DOROTHEA

TEN

"...Eyes full of stars..."

———

February 23rd, 2018

Holy Shit.

Those two words had never popped into Dorothea's mind so much in her twenty-four years of life as they had in the past two days.

Holy.

Shit.

The blonde pop star had completely blindsided her.

When Dorothea had bent to look under the front passenger seat, she'd unconsciously turned to look at the woman at her side, and in the next moment she experienced a total blackout. Pitch-dark nothingness. Her mind buzzed like a vacant cave. Never had her head felt so weightless, so void of even one single thought as she pressed her lips against the singer's. If her body was a monochromatic, empty stream bed, the gentle softness of Taylor's booze-laced lips had flooded her with a monsoon of rich, vibrant color.

Dorothea had forced herself to walk normally after leaving the car and approaching the stairs to her place, but every step threatened her to stagger. As soon as she'd concealed herself in the building, she let herself wobble up the staircase.  When she'd entered her apartment, her brain was still blank as a sheet. It was only after she'd collapsed on her hideous couch that the blankness slowly filled with sparkling pops of lazy fireworks.

In two hours, Dorothea was going to be back in the SoHo building with a dozen people, including the woman whose lips she now knew the taste of. Somehow, Dorothea was going to have to share her progress with editing the merch shoot photos, without imagining the flash of blue before all went dark in the SUV. Somehow, she was going to have to listen to constructive feedback and discuss deadlines and launch dates, while trying not to picture the curtain of perfect eyelashes that blinked open so close to her own.

Somehow, she was going to have to pretend the woman sitting in some spot in that same room had not turned her world upsidedown less than forty-eight hours before.

Holy shit.

Dorothea woke up that morning feeling sicker than ever. In addition to her prenatal vitamin, she popped a few antacid tablets and could only pray she wouldn't have to excuse herself in the middle of the meeting to throw up. She hoped nobody would notice how pale she was beneath her makeup, nor the dark-rings beneath her eyes that only seemed to be getting worse. If they did, she'd say she was getting over a cold; that her eye-bags were an accessory to chronic insomnia. She'd laugh, to let them know it was okay to laugh, too.

But while Dorothea was brushing her teeth and looking at these foreign parts of her features, she realized that if she continued this new photography job, those excuses wouldn't be believable. Especially not when—she nearly choked on her mouthful of toothpaste—she was going to have to start wearing maternity clothes.

She knew for the sake of her job that she had to tell them she was pregnant as soon as possible. But who exactly was her boss? Was she self-employed? One of her college classes had a section on this, but she was pretty sure she skipped that day due to a raging hangover (there were more than a few lessons that fell victim to that). Well, regardless, she certainly didn't have to give herself the news.

But the little voice inside her that had not stopped saying Holy Shit! for the past two days suddenly said something completely different as she spat her toothpaste into the sink.

Taylor had to know first.

Holy...

—Shit.