"It's Sunday, you don't even open today," Julie said, yawning.
"Go back to sleep," he said again, grabbing some clothes out of his dresser drawer and walking out of the bedroom and into the bathroom, closing the door behind him.
After that, Julie did fall back asleep, and she didn't wake up until a couple minutes before nine when the ringing of her cell phone woke her up.
It was Leigh, she saw, so she answered immediately.
"Hello?"
"Hey, Julie. Did I wake you?"
"No," Julie lied, rubbing the sleep from her eye. "What's up?"
Sighing, Leigh said, "My ten o'clock person just called off and I'm swamped. Is there any way you could come in 10 to 2?"
Stealing a glance at the clock, Julie said, "Yeah, I could do that."
"Thank you," Leigh said, sounding a little rushed. "I'll see you then."
"Ok, see you then," Julie said, hanging up.
As she took a quick shower and cursed the lack of water pressure for the millionth time, Julie thought about how it kind of sucked that she got called in from 10 to 2, because Aaron worked at 2, so that meant she wouldn't see him at all until he got home after closing, at which point he would be tired and he would go to sleep since he had to open the next day.
She wasn't even sure why she wa
nted to see him, but she did. If she was interpreting the cuddling accurately as positive reinforcement for stepping off the path of being a dumbass, then she was curious as to whether or not she would continue to get rewarded.
She was also curious as to whether or not the cuddling was going to be a regular occurrence or if it was an isolated incident.
As she drove to work, she let herself have a moment to ponder why she enjoyed cuddling with Aaron, why she wanted to touch his face when he was sleeping so peacefully, why she would reject dinners, thousand dollar diamond earrings, designer labels and bouquets of roses all in an attempt to please him.
Well, maybe it wasn't just to please him, she allowed.
Turning away from Matt had to be the best choice even though she was technically carrying his child, because at the end of the day he was married and not really able—or willing—to bridge the gap. It couldn't possibly be healthy to bring her child up in a home like that, right? Even if she wanted to be stupid and play mistress, maybe that would have been of a little less importance if she only had to worry about herself, because she could just chalk it up to being young and stupid—that's what Julie's mom always used to say about her youthful mistakes anyway. It would have still been wrong, but it wouldn't have really been as big a deal because it would just be Julie.
But Julie could no longer just think about herself. She was going to be a mother, and it was more important to actually be someone her kid would look up to—something that was going to be very tricky considering the circumstances of her pregnancy.
Some days, when she thought about that, she honestly considered—very briefly—just skipping town. If she just went back home to her mom for a little while and got her life together, she could raise the baby as a single parent without him or her ever having to know how Mommy had fucked up. Then she could actually build a respectable life for them, and she would never set eyes on Matt again.
Change of scenery, change of cell phone number, and as far as Matt knew she dropped off the face of the earth.
But she didn't really want to do that.
Erasing Matt from the record as the child's father, she would like to do. But she didn't want to go back home to her mom, and strangely she didn't even feel like she wanted to leave Chicago.
Instead of spending too much energy thinking about why she might not want to leave a city she really had never cared for in the first place, she spent her time accepting that she would just have to find a way to deal with Matt being the baby's ineligible father.
When she got to work she didn't really have time to see if Leigh was still being weird. Sunday mornings were typically busy, but as soon as she walked in she saw that just about every table was full—and Leigh was running all of them.
Julie quickly clocked in and grabbed an order pad, catching Leigh as she went in to get food from the kitchen just long enough to ask which half of the room she wanted Julie to take.
Another couple came in as Julie took care of the counter, and she exchanged a glance with Leigh that said she would take care of them in a second.
It was 11:30 before half the dining room emptied out, and Julie tried to run out and clean off some tables and wipe down the counter as she watched another group of four people approach through the window.
The good news was that she had 35 bucks by noon, and she still had two hours left on her shift.
They hadn't been kidding when they said Sunday mornings were good shifts.