I Heart Christmas Read Free

and round on my finger. Maybe if I rubbed it hard enough a genie would appear and I could wish some common sense into my best friend.
    ‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ Jenny said, launching into her clearly prepared speech before I had a chance to get a word in. ‘There’s never going to be a better time. I’ve got a great job with great maternity benefits and I’d absolutely be able to work around my pregnancy. So many of the girls in the office are pregnant right now, Erin’s been talking about opening a day care centre in the building.’
    ‘In the building?’ I asked.
    ‘Next to the gym,’ Jenny nodded.
    ‘Of course.’ I raised my eyebrows and tried to restrain the tutting noise I was desperate to make. ‘Where else?’
    Sometimes I forgot Erin was obscenely wealthy. Most people would just get a childminder but why bother with that when you could open your own nursery?
    Jenny had been working for Erin’s PR company for a couple of years and she was good at it. She was also good at making rash decisions without thinking about the long-term effects on her life. Usually it meant spending a month’s rent on shoes, dip-dying her hair badly or indulging in the odd love affair with a complete dickhead, but a baby? This was a worry.
    ‘I’ve got a great apartment, great friends, I’m healthy, financially stable and I want a baby.’ She sounded so pleased with herself, I didn’t quite know what to do. ‘Why wouldn’t I do it? The longer I wait, the harder it’s going to be.’
    ‘I’m going to say something controversial now,’ I said, shuffling down the ladder with three drinks’ worth of utter grace. ‘But is Craig, who is still technically your boyfriend as far as I know, the best candidate for Father of the Year?’
    I tensed, gripping the metal handlebars, expecting her to pull the ladder out from under me. Instead, she laughed. It was tough to say whether or not a shot to the chops would have surprised me more.
    ‘Oh Angie, Craig?’ Something I’d said had clearly tickled her. ‘No way! Craig can barely look after himself. And it’s been fun but we both know it isn’t serious.’
    I was confused. Did we know that?
    ‘We, you and me, or we, you and Craig?’ I asked.
    ‘We, me and everyone.’ She spoke very slowly, rolling her eyes. Really? I thought. As though I was the mentally unstable one in the situation? ‘Craig knows this is what it is. He’s not ready to have a baby.’
    ‘But you definitely, definitely, super certainly are?’ I trod as carefully as humanly possible, metaphorically and literally. After all, a slap could still be in the offing. ‘This is the biggest decision you’ll ever make, Jenny.’
    ‘Which is why I’ve been thinking about it so seriously, Angie.’ She gave me a gentle, knowing smile. I assumed she’d been working on it as her ‘maternal’ look. ‘It’s all I’ve thought about for, like, days.’
    ‘Days?’
    And that was the precise moment when I lost my shit.
    ‘Like, a week. Two weeks,’ she muttered into her beer bottle. ‘Since Erin had TJ.’
    ‘You’ve been thinking about it for days?’ I knew I was shrieking but I had absolutely no control over the volume or pitch of my own voice. ‘You can’t make a decision like this that quickly, Jenny. Just because someone you know recently heaved a tiny person out of their vagina doesn’t mean you should do the same. If Erin jumped off a cliff, would you jump after her?’
    I jumped off the bottom step and gave her the frowning of a lifetime.
    ‘It’s hardly the same,’ she snapped back. ‘I want a baby.’
    ‘And I want a unicorn to fly me to work every day but that’s not going to happen, is it?’
    ‘Unicorns don’t fly!’ Jenny shouted.
    ‘That’s not the point!’ I shouted back.
    We stared at each other in silence for a few moments, Jenny sipping her beer, me imagining how useful a flying unicorn might actually be. Anything else was too traumatic to think about.
    ‘I