Maybe Never by Nia Forrester Page A

and modulated her breathing so that he wouldn’t detect that she had been awake all this time, wondering when he would get home.
    Lying there on her back she waited for Brendan to pull her against him, but this time he didn’t. Instead he slid one of his large hands over her abdomen, lightly caressing it.
    Tracy held her breath, the sensation both moving and exciting her. But it was what he did next that really got her. Brendan pulled down the covers, slowly as though trying not to wake her, and oh-so-gently pressed his lips to her stomach.
    That was the first sign she’d gotten that maybe she wasn’t celebrating this pregnancy all on her own after all. To avoid bursting out into tears then and there, Tracy sighed, pretending to turn in her sleep. And that was when Brendan had pulled her close the way he always did. The moment was gone so quickly, but it was the one she returned to over and over again in her mind for refuge when, like now, she wondered whether she was in this thing all by herself.
    “I put the first ultrasound photo in a frame for him and y’know what he said?”
    “What?”
    “ Thank you .”
    Riley shrugged.
    “No, you don’t get it. He said ‘thank you’ like I’d just given him cufflinks or something.”
    Tracy pulled Cassidy’s little socks off her feet and kissed each one in turn, thinking it impossible that she could love her baby more than she did Riley’s two.
    Could that amount of love even be possible ?
    She couldn’t wait to find out. Those were the kinds of things she wanted to talk to Brendan about. But Brendan wasn’t talking.
    “What should he have done? Clutched it to his chest and started crying?”
    “Yes, Riley. That’s what he should have done,” Tracy said.
    “Tracy, you’re setting him up with all these crazy expectations. It’s all new to him, too. For years, this is a man who didn’t even have girlfriends . Now he’s about to . . .”
    “Riley, he’s almost thirty-five. Stop giving Brendan a pass for behaving like an infant for the last eight years of his life. Sometimes I wonder if you’re even on my side!”
    “There are no sides! I love you both . . .”
    “If you say equally, I swear to God I’ll scream,” Tracy threatened. “You’re not supposed to love us equally , you’re supposed to love me more .”
    Riley let her head fall back and looked up at the sky. “You are just . . . insane,” she muttered.
    “No. I’m not. If it ever comes to that, Riley, I expect you to be squarely on my team.”
    Tracy looked at her and Riley, seeing that she was serious, reached out grabbed her thigh, squeezing it.
    “Of course.”
    Tracy sighed. “Good.”
    Driving back from Shawn and Riley’s, they usually passed the time marveling for the hundredth time about how changed their friends’ lives were. Shawn, who used to be a maverick rapper, was now still blazing his own path, but only now it was by getting more involved in political and social causes, coming out with progressive positions once unheard of in the hip-hop community, like being in favor of gay rights. And Riley, who once wanted nothing more than to be a force to be reckoned with in the publishing world, was increasingly content with leaving management of her publication to her capable staff while she spent more time at home with her young kids.
    To Tracy it seemed that their friends were on almost the third reinvention of their lives while she and Brendan remained stagnant.
    “I had an idea about the wedding,” she said, breaking the silence in the car.
    “Oh yeah? What’s that?” Brendan sounded distracted. But he always did lately.
    “We should write our own vows. More couples these days are . . .”
    “Tracy,” Brendan sighed.
    “It’s more personal that way. And it’s the latest thing . . .”
    “I don’t care about the latest thing. We have the latest in this, that and the other . . . why don’t we just get this . . .” he stopped abruptly.
    “Over with,” Tracy