Maternity Leave by Trish Felice Cohen Read Free Book Online Page A

rat out of my attic, I am very nice about it. Still, I can’t help but think on occasion that I owe Danny a blowjob.
    I fully subscribe to the
When Harry Met Sally
premise that men and women can’t be friends because one of them always wants to have sex with the other. My relationship with Danny works because I know he wants to have sex with me and he knows it’s not going to happen. Though he’s tall, smart, attractive, funny and all the other positive attributes of a man, he is solidly in the friend category. I thought about dating him when we first met, but I knew the result would be the same as when I dated my best male friends from high school, college and law school: As soon as I slept with him, I’d confirm my gut feeling that I wasn’t sexually attracted to him. Then I’d spend the next few months trying to push him back into the friend category without breaking his heart. Simultaneously, Danny’s infatuation with me would turn into full-blown obsessive love and he’d be proposing to me right around the time that I finally built up the balls to dump him.
    To be clear, Danny has never formally asked me out and thus he has never formally been rejected. In fact, he scoffed at my arrogance the one and only time I accused him of having a crush on me and advised him that it was not reciprocal. I did not do this to be an ass, but merely to give him the opportunity to opt out of painting my house if he was only doing so in the hopes of getting laid. I suppose it’s possible that Danny is not sexually interested in me and that he just likes hanging out with me and doing all of my chores, but I have my suspicions.
    This dynamic sounds crazy, but somehow, it’s not actually that rare in cycling. Brenda is married, but her husband rarely attends cycling events. Instead, Jeremy, a divorced doctor and competitive cyclist, travels with her to nearly every race, stays with her even if their races are hours apart, and helps her by tuning her bike and feeding her water and food in the feed zone on the course. To my knowledge, they’ve never slept together either, though I have no doubt that Jeremy, like Danny, is interested.
    Once we got out of the parking garage, which I was paranoid had been bugged by an overly nosy secretary, I announced to Danny, “I’m racing the Tour de West.”
    “That three week women’s race? How? Are you finally quitting your job? Do you have enough money?”
    “Nope, taking a maternity leave.” I knew it wasn’t a great idea to advertise my fraud, but I had to tell someone about my ingenious plan and Danny was the most logical choice since he’s one of the few people who knows that I measure my self-worth by my cycling ability. Even if I wanted to confide that information to other people, it would be difficult to convey my point since no one in America cares about cycling. Of the seven Americans who have heard of the Tour de France, five think it is a competition sandwiched between a swimming and running leg. It irritates me that people cannot distinguish between triathlons, which are two-thirds crazy, and cycling, the most beautiful and challenging sport in the world.
    “Maternity leave? Don’t you need a kid to do that?” Danny asked.
    “Nope, just a pregnancy,” I responded.
    “You’re knocked up?” Danny asked as his face went white and he nearly struck a curb.
    “No,” I said, as though it were the dumbest question in the world. “I’m faking a pregnancy so that I can take a maternity leave.”
    The color returned to his face and he grinned. “That’s actually pretty funny.”
    “I know. I’m hilarious,” I said in my most serious voice.
    “Seriously, what’s your plan?”
    “I’m seriously faking a pregnancy,” I said as we rode over the bridge onto Davis Island, one of the richest neighborhoods in Tampa.
    “I swear you have testicles. Big, brass testicles,” Danny said.
    “The better to have a baby with.”
    “When’s the due date?”
    “I’m thinking