Page 50 of Blueline Baby

The noise behind him drops away all at once, like he’s just walked out of a crowded room and pulled a heavy door shut.

“Chlo, baby,” he says. All the laughter is gone from his voice. “What’s wrong?”

I look down at the plastic stick I’m still gripping tightly in my left hand.

“I need to tell you something. And I need you to not say a single word until I’m finished.”

25

JACK

WE’RE HAVING A BABY

We win 3–2. The locker room is chaos. Jude is standing on the bench screaming about a missed call. I’m half-dressed and doing the time-zone math, trying to decide whether Chloe is still in her science lab or already walking to her car, when my phone rings.

I jam a finger into my other ear and catch Dean’s eye on my way out. The heavy door swings shut behind me, and the noise drops away.

The first sound she makes isn’t a word. It’s a wet, broken breath, and everything in me goes on alert. She’s crying. Chloe doesn’t cry on the phone and the fact that she couldn’t wait puts my heart somewhere up near my throat.

“Remember the book I was reading at the lake, and you were making fun of it the entire time?”

“The cowboy book with the shirtless guy on the cover?”

“Yes. And how the girl had been sick for two months, and she couldn’t stand the smell of coffee, and then suddenly she’s like oh no, why am I gaining weight? And it turns out she’s five months pregnant. And I said out loud how stupid it was, because you’d have to be a raging idiot not to know what’s going on in your own body, and you told me maybe she just wasn’t paying attention…”

She trails off. I open my mouth to reply but she gets there first.

“And I said you can’t not pay attention to that. I said you’re a man, so you don’t understand, but physiologically your body is always talking to you and it’s not subtle. And then we argued about whether the girl maybe just had a lot going on. We went back and forth for like ten minutes. And finally you took the book out of my hands and tossed it across the room and said you didn’t care if she was pregnant or anything else about her, because it wasn’t real.”

My head is still at the lake, picturing her legs across my lap and the book hitting the wall, when it catches up with me and my mouth goes dry. “Chloe. Baby. What are you talking about?”

She sobs once. “I’m pregnant.”

The hallway tilts. I put a hand flat against the concrete to hold me up. I’ve taken hits from two-hundred-pound men at a full sprint and stayed on my skates, and Chloe crying into a phone might put me on the floor.

Pregnant. She’s pregnant. We made a—there’s a⁠—

I catch movement in the corner of my eye and look up. Dean followed me out and is leaning against the opposite wall with his eyebrows raised.

That’s when I register the silence coming from her end, and how long it’s been there. She just told me the biggest thing she’s ever had to tell anyone, and I’ve given her nothing back, and now she’s sitting miles away deciding what my silence means. Deciding it means I’m angry. Deciding she’s alone in this.

“Chloe—”

“I’m so sorry.” The words come apart between sobs. “I didn’t do this on purpose, I swear to God I didn’t, it was the lake, that one time, and I thought we were being careful and I⁠—”

She’s apologizing. She’s apologizing to me, like she did something to me, and something about that cracks my chest wide open.

“Good.”

She stops. “…What?”

“Good.” I say it louder and clearer, so it can’t get lost somewhere in the distance between us. “Chloe. This is good.”

And I mean it. That’s the part I wasn’t ready for, how much I mean it. Underneath the shock and the tilting hallway, there’s something that feels a whole lot like the answer to a question I hadn’t gotten around to asking yet.

Dean tips his chin at me in a silent question. I can’t say it out loud yet, so I take my hand off the wall and draw a curve out from my stomach and hope he understands.

It takes him half a second, then his whole face lights up and he turns a full circle in the middle of the hallway, pumping his fist in the air, and I watch my best friend celebrate my kid.