It's Complicated by Julia Kent Page A

Laura said the one thing that made the tears come for every single person in the room, even Sherri.
    “I did it,” she said quietly. With one finger she stroked the baby’s cheek and the baby looked up, eyes wide and calm, mouth closing, puckering, the cries gone, her face alert, following her mother’s voice. “Welcome to the world,” Laura laughed, all her pain seemingly gone, her face lit up with such rapturous joy that Josie thought it was a manifestation of the divine, right here in these seconds.
    Mike and Dylan leaned in, both kissing the top of Laura’s head simultaneously, and then Laura whispered, “Welcome to the world…baby Jillian.”

Chapter Five
    Josie got ready to go back to the hospital to see Mike, Dylan, Laura, and baby Jillian as if it were prom night. Five different outfit changes, two different re-dos on her hair, and make-up for the first time in ages. Add in the fact that the second Dylan would take one look at her she’d get teased for the next six months about her appearance, and all this fuss proved one simple thing: she was a complete idiot.
    Alex had just finished a twenty-four-hour shift and there was no way that she would run into him. What she had was one big crush on a doctor she’d almost given it up for in the on-call room while her best friend was writhing in pain in another room—pain that was the result of doing exactly what Josie and Alex had almost done.
    Well, almost exactly. Josie—unlike Laura—would use a condom. Plus she was on the pill.
    That was one certainty in Josie’s very uncertain life. No babies—not now.
    And not ever.
    She’d decided that a long time ago, even though her mind faltered along with her heart, especially yesterday when she’d held that tiny, mewling infant in her arms, cradled close, warm, and new, and innocent, and just wanting to be loved. Love she could give. It was the whole idea of stability and emotional care-taking and being a good role model that scared the ever-loving shit out of her.
    Her fear that she could never rise to the occasion, could never be a good parent because she had not been parented well herself, was what made her freeze in place at the thought of being handed an infant and told, “Love this! Mother this! You’re it!” One hundred percent in charge of this entire human being.
    No way.
    Hell, she was one hundred percent in charge of herself and she couldn’t even manage to figure out what to wear to go see her best friend and her new baby. For that matter, most days she could barely make her socks match and remember to pay her bills on time. Being the sole caretaker of a new life was something so far out of her grasp that Laura was suddenly catapulted into a whole new category of person that made Josie feel smaller. It wasn’t that Laura did that—it was Josie who did it to herself.
    When her friends started having babies—not her friends back home, who spat them out at nineteen and twenty by accident and were little more than babies raising babies—no, it was when her best friend had an accidental pregnancy but turned it into a loving family, that was when Josie’s world view was shaken to the core.
    Most of her friends back home who’d become teen or near-teen mothers did fine. They weren’t abusive, they loved their kids, they just…didn’t have a spark in them to do better, to be better, to rise up above the trailer parks, the minimum-wage jobs, the social network that kept people in place rather than encouraging them to spread their wings and see what they could do with their lives.
    Josie was one of a handful of people from her graduating class who had actually gotten out of her little town in Ohio, and not a single one of the women she’d known who had babies young had ever left. That was one reason she was so extraordinarily paranoid about birth control. She did not want to find herself one hundred percent in charge of another human being and limited by life choices. In her world, the fathers