This Is Where We Live - By Janelle Brown Page 0,48

house. He flicked the bougainvillea bloom off his finger. “She’s all right,” he told Daniel now. “Bearable.”

The police helicopter was back. It hovered overhead and skipped its spotlight across their faces. They looked up and covered their eyes with their forearms, staring up into the accusing light, until the helicopter swung south, toward downtown. Jeremy watched Daniel wipe dust from his face, smooth back his ruffled hair, tuck his shirt in.

“So, are you going to tell me about the mystery woman?”

Daniel flushed, a bright unseemly pink. “How did you know?”

Jeremy arched an eyebrow. “You smell like a drugstore counter. Is that Aqua Velva?”

Daniel stared down at his lap, looking for the answer to Jeremy’s questions in the crotch of his jeans. “She’s …. she’s great,” he stuttered. “Cristina Villareal. She works at a museum. Downtown. We met last month, at a dinner party. Cristina, she’s—well, she’s thirty-six. Incredibly smart. Pretty, but not the scary sort of pretty.” Jeremy watched Daniel struggle to regurgitate these details, trying to make them add up to something that he couldn’t quite articulate.

“You’re in love.”

Daniel’s nose flared. He looked like he might melt down entirely. Daniel had never really been in love before, not that Jeremy knew about anyway; instead, he pined after girls who had already relegated him to just-a-friend status or dated surly women who treated him like their personal assistant. His one long-term relationship—with a mousy, needy girl who was too scared to drive a car—had happened mostly out of desperation, at a point in his twenties when Daniel had been insistent on finding a girlfriend, any girlfriend. Truth was, Daniel didn’t know how to stand up for himself or how to recognize his equal in a woman. Sometimes, Jeremy thought his friend would be single forever, living in his musky bachelor pad with only a dog for company, clumsily hitting on waitresses at restaurants, eventually dying in his La-Z-Boy while a Dodgers game played on mute.

“Yeah,” Daniel said finally. He stared at a bum down the street, who was erecting a shelter out of flattened cartons. “Yeah, it’s definitely love.”

Jeremy considered this, circumspect. “I’m happy for you,” he said. He put his hand out and rubbed his friend’s back through the T-shirt, until the moment began to feel too loaded. “How’d you get her to date you? Club her over the head and drag her back to your lair? No, you must have taken her to a hotel. Your apartment would have scared her off by now.”

But Daniel didn’t laugh. He just shook his head, again and again. “Jeremy—she’s pregnant.” His voice cracked on the last word, and he said it again: “We’re pregnant.”

Daniel’s back, under his palm, was slack and hot. Jeremy pulled his hand away, trying to read the cryptic expression on his friend’s face. He couldn’t remember ever hearing Daniel use the word we regarding a relationship before; certainly he’d never used it like this, paired with that other terrifying word, pregnant. “This is—a good thing?” he asked carefully.

Daniel’s eyes were luminous under the fluorescent streetlights. “It’s a great thing,” he said, and his voice was grave and serious. “I bet you think I’m insane, but I’m not. We just knew. Right away, from the second we met, we knew. It’s not like we intended to get pregnant, but it’s not like we really tried not to either. It just felt … right.” That word again—we—kept tumbling from his mouth, and Jeremy wanted to tell him to stop it, to stop acting as if he’d managed, in the space of less than a month, to merge himself completely with a stranger Jeremy had never met.

Daniel was staring at him, and Jeremy realized he’d been silent for far too long. “I don’t think you’re insane,” he said. “I figure you’re just trying to beat Claudia and me. Remember, we got engaged in less than six months? So, see, I’m all for crazy love.”

But he knew, from the stunned expression on Daniel’s face, that this wasn’t the same as that. Not at all. His relationship with Claudia hadn’t been a grand combustion, the kind of crazy love that devours you alive, the way it had been with Aoki, and the way it apparently was with this Cristina person; it had been a mild simmer, something gentle and protective and kind. If Jillian hadn’t been dying, he probably would have dated Claudia for years before finally making the big leap. But Jillian was dying, her lungs were ejecting thick black clots