In The Clear | ✓

01 | mamma mia! here we go again

Jensen Rhodes was tired of being pregnant.

She was tired of the bruised ribs. She was tired of having to have someone else shave her legs for her. She was fucking tired because she was growing a child inside of her. If she and Miles decided they were having another kid after the present one was born, she swore he was going to carry it. Not her. She was already on number two and Miles, quite frankly, wasn't pulling his pregnancy weight. Well, that wasn't true.

Miles was doing a hell of a lot for Jensen. Especially considering this was their second kid. He knew the way things were going to work. That there were going to be good days and bad days. Too many appointments to too many people. There had to be space in their living room cleared in about a month for when their kid decided to come and he'd made sure that nothing from the moment she'd entered the third trimester disturbed that space. He also knew that she loved their daughter to the moon and back and but sometimes Jensen just needed the house to be quiet and a two year old running around could not achieve that.

Which was why he'd taken her with him to buy baby supplies. She was excited about having a sibling and would have done anything they asked if it had to do with the baby. If they asked her to stop picking her nose, it was a no. But shopping with her dad for baby things? Absolutely. Every time.

When Miles left it turned into Jensen getting a little in her own head. Not always, but that day she had. Headphones in her ears, volume turned up on a shitty little podcast the world knew as Cami & Gio's. The latest scoops in celebrity gossip.

Sue her. Jensen hadn't learned a thing in almost six years. Except now she was hearing stories about herself, not reading them about others. Jensen hated how much she worried about what people thought of her. Spare appointments and ultrasounds that had her hiding from the public eye anyway, she'd barely been out of the house since wrapping the movie she had been working on, yet somehow she was still a topic. Because Miles had been out of the house. The new episode was called: Rhode(s) to Baby Two? and Jensen wanted to throw her phone across the room.

Instead, she pressed it. The familiar jingle played and sponsors were read. CamiGio was a discount code for too many brands that Jensen was never going to purchase from. She shouldn't have been listening in the first place, truthfully. A stream of their podcast wasn't something Jensen should have given them. But she did. Because she couldn't help it.

"Let's start this one off by saying that I would love for these rumours to be true," Cami said after their sponsored ads. Getting right into it, right away. As always. "But mum's the word on the Rhodes baby rumours as of yet."

Camilla Morales was the kind of woman Jensen wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of. Mostly because she knew too much and kept her mouth closed about it too little. She wasn't certain she was on Camilla's good side, despite having never met her. According to Miles, she had been married to Dante Juarez for a while, which made all the sense in the world to Jensen. There were too many similarities for them not to have met somewhere along the road. Even though she'd opened her world to Hollywood when she was ready, Jensen still wasn't used to people like Camilla. People who stuck their noses into other people's business and were paid for it, that was.

"Hot take on hot dads," Gio said enthusiastically, "Miles Rhodes cannot be beat! Another Rhodes baby could send the world into a spiral of adorable content."

Giovanni Perez was the kind of person that Jensen would find in a dark alley gazing through the window of a nightclub trying to see who was doing coke in the bathroom or who was hooking up with who. Also the kind of person Jensen never wanted to meet if it could be helped.