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“Hmm. That might be leaning a bit too hard into Catholic guilt. Maybe just that whole ‘love one another’ thing?”
Mia reached the top of the steps. “You can love one another without living in a total shithole, you know. Which room’s yours?”
“Last one on the left.”
Mia seemed a little less judgemental when she got to his room, and he figured that was because she’d survived the stairs which, even in the middle of the day, were dark and gloomy. Jack had scored the bedroom at the front of the house, though, and it had plenty of windows to let the light in. He knew it had been some other guy’s room not that long ago, but he wasn’t sure why Harry or Tristan hadn’t snagged it as soon as it became vacant. They were probably just too lazy to be bothered moving their stuff down the hallway. Their loss, because the room was definitely the pick of them.
“Oh…” Mia headed straight for the bay window. “Okay, this isn’t actually so horrible after all. It’s a bit sparse, though.” She turned, hands on her hips, and gazed around the room critically. “You could string some lights up, get some curtains and it would actually be kind of nice.”
“I don’t have lights,” Jack said. “Or curtains.”
“I’ll get you some.”
He had a sudden flashback to Mia’s room when she’d been a kid. It had looked like a fairy and a butterfly had collided in mid-flight, then exploded in pink and purple glitter all over the place. “Nah, it’s okay.”
Mia’s tastes had matured since her tween days, and these days inclined more towards whatever was hot on Instagram. There was a lot of linen and rattan in her flat, and everything was Japandi, whatever that was. Jack thought it was supposed to be a mash up of Japanese and Scandinavian, but since he couldn’t remember the last time he’d stepped into either a Daiso or an IKEA, he wasn’t exactly an expert.
“The light’s great,” she said, peering out the window towards the street, then turning back to face him. “It’s just a shame about…well, everything else.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“Jack, my shoes stuck to the hallway floor.”
“Yeah, we need a decent mop,” he said. “And a broom. Ours is on the roof. But at least I’m not sleeping on your couch anymore, cramping your style.”
Mia chewed her thumbnail and wrinkled her nose, then sat down on his bed. “Well, maybe our style could do with some cramping.”
“What?”
She sighed. “Okay, so you know how the plan was for me to graduate, and then Tate and I would travel around the world for a year or two? Living like—well, in shitholes like this, I guess?”
He let the shithole comment go and nodded.
“And then, when we get back, we’d get engaged, and by that stage Mum and Dad would have figured out how to look past the tattoos and the piercings? Because they like Tate—they like him a lot thanks to Harry—but I think they still have this idea that some clean-cut boy is going to pop up out of nowhere in the next few years, and suddenly I’ll come to my senses and realise that what I really want is, I don’t know, someone who wears an ironed shirt every day but can’t sexually satisfy a woman?”
“Mia, Jesus.” He winced. “But yeah, I get your point.”
She chewed her thumbnail again. “Well, we fucked over that plan. Literally.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m pregnant,” she said. “And I blame you, at least partly.”
“Pretty sure I had nothing to do with it, and also please don’t say things like that. Ever.”
“I mean, there you were, cramping our style, and me and Tate, well. Remember eight weeks back when Tate took me out for dinner after I’d been sick with that chest infection?”
Jack nodded, wary.
Mia exhaled heavily. “Well, it had been at least a week, and the walls at home are thin, so after dinner we ended up parking and having a quickie in the car.” She caught his horrified look. “Stop judging me. It’s normal to have a healthy sex drive! Anyway, antibiotics really fuck with the pill. Which I knew, so Tate was also gloved up. But it turns out that’s not one hundred percent either, especially when you’re working in limited space in the back of a Barina. Tate’s tall, you know? Angles were awkward. And there was obviously some sort of…slippage, and, well, here we are.”
“Holy shit.” Jack sat down next to her. “Um, do I say congratulations?”
She gave him a slightly watery smile. “Yeah, it’s congratulations. We weren’t planning it, but we’re happy. We talked about our options, but we decided that, why not? We’re it for each other, and if we have to chuck the baby in a papoose while we go backpacking, we’ll do that. This is a bump in the road, not a crash.”
Jack put an arm around her and pulled her into a hug. “Congratulations.”
Holy shit. His little sister was pregnant. He was going to be an uncle. And Mum and Dad were?—
