It's Complicated (43 page)

“That’d be great publicity,” Dylan said.

Josie glowered at him. “That is definitely not the way I want to start a new career.”

“We can be subtle,” Laura added. “I mean, I thought Ménage Match, Incorporated was a great name.”

“Really subtle.” Josie laughed. “I don’t think that’s quite right; we need something that’s a little more sophisticated, something more…romantic, and not sexual.” Josie went pensive, thinking it through. Here they were right in front of her, proof positive that this could work. How could she take Laura, Dylan, and Mike, and without revealing their identities,
use
them somehow, channel the goodness that they had found in each other. And then it hit her. She leaned across the table, and said quietly, “Good Things Come in Threes.”

“Hell yeah they do!” Dylan said.

Mike’s face went from interested to on fire, a giant grin spreading across his face, making those ice-blue eyes sparkle. “You just
nailed it
,” he said. “Good Things Come in Threes, that’s the company name.”

“Now, we need to get down to brass tacks.”

“Well, for funding, Laura can fund it however she likes,” Mike said, looking uncomfortable suddenly.

“We consider this her thing,” Dylan said, “we’re just here to…”

“To disrupt the process,” Josie choked.

“To give our input,” he countered.

“Potato, potahto.”

Dylan gave her a “fair enough” gesture, waving his hand and reaching, in the process, for the coffee carafe to fill his cup again.

“Do we advertise at all?” Mike wondered aloud. “What about word of mouth?”

“Do you know any other people in a situation like yours?” Josie asked, skeptically.

The three of them paused and thought about it. They all shook their heads. “No,” they said in unison.

“Me neither,” said Josie, “so how do we get started on this?”

“We could take out ads, you know, in the
Phoenix
or some of the other local newspapers that having dating site ads.”

Josie mulled that one over. “Yeah, we could. It’s kind of a unique service.”

“Well, we need to make it clear, too,” Laura added, “that this isn’t just some…sexual hookup system.”

“We’ll get the creeps, though,” Josie said.

“You’ll have no problem dealing with them,” Dylan ventured.

Josie smiled— that felt good, that he thought that of her. “Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate that, Dylan.”

He looked like he was about to say something else with a snarky tone, and then pulled himself back. His eyes expressed surprise that she would give him that much credit.

Jillian woke up with a scream that made the fillings in the back of Josie’s mouth shake. How could a baby go from sound asleep, curled up on Mike’s neck, to screeching like a howling monkey? It startled Mike, who unwrapped his arm and began soothing her, patting her back carefully.

“Poor baby, give her to me,” said Laura, reaching around Dylan to try to grab her.

Mike turned away just a little. “It’s fine, I have to learn to be able to soothe her,” he said, a tone of irritation in his voice.

Josie had a feeling that this was an argument they’d had on and off for the past few weeks. Dylan just sat between them, trying to relax and drink a cup of coffee at the same time. Nothing Mike did calmed the baby down, though. He stood and began pacing, four steps away, four steps back, four steps away, four steps back. The rhythm seemed to soothe Jillian, and then,
BUUUUUURP
. The biggest, juiciest, nastiest burp that Josie had ever heard came out of the baby, and then the inevitable spitup, all over Mike’s clean collar.

“You forgot a burp rag, dude,” Dylan said, reaching in the diaper bag to pull one out. He handed it to Mike. The baby whined a little bit at being wet, the front of her little onesie now soaked a couple of inches down. Mike traded the sour-milk-smelling infant to Dylan for the burp rag. “Thanks,” they said in unison.

Laura just laughed, concern turning to relief.

“You’re really living the life, aren’t you?” Josie said.

“I am, I just wish that I could appreciate it a little more from the stance of having a little more sleep. Otherwise…” Laura leaned back and watched as Dylan took Jillian into the men’s room to change her, and Mike patted at his shirt, uselessly, with the burp rag to clean himself up. “I am very, very grateful for what I have,” Laura said softly. “How ’bout you?” Her eyes narrowed, and there was a look of real perception.

Josie knew she was being studied by the one person who knew her the best. Her niece Darla was a close second, and now that she knew she was coming here to live with her, Josie felt like a lot of her carefully constructed walls were starting to fall away, brick by brick. Alex, one of the many masonry workers, chipping away. “I’m well…no, I’m not okay. I was about to say ‘I’m fine,’ but we all know what bullshit that is.”

“You and Alex still fighting?”

“Me and Alex aren’t anything. He made a series of assumptions in the middle of a conversation that went from mild irritation to stalking off in…in anger.” Josie deflated. She could feel the air pushing out of her as the memory took over. It had been two weeks, two weeks since they’d fought, and she hadn’t heard a word from him. On the other hand, he hadn’t heard a word from her, either. She wasn’t about to make the first call, the first text, the first anything. Why should she? She wasn’t wrong, she hadn’t done a damn thing wrong by suggesting that maybe Dr. Perfect should get his grandfather a second opinion. His silence, though—that had surprised her. She’d figured that cooler heads would prevail, and he would call, but he hadn’t. Ed was due in for a new appointment in two weeks, and she was holding out hope, but it was fading as her phone was only populated by calls and texts from Darla and Laura. Her world was shrinking and expanding at the same time, just as her heart felt like it was getting smaller, too.

“I’m sorry,” Laura said, sliding one hand across the table, grabbing Josie’s. It was the first time she’d had compassionate touch in morethan two weeks, and it startled her how much her inner core needed that.

“Thank you,” she said softly. “I’m sorry, too. I don’t know what I did to break this and I don’t know how to fix it.”

“You could text him.”

“I’m not texting him.” Josie pulled her hand back. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I know that, and you know that…” Laura said.

Mike sat next to Laura and watched the conversation in rapt attention. Josie realized he was there suddenly, dipped her chin down, and gave him a death stare. Laura joined her, and with four angry woman eyes on him, Mike did the smart thing without a word passing between the three of them, and got up and went to help Dylan with the baby.

Josie leaned forward and whispered, “The results came in.”

Laura went pale. “And?”

“We don't need to change the name.”

Laura squinted at Josie. “You guessed right?”

Josie nodded.

“You have a hunch, don't you?”

“I did. And I was right.”

Laura bit her lips, closed her eyes, and sighed. “Thank you.”

“Any time. I know you'd help me if I need it.”

“Alex is too nice to let get away.”

“And here we go,” Josie said dryly.

“I'm right! Sometimes I get to be right, you know.”

“Well, if he’s so nice,” Josie hissed, “then why would he accuse me of making these gigantic ethics violations? I would
never
do that,
ever
.”

“I don’t know,” Laura said, “but look at what being stubborn got me. The guys missed out on the entire second trimester—hell, almost two thirds of my pregnancy—because I was a stupid, stupid idiot. I don’t want to see you do that.”

“Well, I’m not pregnant.”

Laura sighed, shook her head, and rubbed her eyes. “No, you’re not pregnant, and no, it’s not the same. You didn’t sit there and watch yourself be humiliated on national tel—well, on local television, and find out the two guys that you’re sleeping with were both billionaires. I was stubborn because they kept a secret from me, and it was wrong of both of…of all three of us. Ugh, I still don’t have a vocabulary for the fact that there are three of us,” she muttered, laughing to herself. “But the bottom line is that
I
let my pride get in the way. I let my insecurity, too, get in the way of the greatest love that I could
ever
hope to find, and
I
want
you
to learn from my mistake. I do not want to see you do this to yourself, Josie.”

Leave it to Laura to say the one thing that could crack her fucking wall. “You know, I hate you,” Josie said.

“I know, it’s because I make sense.”

“Now I hate you more, for saying that, because you’re right,” she said, slamming her hand against the tabletop, just as Mike and Dylan returned with a freshly changed baby.

“But there’s something I still don’t understand,” she said, her mind spinning, trying to find the right formula of words to make the equation balance as the guys settled down, the baby half asleep already. “How is it that you—what exactly…” She stumbled through her own thought process, trying to say it aloud.

Just then, Madge interrupted them. “Dessert?”

Laura groaned. “Oh, God.”

“What?”

“I’m not pregnant anymore so I don’t have an excuse.” She patted her belly. She still looked pregnant—at least, Josie thought so, though she’d never say a word. Then again, it took a while for organs to shift and move, and some women held on to weight when it came to breastfeeding. It didn’t detract from Laura’s natural glow and she was slowly regaining that gait that she had, a self-possession and femininity that Josie could never emulate.

“How about we get two desserts and split them?” Dylan suggested, wolfing down the rest of his food.

“Oh, I like that idea! A gradual transition down.” Laura perked up. “What should we get?”

“We have a nice caramel pistachio cheesecake today,” Madge said. “And then there’s the rhubarb maple cheesecake.”

“It’s cheesecake day?”

“No, we just happen to have some of these.”

“Anything else?” Mike asked.

“Well there’s a turmeric-infused candied pecan—”

“Stop there.” Dylan held his hand up. “Is it cheesecake?”

“Yup.”

“I vote for that as one of them. All in favor say ‘aye.’”

Three “ayes” rang out into the air.

“How about two of those?”

Everyone nodded.

“Two slices of that.”

“So, Josie, get back to what you were asking. I like watching you be awkward.”

“Ha ha,” she snapped back. The distraction had rattled her, so she just blurted it out. “How did you know that it was okay to just be together without being together sexually?”

Mike choked on his coffee, Dylan reaching over to whack him in the back
hard
, repeatedly, as the guy coughed and rumbled.

“That’s awfully direct.”

“And having Alex walk in on your—”

“Okay, okay, I gotcha. I gotcha,” Dylan said, holding his hand up. “I’ll answer.”

“Thanks,” Mike croaked out, trying to recover.

“The problem with answering that question…” Dylan said, leaning back against the torn vinyl booth. “The problem with that answer is that most people don’t have a framework for why I’m about to say what I’m about to say.” His face changed and he became more serious, more introspective than Josie had ever seen in the otherwise cocky, manly man in front of her.

He looked nervously at Mike and then even more nervously at Laura, and said in one long rush of breath, “I realized that what I wanted more than anything.” He stopped. “No, not more than anything, but
as much
, as much as I wanted Jill…I wanted to share her with Mike.”

Mike blinked and cleared his throat, running a hand through overgrown blonde waves of hair that tickled the top of his collar. “That’s probably what those two guys are going through, Josie—the ones with your niece. That dawning that comes when you realize that there’s this ache inside you that
nothing,
nothing has stopped so you learn to live with it—it’s just there, like a mole or a scar or an overbite and you try all sorts of things to make it go away. You date different women, some people try dating other men—”

“Not me,” Dylan said.

“It doesn’t
matter
, Dylan,” Mike said. “Everyone has that ache in them. It’s not just that Dylan and me and Laura or people like us do—everyone does. But for me the moment that Jill and Dylan and I came together, I realized that I was missing something for the first time in my life. Not that I
had
something.”

Mike’s cool Zen demeanor shifted to a layer of excitement that made Josie lean forward in anticipation, his
joie de vivre
contagious. “I realized that I was missing that ache for the first time in my life. Do you know what it’s like to go through most of your adolescence and early adulthood in pain and just dealing with it? And then, one day, it’s gone. Just gone.
Gone.
” Slamming his palm against the tabletop just as Madge delivered the two pieces of cheesecake.

“This cheesecake’s going to be gone in about five seconds. I suggest”—she pointed straight at Laura—“you not put a plate in front of her.”

“Hey!” Laura couldn’t finish her protest because Madge had left already.

“What about you, Dylan?” Josie asked as they each grabbed a fork and dug in.

The cheesecake was perfection, carafes of a turmeric maple sauce on the side and little cruets filled with candied pecans. The first bite of cheesecake and a candied pecan in her mouth at the same time made her want to stop the conversation instantly and do nothing but have a mouth orgasm.

“Ditto,” Dylan said. “Whatever Mike said, that all applies to me.”

“Ditto? You’re talking about the most significant moment in your emotional journey through life and your answer is ‘ditto’?”

“Yup.”

“You have the depth of Justin Bieber.”

“Ouch,” Dylan said, holding his hand over his heart. “That hurt my feeling.”

“You mean it hurt my feelings.”

“No, my
feeling
. Remember, I’m shallow.”