Chapter 40 Braxton and Hicks walk into a bar.
Braxton and Hicks walk into a bar.
Josie
I BALANCE ON a chair on Emmy and Jason’s spacious patio on a cool, clear Halloween night, taping a cluster of pink and blue balloons to the gutter.
It seems silly to be doing this reveal at all.
This whole thing is really for Jason, and I’m sure he’d be just as happy if Emmy wrapped up a pink onesie and gave it to him over dinner.
But she’s excited to surprise him, and I love my friend and her growing family.
I glance over to the patio love seat where Sean is fiddling with the drone.
I can barely even look at him. That Adonis body.
That insane mouth. The straight man, unimpressed demeanor that transformed into something else entirely when we were together.
The opposite of cool and detached. Plugged in.
Tuned in—to me. He read all my body’s signals and gave me what I wanted even when I didn’t know I wanted it.
It was like I was a gift, being carefully unwrapped by fingers that…
God, I need to stop.
I shouldn’t have let myself fall so hard! What was I thinking?
I wasn’t. I was being typical me—impulsive, chaotic. Letting my emotions take the wheel. Losing control. Over and over. Multiple times.
Lord, I need help.
The tape pulls free, and I find myself suddenly and viciously attacked by an enormous balloon entity.
“You okay over there?” Sean calls as I flail.
“I’ll manage.”
But I’m not sure I will.
What I can do is throw myself into my art.
People are still demanding it like mad. That won’t last, but for now I’ll paint and package and sell and deposit the funds into my account.
Maybe I can earn enough to get my own place.
And Emmy will have the baby soon. She’ll need my help, and that’ll be a good distraction.
Not to mention, when the crossover taping is finished and Miguel and Lupe and the rest of the cast from Castillo Studios leave, I can go back to work.
I haven’t even seen Miguel since Lupe arrived.
According to him, it’s been impossible to make plans with me without her finding out.
Of course, going back to work means potentially running into Sean, but maybe by then he’ll have found someone to step into the void I’ve created.
Even if he hasn’t, our paths hardly crossed before, and they don’t need to cross much afterward.
He’s the star. I’m the makeup person. Hardly the twain need to meet.
I trap the balloons against the gutter with a scandalous amount of tape and hop down.
Sean is hovering the drone over the pool now, our pink smoke bomb attached to the bottom.
I can’t tell what he’s thinking. Since he arrived, he’s hardly said a word to me.
I shouldn’t complain—he’s doing what I asked him to do.
We aren’t supposed to be together, after all. But my heart doesn’t know that.
“You okay?” I ask him.
“No,” he says without hesitation. “Not at all.”
“Me neither,” I whisper, letting my gaze cleave onto the clover-green of his eyes. Neither one of us looks away. We owe each other that much.
Margarita and Rhett arrive with their daughter, Eva, and Peyton immediately dumps ice all over the kitchen floor and then short-circuits over whether to clean it up or greet them.
“Go, go, go,” I tell her, bending down. “Your personal assistant will take care of it.”
An ice emergency is the perfect excuse to avoid Margarita. Ever since she told me I looked familiar, being around her gives me a mini panic attack. As I’m finishing up, Emmy cracks the front door just enough to peer through. “Can we come in?”
“Stay off the patio,” Sean warns.
“Yes, sir!” Jason salutes Sean in the Lost Star fashion, two taps of his fist against the left shoulder. He’s grinning like a maniac.
“Someone’s excited,” I say.
Emmy bites her bottom lip and gives me a conspiratorial look that lasts all of a millisecond. It must be nice to be able to make someone that happy.
I enlist the kids to help Sean and me bring out the food, and Jason’s in charge of greeting the guests who trickle in.
We show the kids their pink T-shirts and run them through a brief verbal rehearsal of their parts.
Pretty soon, the French doors open, and people spill out onto the balloon-filled Spanish revival patio, the same place where Emmy and Jason got married.
The Lost Star cast is here, as well as Miles and a few more of our directors and ADs, plus a handful of people I recognize from Emmy’s writer group.
Amanda and Kayla both make their way over to me.
“Anything we can do to help?” Amanda asks.
I task her with photo and video duty and hand Kayla two pool towels. “You’ll know what to do with these when the time comes.”
She laughs. “I got you.”
I see Sean snagging Jason Ramirez for pink balloon duty and take a deep breath. “Okay, kids, take your places.”
Peyton ushers her stepbrother through another set of French doors into Emmy and Jason’s room. It’s showtime.
I join Sean at the mic stand he’s set up. He gives me a tight smile that makes my chest hurt and brings the mic to his lips. “Welcome, everyone, and thank you for being here! Today, we get to find out if Emmy and Jason are having a boy or a girl!”
I take the mic from him. “Of course, Sean and I already know what it is, and we were debating how long to make the rest of you suffer.” I pause. “We decided it should be a long time, so we’re going to entertain you for a bit.”
Warm chuckles ensue as I hand the mic back.
“Emmy is having a home birth. Did you all know that?” Sean gets a few claps. “You know, most medical professionals don’t refer to home births as deliveries. That’s because, if a baby is born at home, it’s not delivery… it’s DiGiorno.”
Our audience groans, but there are a lot of grins and some clapping hands, too. This is going perfectly.
My turn. “Braxton and Hicks walk into a bar.” I pause. “Nothing happens.”
That one gets a few real laughs. Emmy is shaking her head and smiling. Jason’s got his arm around her, beaming so brightly it’s like he’s got his own inner spotlight. A little ache throbs inside me. She’s lucky. They’re lucky. They have each other and all this.
“Why do you never see a pregnant Barbie?” Sean asks, voice low and serious. He gives the audience a beat to murmur among themselves. “Because Ken comes in a different box.”
The laughs come harder now.
“That was a good one,” I admit into the mic. “I don’t know if I can top that, but I’ll try. What did the drummer name his twin daughters?” I pause. “Anna One! Anna Two!”
Now that they’re warmed up, our audience gives us a good, hearty reaction. Sean grins at me. It’s time.
“All right, everyone,” I say, “we’re going to put you all out of your misery. Sean, will you hand the remote to Jason to do the honors?”
The sky is darkening. The solar lights on the patio have come alive. Sean tosses the drone remote in Jason’s direction.
I give a thumbs-up to Peyton, who is peeking around the curtain in front of the French doors. Sean coaxes a lighter out of his pocket, picks up the drone, and lights the wick of the smoke bomb affixed to the bottom.
“Three, two, one…” he chants at Jason. “And liftoff!”
Jason works the controls, and the drone rises off Sean’s palm into the air and over the pool.
The crowd falls quiet, all our eyes on the drone. The wick sputters, and then all at once, pink smoke plumes out of it. At the same time, Margarita executes her assigned job—switching on the pool lights, set to pink. Everyone cheers.
“It’s a girl!” Jason cries, losing control of the drone in his excitement.
People scream and duck as they’re crop dusted with pink smoke.
Meanwhile, Jason Ramirez has shaken open three huge garbage bags of pink balloons.
They go bouncing across the patio. That’s when the French doors scrape open, and Peyton and Mattie come screaming out in their pink Big Brother and Big Sister T-shirts, cannonballing into the pink pool.
Jason fights to gain control of the drone, but his attention is clearly all over the place, and his face is plastered with surprise and joy and something that might be diagnosed as clinical shock.
“Sean, get the drone!” I yell, as it dips toward the guests again like a killer robot insect.
But it’s caught itself up in our decorations and is dragging streamers and clumps of balloons across the patio.
I leap up to grab it and fail. Jason Ramirez tries, too, loses his balance, and staggers into the pool, swamping Mattie and Peyton—it’s like an asteroid fell in there.
Jason Connor wraps Emmy in a bear hug, abandoning the remote entirely.
He kisses her a bunch of times and then runs off to cannonball into the pool, too, voice cracking as he shouts, “It’s a girl! It’s a girl! Woo-hoo!”
Ducking under the drone’s onslaught, I hurry toward Emmy. “There’s a return to home button!” I shout, and together, we find it and press it. The drone dutifully levels out and makes its way back.
“That’s what you get when you put Sean and me in charge,” I say to Emmy by way of an apology, but she’s not paying attention to me. She’s watching Jason splashing the kids in the pink pool, a huge grin on her face.
“It was perfect.” She turns to me. “Thank you, Josie.” She throws her arms around me and hugs me tight. “You and Sean did great. And now I don’t have to pretend anymore. That was a hard secret to keep.”
She has no idea.
The doorbell rings. Someone must have arrived late.
“I’ll get it.” I give her a squeeze before pulling away. “You stay here and enjoy the view.”
Somehow, Sean has ended up in the pool, too, and a dripping-wet Jason Ramirez is chasing Kayla around the deck, trying to get her in. The gender reveal has turned into a full-on pool party.
I head to the front door and swing it open.
It’s Miguel. And beside him, holding his hand—oh hell, no, how is this even possible?—is Lupe.