Page 15 of Lick

“I’m pregnant,” I whisper, but I might as well have shouted.

“Wait, what? I didn’t know you were seeing anyone.”

“I’m not.”

She stares at me before it clicks. “Oh my god, it’s Lick’s?”

I nod, wrapping my arms around myself.

“That’s why you agreed to come tonight without a fight. You’re going to tell him?”

I nod again. “Something tells me it isn’t going to go well.”

Her face hardens. “We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. But if he’s a knob about it, I say fuck him. You have me and Jessie. We’ll be the best damn aunts this kid has ever seen.”

“Damn straight,” Jessie, who up until this point had been quiet, adds.

“You guys are the shit,” I whisper, feeling emotional yet again.

Stacey reaches her hand through the seats, and I don’t hesitate to grab hold of it. The lifeline she’s offering grounds me. As I take a few deep breaths, I know that everything will be okay. Yeah, it’s gonna suck for a while, and perhaps Lick won’t want anything to do with the baby, but it will be his loss, not mine.

I straighten my shoulders, my hand slipping free from Stacey’s. “Let’s get this over with.”

“Whatever happens, you have us.”

“Thank you. It means the world to me.”

She beams her bright smile my way and it’s hard to not let her sunshine soothe me.

By the time we pull up, I’m a bag of nerves once more. But once I’ve gotten this part over with, I’ll at least know where I stand.

“I’ll drop you both here before I find somewhere to park,” Jessie says.

“Okay,” Stacey trills before leaning over and kissing her. She climbs out, but I need a second to fortify myself.

“You’ve got this, Emma,” Jessie tells me. I nod and offer her what I hope is a grateful smile before I climb out and close the door. I walk around the back of the car to where Stacey is waiting for me at the curb and join her.

“Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,” I admit.

She leads me inside, past the bouncer who grins at Stacey, and through to the bar area. She orders me a fruity mocktail and herself the alcohol-filled version, along with a Coke for Jessie, before she turns to me. “Okay, so we need a plan of action. Do we feel things out or rip off the Band-Aid as Americans would say?”

“I don’t think I have it in me to feel him out. There is no easy way to tell a man I don’t really know that he’s my baby daddy.”

She chokes on the sip of drink she just took before chuckling. “You might have a point. You want to sit for a bit and get your bearings or see if we can find him now?”

“I’d rather get it over with, but I don’t want to ruin your night. I know if this goes badly, I’ll want to leave.”

“Then we’ll leave. I don’t give a fuck about this place. I care about you.”

I reach over and give her a hug, careful not to knock her drink. I pull back as she smiles. “We’ll wait for Jessie and then track him down. How hard can he be to find? Even if he’s not here, someone has to know where I can find him or when he might be back.”

Of course, nothing is ever that easy. After spending over an hour asking questions, I come up empty-handed again and again. Either nobody knows anything about him, or everyone’s lying. Feeling frustrated, I collapse in a chair at one of the few empty tables and bang my head against the table.

“We’ll figure something else out. Heck, we can come back on another day.”

I lift my head, my shoulders slumped, when I see a couple of faces I recognise at one of the tables in the corner. “Isn’t that the woman that introduced the band before? Come to think of it, I think that guy is the bass player.”