Zane shifted his chair so he could hold Mara’s hand and look at me at the same time.
I tipped back in the chair so I was balanced on the rear legs, my feet propped on the foot of Mara’s hospital bed. “Fine. But this shit stays between us. I got a rep to uphold.”
“That’s why I’m so interested,” Mara said. “Everything I’ve heard and seen about you says you are now and always have been a Hook-up Harry. I didn’t think you’d ever had a real relationship.”
“I’m your own fuckin’ brother,” Zane added, “and I’ve always been under the same impression. What heartbreak are we talking about here?”
I let out a breath, and spent a moment organizing my thoughts, which was a difficult process now that I was sobering up and entering the wicked headache stage of going directly from wasted into hangover, without the intervening sleep.
“It’s not that complicated, or some big secret,” I said. “Like you said, I’ve always been more into one-night stands and the occasional repeat hookup if the chick was bangin’ enough and the sex was good enough. But once they got clingy or started wanting to, like, discuss feelings and what we are and shit, bam, that was it. I was always honest about that from the get-go, too. I was focused on my career, and had no interest in or time for bullshit like relationships, and I always,alwaysmade it clear from the start that it was gonna be no-strings sex. Which worked pretty damn well all through college and the first year I was in Calgary playing for the Stampeders.
“Then, during the off-season after that first year, I met this chick. A reporter, actually. Some minor local paper wanted to do a feature on me, since I’d made some pretty high-profile plays that season, and I was a new face in the town. Not a big deal, just a couple paragraphs about me and some photos on the front page of a Calgary paper. But the girl who did the interview was fuckin’…she washot, man. Really cool, really chill, classy, easy to talk to. The interview should have been like twenty or thirty minutes, but we ended up having a two-hour lunch, just talking. She knew football, and there was something cool and hot about talking stats and plays and shit with a chick. She was the one who called me a week after the feature aired, actually, asking if I wanted to get lunch again, but on a personal level, not for an interview. Like, a real date, she said. I was interested, since we’d hit it off without fucking first, which was weird, so I said yes.”
Zane snorted. “You make it sound like talking to a woman outside the pursuit of sex is this weird, unheard of thing.”
I laughed. “It kind of is, for me. Women were never much more than a distraction for me, you know? Like, I fuck because I’m a guy and I like to fuck, and women are fantastic and I love them, because tits and ass, and that’s about it. And yeah, I know, that’s macho, asshole, chauvinistic bullshit. But I do actually know women are more than just sex receptacles, okay? I do, I swear.”
“Sure you do,” Mara said, sarcasm dripping from her voice.
And then her hands tightened on Zane as another contraction hit her, and she grunted through it, and the grunt devolved into a forward-leaning, teeth-gritting scream, and Zane held her hand through it, murmuring something in a soothing voice, which I couldn’t make out. After a few seconds, the contraction passed, and she flopped back against the pillows, sweating.
“I’m seriously…fucking pissed…my water broke…before I could get…a fucking…epidural,” she said, between gasps for breath. “Keep talking, Bax.”
“Okay, so. We go to lunch, and it’s cool, like the first time. We spend an hour and a half talking over coffee and croissants, and I’m super into the chick, and she seems to be super into me. Cool, right? Well, we do lunch a few more times over the next few weeks—and for the record, she’s the only person I’ve ever actually truly dated, especiallybeforewe had sex. I’ve gone on a few single dates, and I take girls out if we’re hooking up on a regular basis. Like, in college I had a roster of girls I was hooking up with, always no-strings, no commitments, no questions, and every once in a while we’d have dinner or see a flick together just for a change of pace from the fucking.”
Zane chuckled. “What a gentleman.”
I shrugged. “Eh, I’ve never claimed to be a gentleman.” I felt uncomfortable and squirmy relating this story, especially as I got into the real meat of it. “So this girl, Lauren, was every bit as wicked awesome in bed as she was out of it. We had a seriously great time. I never had the talk with her about it being no-strings and we also never defined what it was, but we went out regularly and I just, without even thinking about it, kept sex confined to her. A week, two weeks, then suddenly it was three months and I’d kept it strict, only fucking her, and I only went out with her, and we were seeing each other a couple times a week, and I started to realize I was for real into her. Like with emotions and shit. We still hadn’t talked about it, but it was pretty obvious this thing was…athing.”
Another contraction hit, and I paused as Mara growled through it, crushing Zane’s hand and the bed railing. The physician came in at that moment, and I had to leave so he could check her. I’d only been in the waiting room a few minutes when Zane popped his head in.
“It’s happening soon, bro.” He scrubbed his hands over his head, his eyes wide. “Where’s everyone else?”
All the brothers, Dru, and Claire all filed in right then.
“What’s the word, Big Poppa?” This was Corin. “You got a baby yet or what?”
Zane was as close to a nervous breakdown as I’d ever seen him, pacing crazily, hands running obsessively through his hair. “She’s about to have the baby, like any time now. He said she’s fully dilated and almost fully effaced, so she should be ready to push any minute.”
Claire headed for the door. “I need to see her.”
Zane nodded. “Yeah, she’s asking for you.” He glanced at Dru. “You too. She wants you both there with her.”
Dru just blinked. “She…she wantsme? While she’s having the baby?”
Zane pushed past Claire, leading the way to the room, addressing Dru over his shoulder. “Of course she does, dumbass. You’re part of the family.” He paused, popping back in to sweep his manic gaze across the rest of us. “Next time you see me, boys, I’m gonna be a daddy. So, like, say some prayers or whatever.”
And so we waited, the seven of us taking up most of the waiting room, none of us really talking.
Ahand shook me, waking me from a doze I hadn’t realized I’d fallen into. “Wha—? Whassat?”
Zane was standing over me. And, for the first time since Mom’s death, a Badd male had tears in his eyes. Even when Dad had died, none of us had openly cried, at least not around each other. I know I’d shed a couple tears in private, after a few bottles of Jack, but that had been literally alone in a dark closet at four in the morning in my Calgary apartment.
He wasn’t bawling, but he had tear tracks on his cheeks, and more tears glinting in the corners of his eyes. “Bax, brother.” He collapsed into the chair beside me. “I’m a father.”
The others, all of whom had dozed off in the couple of hours we’d been waiting, all sat up.
“She had the baby?” Xavier lurched out of his seat. “Can we see him?”
