Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 78152 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 391(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78152 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 391(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
She held the portable phone out to him. “It’s your father,” she said. “He has news.”
From the smile on her face, I knew it was nothing bad. Scott put the phone up to his ear and said, “Hello?” Then he covered his other ear and stepped into the hallway. Lauren followed him.
Our apartments were close enough that the phone worked sometimes, but it was usually pretty spotty, so I figured he was going to walk a bit closer to his apartment. I paused the game and scrambled up to get a drink. On my way to the kitchen, I noticed our shoes in the corner of the room under a window. They were in a pile, but you could see all four and a ray of light was coming through the window and hitting them just right. It struck me as a good shot, so I got my camera and snapped a few pictures.
By the time I was done, I’d decided to put an end to Scott’s mission to cheer me up through electronics and instead ask him to cheer me up through ejaculation. I had just put away my camera when I heard Scott walk back in. I strutted out to him, ready to pour on the seduction, but I stopped short when I saw how pale he looked.
“What’s wrong?” I asked and then rushed over to him. “Did something happen to your dad or Julia?”
He shook his head slowly, paused, and then nodded. “Nothing is wrong, but something did happen. Julia is pregnant.” He smiled broadly and made a sound that was dangerously close to a giggle. “I’m going to have a sister!”
It took me a minute to catch up and then I hugged him. “That’s great!” I said. “But I thought you said they couldn’t have kids.”
“I did. That’s what they thought too. And she’s almost forty-five, so they gave up on it a long time ago, but somehow it finally happened. My dad said Julia is doing well and the doctor said the baby seems healthy, so in four or five months, I’m getting a baby sister.”
It was exciting for a while. After she hung up with Scott’s dad, Lauren came running in cheering and bouncing about the new baby being added to their family. By then, I was so used to his parents and how close all four of them were that it didn’t even strike me as weird that the woman felt so connected to her ex’s upcoming birth.
Anyway, I understood how wonderful it was to have a sibling. Even though she now lived thousands of miles away, Rachel was still my confidant and, along with Scott and Selina, one of my best friends. And besides, Scott was happy, so I was happy. But, as I was often apt to do, I didn’t think through the details of the Scott-having-a-sister thing. Maybe if I had, I would have been better prepared when I walked into Scott’s room a week later and found him sitting on his bed looking nervous as hell.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey.” He opened his arms and I crawled into his lap. “I have news, Charlie.” He said it just like that. He had news. And he didn’t even wait for me to respond before he continued. “I’m going to transfer to UNLV.”
My jaw dropped. “You’re leaving me?” I said, before I could think about how self-centered that sounded.
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m not leaving you. I’m just going to move for a few years so I can be closer to my dad and Julia and the new baby. School is cheap there, and I can live in the dorms and still be less than a half hour from my dad’s house, so I can really get to know her. But it’s only until graduation, Charlie, I promise, and then I’ll be back.”
In retrospect, I think I was in shock and didn’t truly snap out of it until after he’d gone. I remember promises of frequent phone calls and letters and visits. I remember the two of us being all over each other whenever we were alone, which, frankly, was no different than how we’d been from our first mutual orgasm. But I don’t remember feeling sad, truly feeling sad, until about a week after Scott moved away.
I went straight from school to my job at the dance studio. He had an evening study group. Between those things and the time change and who knows what else, we missed our daily phone call. I’m pretty sure that’s when it really hit me that he was gone and all the promises about things staying exactly the same between us weren’t going to come to pass.
It took a little longer than that for things to unravel. We hung in there for close to a year. But Lauren and Dave went to Nevada for every holiday because Scott’s dad had a giant house, and it made more sense than having the now-four-person Nevada contingent fly to New York and crowd together in a small apartment. It was too expensive for me to fly there, and even if it wasn’t, I couldn’t afford to take time off work. I was saving every penny to take more dance classes, working hard auditioning for whatever community theater had casting calls. That meant those frequent visits we’d planned to make didn’t happen.