”
“Hmm.” She smoothed tissue around the candles, recognizing the deflection as easily as a sommelier recognized a cork.
Jocelyn kept her expression neutral as she paid for her goods and lifted the heavy bags. “Have a nice day, Mrs. Larkin.”
“You have an honest one, Ms. Collins.”
The send-off landed more like a challenge than a wish, and her lip twitched around her forced smile as she pushed out the door.
Maybe a hangover still gripped her, because her tolerance for small-town decorum was already dwindling. Or maybe Soren was to blame.
It was probably that. She’d blame him for the weather if she could. And had he not burst into her home last night and derailed her focus, she might not have stayed up so late trying to get that last chapter written.
Paper Moon was two doors down. The owner, Paige, already arranged a fall display of hand-pressed stationery and leather journals in the window. Deep taupes and burgundies caught the light in a whimsical display.
Jocelyn forced herself to ignore the new seasonal notebooks and focused instead on the sample of custom cardstock fanned across the counter, finding what she wanted immediately.
“That’s not for you.”
Jocelyn looked up from the counter as Paige appeared. “No? These look nice.”
Paige held up a finger. “I have something better. Let me grab it.” She slipped into the back and returned a second later with a cream card in her hand. “Check this out.”
The heavy linen parchment carried a subtle anchor embossed into the grain, the kind of paper that whispered quality without announcing it. Paige was right. It was perfect.
“Can you do fifty of these with custom text?” Jocelyn laid the sample on the counter, the paper thick and cool under her fingertips.
Paige pulled out her order pad. “What do you want them to say?”
“‘Reel Excited for Baby Hawthorne.’ Spelled like a fishing reel. And a small fish. A tasteful fish, Paige, nothing cheesy.”
Used to Jocelyn’s particular requests when it came to format design, Paige didn’t blink as she jotted down notes. “Font?”
“Something classic, with weight. Nothing babyish. If I see Comic Sans, I’ll set this building on fire and make it look like an accident.”
“Noted.” Paige scribbled on the notepad. “When do you need them?”
“Two weeks.”
“I can have them done in two days.”
“Really?”
“Easily. And if you email me your list, I can print the labels and even get them shipped for you.”
“This is exactly why you’re irreplaceable.”
By the time Jocelyn placed the stationery order and finished her coffee, her brain fog burned off completely. September sun pressed down on the harbor, drawing the smell of hot asphalt up from the streets in shimmering waves.