Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
“I froze my eggs,” Rachel announced as she and her oldest friend Leda walked along the Elwood foreshore on the way to their weekly personal training session on the beach.
“Can you do that? I thought eggs went gross.”
Rachel laughed. “Baby-making eggs.”
“Sheesh, you serious?” Leda replied. “Doesn’t that cost a fortune?”
“Yep 15,000 big ones.” Rachel was surprisingly matter-of-fact for somebody who barely seemed to be able to scrape together rent.
“Whoa! Where’d you get that kind of cash?”
“Remember how my Great Aunt Bev died? Turns out she bypassed my douche bag dad in the will and left some money to me and my sister. And the way things are going for me on the husband-front right now, I reckon this is as good an investment as any blue chip.”
Leda and Rachel always planned to jog to their shared sweatfest, but with conversations about men, fertility and career climbing to get through, they never got beyond a power walk.
And once the workout began, conversation ceased immediately because A. Their hot trainer Luke absolutely smashed them so they could barely breathe, let alone gossip, and B. Even if they could muster the strength to chat, their conversations were rarely suitable for the ears of anyone outside the inner sanctum.
“Wow. Reckon I should do it too?” Leda asked.
“Up to you. I just want the piece of mind.”
“But celebs in their 40s are always getting preggas.”
“I just don’t want to take the risk.”
“But you’re 33 – plenty of time to meet someone.”
“Ledes, we’ve been telling each other the same thing since we were 23 and all I’m getting is wanker after wanker. Do I need to remind you what it’s like to be standing in a white dress alone at an alter? Look, the way I see it is, now I can always get a Ryan Gosling lookalikes’ sperm down the track and do the parenting thing solo.”
“Hang on, this is your kid you’re talking about. Do you really want a son that hot? Way too creepy to be perving on him like that all the time. I reckon you want a plump and cheerful son. Mad keen on hugs and never going to leave you for some skank in a midriff.”
“Whatever, you know what I mean.” Rachel was laughing before getting serious again. “I guess now the ball’s in my court and I don’t have to freak out.”
Rachel had baggage. She knew it and the four dates she’d been on in the past three years had only proved it.
Everything seemed to be progressing well on each one. They’d chatted easily, had great sex and promised to call when she’d left. Then crickets.
She’d tried casual texts to check in, but no response, and when she texted the last one demanding an explanation about why he’d gone radio silent, she had to hand it to him for his honesty. “It’s dripping off you,” he’d written. When she asked him to clarify, she got, “The desperation”.
Ouch.
But it took that clarity for her to realise how much she’d let her hunger for kids get in her way. Her mum had four children by her age and Rachel had always envisaged a big brood for herself. And as every birthday rolled around, she felt incrementally frantic.
But now that she had 12 little half-children, simply waiting for Mr Dreamboat’s sperm to make them fully-fledged little humans, she felt an unusual sense of serenity.
“Come to think of it, you have been different,” Leda said. “Way calmer, I reckon.”
It had taken her four weeks to work up the courage to tell anyone, and she knew Leda was a good warm-up act. Their weekly walk-to-hell/workout had become a kind of confessional where Leda shared her increasingly reckless sexual escapades and Rachel debriefed about work, life and all the other stressors that seemed to accumulate along with the self-help books on her bedside table.
“That was the plan,” Rachel replied as they saw Luke waving on the beach beside boxing gloves, mitts and mats.
“Ladies, got your gossip out of the way?” he asked as they dumped their wallets and phones and prepared for their orders.
“Alright, Leda – see that football oval over there? You’ve got two laps. Rachel, you’re boxing with me.”
Leda set off and Rachel gloved up.
“Okay you – give me what you’ve got.”
Luke called out numbers and sequences and Rachel grunted as she smashed the pads for five straight minutes before he called a breather.
Doubled over, catching her breath, Luke commended Rachel’s efforts.
“Nice work Rach – your fitness has skyrocketed in the past month,” he said.
“Is there someone I need to be jealous of?”
It was only then that Rachel noticed Luke’s uncanny resemblance to Ryan Gosling.