“And if it’s negative tomorrow, you can come back here for some of this.” Maya produced a bottle of tequila.
Nora laughed and held out her palm. Maya slapped the test into it. “Go forth and pee. Think happy thoughts of tequila tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow’s Friday, though,” Eve said. “Bar night.”
“Well, I think we can all agree that a break from boys is in order.” Maya made a face at Eve. “Or at least two-thirds of us can agree. All boys do is cause problems.”
Nora left the door to the bathroom ajar so she could hear the conversation.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Eve said.
“You’re such a liar—that’s fake solidarity. Yours doesn’t cause problems.”
“That’s because he got it all out of his system when we were teenagers.”
“True.”
Eve, Nora had learned, used to come to Moonflower Bay in the summers when she was a kid, and had had a romance with Sawyer and then not seen him again for a decade, until she inherited the Mermaid Inn.
“Have you heard from Jake?” Eve called to Nora.
“No.”
“But has Jake heard from you?” Maya asked.
Also no.
It wasn’t like they hadn’t seen each other. He’d brought Mick by the clinic twice in the past two weeks. But both times he’d been on the way to a job and hadn’t been able to stay very long. He hadn’t suggested anything else, and she hadn’t, either.
There had been times in recent months when Nora had felt like she and Jake had ESP. Like he could sense her thoughts, her wishes, without her having to verbalize them. Was that what was going on here? She’d thought after New Year’s that they needed to cool it. Had he read her mind?
Or was this distance between them his idea? Had that weird moment outside on New Year’s Eve been a bigger deal than she’d realized? She had to wonder. Jake wasn’t an idiot. He would have sensed how warm things were between them before New Year’s. And while it was okay for things—historically—to be hot between them, warm was uncharted territory. Warm was dangerous. She’d gone to his house with her needs and her emotions all over the place and her speeches about how he was her best friend, and maybe she’d scared him off.
So if he was pulling away because he wanted to pull away, and not just because he thought that was what she wanted, she could hardly blame him. He’d been up-front from day one about what he wanted—and what he didn’t want.
“Anyway,” Maya said, “it’s a full moon tomorrow, so let’s ditch the boys, do tequila here, then go to the lake.”
Sounded fine to Nora. It wasn’t like she had anything else to do now that she wasn’t spending all her free time being sexed up.
Nora finished her business and sighed as she washed her hands, set the timer on her phone for three minutes, and thought about what Maya had said about boys causing problems. What Jake did, generally speaking, was solve problems. Decks, new housing, receptionists, paralyzing grief due to dead grandmothers—you name it, he solved it.
So no, Jake had not created this problem. That honor was 100 percent hers.
But she was getting ahead of herself. There wasn’t a problem. A problem was statistically unlikely.
Probably.
She just didn’t know the stats on how five-minute orgasms affected the likelihood of pregnancy. While female orgasm as a factor in successful conception had been debunked in many studies, most scientists thought oxytocin—the happy hormone—did play a role. And those had been five very happy minutes.
She rejoined her friends, setting the stick down on a Kleenex on the coffee table. But she thought better of it and moved to pick it up. “Sorry, this is gross.”
Maya stopped her. “No, no, this is great.” Eve elbowed her. “Well, not great. But dramatic.”
They all leaned over and looked at the little window. There was a horizontal blue line. That was supposed to be there—it appeared immediately after peeing. What they were looking for—or not looking for—was another line, a perpendicular one that would make the image into a plus sign.
“I can’t be pregnant,” Nora said.
Maya patted her hand. “You’re not pregnant.”
“I can’t be pregnant. I’m moving back to Toronto.” If she had a baby whose dad was here, things would be messy. “I’m only here for another year and a half.”
Maya snorted. “That’s what they all say.”
Huh? “That’s what who says?”
“She’s talking about me,” Eve said. “I was only planning on being in town for a year.”
“You might be following in her footsteps,” Maya teased.