Officially Us

30 - The most expensive goddamn ice-cream I ever ate.

Two months later.

"Hey, girl. What are you doing here?"

I had just come home from dropping Jet off at the cinema with his friends Ryder and Jasper to find Morgan sitting on my couch. Both she and Tanner have always had a spare set of keys to my house since I moved in, so the fact that she had let herself in was no surprise. Being on her own, however, was, as Tanner very rarely let her go out by herself now she was getting to the tail end of her pregnancy, just in case something happened or she went into labour early.

"Tanner's gone out and I got bored on my own, and I know you always have ice-cream, and we were fresh out."

"Gone out?" I questioned. "With who? We're both right here . . ."

"No idea. He didn't say, and I didn't ask because I was grateful that he left and took the smell of his godawful aftershave with him." Her sense of smell was supernatural now she was pregnant. "Also, you need to shower, Ruben. Jesus."

I laughed and deliberately sat down right next to her on the couch to piss her off, forcing her to smell my post-work, sweaty goodness.

"You're fucking disgusting," she snapped.

"Hey, watch the language. Little ears can hear, you know," I said, pointing to her ever-growing stomach.

"Ugh, please. She's going to be a right guttermouth with the way we all talk. Poor thing." Well, she certainly wasn't wrong on that.

"What's wrong, Morgs? You seem more hormonal than usual. And by 'hormonal' I mean beautiful and glowing and only the slightest bit more grumbly than usual." I had watched Tanner put his foot in it enough times over the past seven months to know I needed to butter her up alongside my friendly digs in order to escape unscathed.

"Just thinking about things, I guess," she said, without elaborating any further.

"You're not going to give me anything more than that?"

"I will if you go shower, you pig. Or have you been hanging out with similarly unhygienic teenage boys for too long that it's started to rub off on you, too?"

"Fuck, woman. You've made your point. I'm going," I said, getting up to go shower. I stopped before I left the room, refusing to allow her comment about Jet go by without saying anything. "He's actually a lot better than he used to be. And, for the record, when he sees you he'll deliberately not use aftershave or deodorant because he knows you can't stand the smell of it."

"God, he's so beautiful," she gushed, shifting her mood immediately at the mention of Jet's sweetness. "I can't wait until he brings a date home. You know you're fucked when he does though, right?"

The kid was finally filling out and looking less and less like a scrawny lightpost with every week of footy training and hour spent erecting wooden frames at work. Dropping him off at the shops or school nowadays was testing my foster-parent patience with the way young girls were gawking at my naturally handsome kid. It was even worse when we went surfing, and I had to watch the back and forth between him and the girls there, eyeing off each other's half nakedness.

I wasn't ready to deal with a dating teenager, and after one particularly torturous day at the beach a couple weeks ago when he packed it in early and was accosted by four girls at once while getting changed at my truck, I finally admitted to needing to have 'the talk.'

Turns out he'd been having sex for years already, pressured by his dropkick brothers to get a girlfriend as soon as he turned fourteen. With the shit that went down at school involving his last girlfriend Lacey and that steaming pile of shit of a kid, Cole, he had sworn off girls ever since. But I've been getting the feeling lately that his voluntary abstinence was only temporary, and that it isn't going to last much longer. He is an almost seventeen-year-old boy, after all.