Chapter Six Bailey #2
There were going to be fireworks after eight, so they had packed dinner, pasta salad with grilled veggies, ham and cheese on baguettes, cucumber and tomato salad, brownies with bits of salty pretzel baked in.
Eben and Max helped Bailey shake the sand off the blankets and set up the picnic.
There was a plastic Tupperware carefully labeled “Adult Brownies” that Fran and the guys had been snacking on all afternoon, and Bailey kept those off to the side.
They tied a trash bag to the handle of the wagon and gathered a dozen empty cans in another.
Eben was wearing expensive sunglasses unlike anything he would have worn in high school and a tank top that showed off his sculpted arms.
RJ and Colin were pretty hammered and probably had heatstroke.
When the sun set Fran went over and pulled off RJ’s sunglasses and he looked around with delight at how much better he could see.
They all had raccoon eyes that would look ridiculous for a week, their noses and cheeks burned various states of pink and brown.
Colin pulled out his guitar and played quietly, and Augusta was watching him with what looked like longing.
Colin wasn’t Bailey’s type, he wore vests with the name of his bank on the chest, and perhaps more importantly, Bailey knew about the secrets he kept from Augusta, but watching him play the guitar made her see why her best friend was so crazy about him.
He was more serious than the other guys in their group, more reserved, the product of formal WASPy parenting, but he laughed the hardest when the others misbehaved.
He wasn’t the life of the party, but his enthusiasm for whatever was happening at the center made the whole thing better and Bailey appreciated that.
Colin improvised random melodies and let Charlie and Hale take turns running their fingers along the strings of the guitar, little squeaking noises somehow making it sound even prettier.
“Sorry.” Caroline interrupted Bailey’s thoughts. She sat down on the chair next to her and brushed away imaginary sand from her legs.
“Hey.” Bailey smiled lazily. “You having fun?”
“Definitely.” Caroline nodded and they were silent for a moment, watching the boys play. “Hey, listen. I know this is awkward and maybe it’s better if I just don’t say anything, but I wanted to make sure you know that I only ever want to be a positive element for you.”
Bailey looked at Caroline curiously. “Okay, thanks.” A positive element.
Caroline had taken off her sunglasses but hadn’t replaced them with her glasses and her face looked naked. “Anyway. It’s an unusual situation and I just wanted to be really direct with you. And I hope you’ll always be direct with me if there is something you want or need.”
It was funny. Caroline obviously meant this all kindly, she so clearly thought she was extending an olive branch, but Bailey didn’t want that. What was she going to say? “Please give me Van. I made a mistake and now I want him back.”
On the other side of the blanket Augusta held her baby in her lap, sandy and pink-cheeked, glassy from the late hour.
Fran sat next to RJ, her arm lazily draped around his shoulders.
Eben and Max were together, looking at something on a phone.
And then there was Van, his hair tucked behind his ears, his long legs, bare feet.
He was so lovely, but he didn’t belong to her—she needed to let him go.
“We’re good, babe,” Bailey said quietly.
Colin was lighting sparklers and Bailey watched as he handed them out to the children, the boys crowing with delight.
Jane lazily twirled her sparkler in a circle while London waved his back and forth in a zigzag.
They made figure eights and squiggles, they danced and pretended the sparklers were magic wands and lightsabers, casting swirls of white in the dark.
Even after they had sputtered and fizzled to smoke the streaky lines lingered in Bailey’s eyes, a memory of something bright that was gone.
A Good Knock
In the time of Jane Austen, a woman had to play the piano or sing or dance a quadrille to attract the romantic attention of a suitor, but in these modern times you just had to give witty banter in the DMs, and Bailey was grateful for that.
She was lying in bed, eating salt-and-vinegar potato chips and flicking through photos of a minor celebrity’s plastic surgery journey, when a message popped up at the top of her screen.
Coming to Boston for a few days want to hang
Bailey waited a moment before responding.
Mac Maker was a guy she’d known in college.
He had been friends with her sophomore-year boyfriend, Robert Flynn, and she and Mac had hooked up at a wedding in Chicago three years ago.
He lived in Los Angeles and worked in…something?
Bailey couldn’t quite remember, but he had a set of wings tattooed on his chest and a chip on his front tooth that she found unaccountably sexy.
What did it even cost to cap a tooth? A couple hundred dollars?
He could obviously afford it, so rocking the chipped tooth was an aesthetic choice, and Bailey appreciated it the way she liked a scar or the hole from an old piercing.
I thought Boston was a second-class city?
Ugh it is but they have nerds there
That rang a bell. Mac worked in tech. No. His job was somehow in computer-generated imagery.
They also have hot girls, Bailey wrote, and added an emoji of a manicure.
Yeah, there’s this one I’d like to see if she’s down
Bailey started to write and then stopped. She knew he could see the little dots bobbing in the bubble as she typed.
So, I’m pregnant, she wrote. She added a pregnant lady emoji just to be clear.
Congratulations! Mac messaged back, and Bailey had to laugh. What else could he say?
Sperm donor. Single and ready to hang out if that’s not weird?
Nice, Mac replied, and then added a peach emoji. Bailey appreciated their shared desire for transparency via emoji and they made a plan for the following Thursday.
Over the course of that week Bailey and Mac DMed constantly, a torrent of flirtation and innuendo.
It was bizarre how Bailey was suddenly obsessed with sex.
How did it evolutionarily make sense for a pregnant woman to want to bang all the time?
They didn’t need to procreate! She’d done that part.
Google said that it had to do with solidifying the partner relationship, most women really wanting to build a tight bond with the father of their children so that he would stick around after the birth.
But for Bailey the constant state of sexual interest was wildly inconvenient.
She liked her own pregnant body, though.
Sure, she had a bump, bigger with every passing day, but her boobs had grown two cup sizes, her mouth looked like she’d had lip injections, and her hair was really shiny. She wanted to show it to someone.
On the Thursday of their date Bailey dashed home after a meeting, showering, shaving her legs, and putting on her best underwear.
As she looked in the mirror, fastening a pair of gold earrings, she assessed her face.
Bailey always looked sort of sexed-out, even when she wasn’t.
She thought it probably had to do with her eyes, and how they had slightly dark circles around them, and her hair, which was very fine and looked bed-tousled after even the smallest breeze.
The fact that she often wore cowboy boots and sunglasses added to the effect, and all in all it served her well.
She had what she called a “naturally flirtatious personality,” which meant that people were always falling in love with her or getting mad at her, depending on who it was she happened to be naturally flirting with.
Once, she heard a guy refer to her as “sex on a stick,” and although she actually had no idea what that meant, she understood it to be a superpower.
Mac was staying at the Liberty Hotel in Beacon Hill, and Bailey parked in the garage at Mass General and texted him that she was there.
He met her in the hotel lobby, freshly shaven and wearing a crisp white T-shirt, and they walked a few blocks to a chic little cocktail bar where Mac ordered a whiskey, neat, and Bailey a club soda with bitters.
“So, how’s Robert?” Bailey asked. She didn’t actually care, but her ex-boyfriend was one of the few things they had in common.
“Two kids, job in reinsurance, totally boring.” Mac grinned before looking suddenly worried. “Not that having kids makes someone boring. He’s just a really boring person.”
“Kids do make people really boring.” Bailey flicked her hair prettily. “I swear to God I’ve spent the past five years listening to my friends tell their birth stories and talk about strollers. It’s painful.”
“But you wanted one on your own?”
“Yeah, so random.” Bailey wasn’t sure why she’d lied to Mac about the sperm donor. The whole Vanny thing had just seemed like too much to get into over text.
“The world could use a mini Bailey,” Mac said with a smile.
He put his hand on her knee and Bailey felt all the blood in her body rush downward.
Is this what it felt like to be a teenage boy?
Completely turned on all the time? They chatted for an hour, then Mac invited her back to the hotel, and Bailey appreciated the novelty of leaving a bar sober, of a random hookup without the excuse of a few drinks.
In Mac’s hotel room she was suddenly nervous, though, unsure whether or not to take off her shoes or sit on the bed.
What if she had misunderstood this entire thing and he didn’t actually want to have sex?
Or what if he hadn’t realized quite how pregnant she was and changed his mind?
But then Mac started kissing her and unbuttoning her dress and she decided that no, she had not actually hallucinated their week of frantic flirtation.