Along Came Trouble (Camelot 2)

It had certainly warped her marriage. The endless blood draws and progesterone injections took a lot out of even the most solid, dedicated, mutually infatuated couples, and she and Mitch hadn’t been one of those. Not by the end, at any rate, and probably not even on the day she married him.

The other dads-to-be had shown up for appointments with books and iPhones and crossword puzzles, offering their quiet, steadfast support to the women they loved. Mitchell hadn’t shown up at all, but he had unfailingly offered color commentary as he’d plunged that 22-gauge needle in her ass.

Christ, honey, this is depressing. How much longer are you going to keep this shit up?

I’m running out of places to stick this thing, babe. Pause. Chuckle. That’s what she said.

Holy crap, Carly, did you know this syringe was made by a company called Wang? That’s just all kinds of wrong.

At least he wasn’t the Wombat’s biological father. After refusing tests and putting her through three years of Clomid hot flashes and headaches, Mitchell had finally consented to have his sperm checked out, only to confirm her suspicion that she wasn’t the only one with second-rate reproductive organs.

A sensible person might have concluded that a biologically related child wasn’t in the cards, but nobody had ever accused Carly of being sensible, and Mitch seemed to take the sperm motility number as a personal affront to his manliness. She went through three rounds of IVF with donated sperm and a husband who cracked tasteless jokes and skipped appointments. Mitch lost forty pounds and bought a new wardrobe. At some point in the middle of round three, he told her it was their last hurrah. He didn’t want to do it anymore.

Then it worked.

Then he left.

Two months after she finally succeeded in getting pregnant with another man’s sperm—clinic-approved, cleaned, and sanitized, thankyouverymuch—Mitch packed two bags and jetted off to screw surfer girls in Baja.

Good riddance, Nana had said when Carly told her. And Carly had cried. But the tears didn’t last as long as she’d expected.

She ought to have known better than to have married a man named Mitchell. It was like marrying a Duane or a Conrad. Born losers, all of them. Marrying Mitch had been a form of late-adolescent rebellion. At twenty-two, she’d taken the plunge into matrimony as a way of thumbing her nose at Nana’s Second Wave feminist stance on patriarchy.

Stupid of her to try to rebel. She should have used Nana’s life as a template. Her grandmother had more fun than anybody Carly had ever met. If she’d followed Nana’s lead, maybe she’d be in Amsterdam right now with some hot guy named Sven, working her way through the Kama Sutra positions one at a time, instead of pregnant and trapped in Nana’s house with Caleb Clark for a protector.

She gave the Wombat a pat. “Don’t take it personal, Wombat. I still want you.” Before Jamie, her life had focused down to the point that the Wombat was the only thing she’d wanted. Jamie had helped remind her there were other things in life than babies and needles, scumbag husbands and online friendships.

Sex, for example. Fun. Music.

She pulled a plate from the soapy water in the sink and began to wash.

At least on the name front, she’d done better with Jamie Callahan. Not that he was marriage material, but he did have a great name. A girl could be confident that a guy named Jamie Callahan would show her a good time.

And oh, man, had he ever shown her some good times. Once, he’d even made her see stars—honest-to-goddamn stars circling her head after a colossal orgasm, and he hadn’t even been nailing her into the headboard. Jamie had been far too considerate of her delicate condition to nail her into anything. It hadn’t kept him from nailing her, over and over again, but he’d been a real sweetheart about it. A raunchy, clever, dirty-minded sweetheart.

She took her hands out of the warm dishwater and dried them off so she could fan her face. Bad idea to think about Jamie. Thinking about Jamie either made her hot or it made her cry, and sometimes it did both at the same time. She’d almost cried in front of Caleb, which would have sucked. Caleb had never seen her cry, and he wasn’t going to. He was a good guy and a good friend, but he wasn’t that sort of friend.

Jamie was that sort of friend.

“Oh, shut up,” she told herself, exasperated. Jamie was over. The fight they’d had about her blog was stupid, but it had needed to happen.

Jamie Callahan smiled like a god, and he had some fantastic moves in the sack. He’d made her laugh like she hadn’t laughed in years. And for four incredible months, he’d made her dancing-in-the-fucking-tulips happy. But he was the kind of boy you played around with for a little while and then sighed over after he broke your heart. He wasn’t serious.

Jamie had been Impulsive Mistake #786, the latest in a lifetime of failures to look before she leapt. She’d sailed over the cliff, thinking, despite knowing better, that maybe this guy would catch her, because she really was a complete moron. Naturally, she’d broken both legs.

“De nada,” she told the Wombat. “That’s Spanish. You say it to mean ‘You’re welcome,’ but it really means, ‘It’s nothing.’ Learned that from my worthless prick of a husband.”

It’s nothing. The bruised heart. The memories that weren’t fading yet. The way she’d cry whenever one of Jamie’s songs came on the radio. De nada.

“Don’t you worry about Mama, Wombat. When you’ve taken as many falls as I have, you learn to pick yourself up and dust off your own butt.”

The Wombat acknowledged this wisdom by kicking her in the kidneys.

“Ugh.” She rubbed her back with one hand as she put the last plate on the draining board. “Dish it out, you little weenie. I can take it.”

She could take it. She could take getting kicked by the Wombat and losing Jamie and a thousand times worse if she had to.

And if sometimes, late at night, she wished she didn’t have to, well, tough.