Bus Ticket Baby

By Imogen Markwell-Tweed

With lively characters, an unlikely circumstance, and a focus on family, Imogen Markwell-Tweed’s Bus Ticket Baby is a precious romance that will leave you breathless.

Vanessa left her small hometown to live a better life and she knows crying never solved anything. But at eight months pregnant, Vanessa finds herself crying a lot these days. She didn’t expect to have a baby alone or to be excited to be a mom or to put off telling her family for so long. But now forced to ride a bus before Christmas to visit the family she’s avoided for a decade, Vanessa can’t fight the tears. So when another passenger sits down to comfort her on the long, smelly bus ride, Vanessa has to convince herself it’s the hormones making him look so dreamily handsome and acting so kind.

Emmett may be focused, determined, and have a slight savior complex, but he’s not so cold-hearted as to ignore a crying woman on a bus, especially if she’s pregnant. Checking in on Vanessa he didn’t expect to feel a spark for the charming and independent spirit she is. Hippocratic oath or not, Emmett finds himself wanting to be there for the young, beautiful, and sharp-witted Vanessa. The plan is simple: be her pretend baby daddy. Caught in a poorly-prepped lie, Emmett and Vanessa must navigate trying to convince their families they’ve been together longer than a few hours, as well as rein in their growing feelings for each other. But with a built expiration date on their fake relationship, how long can they keep up the ruse?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryant Street Shorts
• Release date: Oct 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781094421384

Imogen Markwell-Tweed

Imogen Markwell-Tweed is a queer romance writer and editor based in St. Louis. When she's not writing or hanging out with her dog, IMT can be found putting her media degrees to use by binge-watching trashy television. All of her stories promise queer protagonists, healthy relationships, and happily ever afters. @unrealimogen on Twitter and Instagram.

Book preview

Chapter One

Vanessa holds her closed fist over her mouth, squeezing her eyes shut, and tries to convince her traitorous body that she absolutely does not need to throw up.

The nausea rolls through her in waves, declaring vengeance against her spine and muscles in the form of a hurricane.

She leans her forehead against the cold glass above her bus seat, fighting the nausea, until it eventually recedes and she is left dizzy and wrung out, but thankfully not covered in sick.

Vanessa feels the familiar pinprick sensation of tears in her eyes and sighs, heavily put out by her own body, as she refocuses her energies on not openly weeping.

Being pregnant is the fucking worst.

Yes, Vanessa is looking forward to being a mother — even if she is petrified of it in a way that feels like an instinctual, animalistic sort of fear — and yes, she is glad in some way that she gets to be a true life-bringer of this baby, knowing that she’s able to keep it safe. But also, not more importantly but definitely more notably, Vanessa hates being pregnant.

She is hot and she is nauseous and she is hungry and she is upset all the time. Her body has no center of gravity which means she’s clumsier than ever before, a shock to everyone who knows her already as the clumsiest person they had ever met. Vanessa feels like every day is more difficult to get through than the last and, every time she complains, she’s met with a disapproving sneer from someone who thinks that being pregnant is both sacred and an obvious duty. She’s eight months pregnant and still doesn’t know how to explain to someone that she can be grateful to be pregnant and miserable while doing it at the same time.

Vanessa scrubs her hands down her face.

The bus rolls to a stop.

We’ll be here for ten minutes, the bus driver says, a handsome man named Gideon who had smiled at Vanessa when she got on the bus two hours ago. So get a snack or a stretch now because we’ll only be stopping one more time before our destination.

The person in the spot in front of her waves her ahead, letting her wobble out on her own. Vanessa sniffles as she climbs carefully down the steps, wet from the snow, and clings to the handgrips firmly so that she won’t slip down.

Walking is a slow waddle; she’s sure she spends half of the ten minutes just getting from the bus to the rest stop, her arms thrown out to keep her balance in case of any sneaky ice.

Taking a multi-hour bus all alone during December to get to her family’s small, Midwestern town was not something Vanessa expected when she found out she was pregnant. But as the days turned to weeks, and then clambered into months, Vanessa found that every phone call she had with her family ended with her putting it off one more day…

Vanessa is now eight months pregnant and hasn’t told anyone.

Christmas is going to be hell.

She makes it to the rest stop, where a tall, handsome man sighs heavily as he holds the door open for her. She glares at him, resisting the urge to snap at him — after all, she didn’t ask for this man to hold the door for her. He smiles at her, tight-lipped and not quite an apology, and she rolls her eyes, waddling past him.

The line in the bathroom parts for her. She thinks she ought to be grateful, but there’s a pinch of annoyance on the woman’s face who was next. Vanessa steps back but she’s waved ahead anyway.

As Vanessa pees and fights back her tears, an all too common pregnant occurrence for her, she spares a moment to be resentful that other people are resentful of her. She didn’t ask to have the door opened for her or to skip the line or for the people on the bus to wait for her to get off first. There’s some sort of honor system that Midwestern people feel towards pregnancy that, she’s almost certain, doesn’t extend at all to the woman in the equation.

One day soon, she reminds herself, I won’t be pregnant anymore. It’ll just be her and the baby and things will be better.

Things have to be better.

She hurries through her pity party, though, and by the time her hands are washed and she’s at the vending machines, she’s in much better spirits. She would blame the mood swings on her hormones, but she’s pretty certain that her buoyed mood is specific to the line of Cheetos and Peanut M&M’s that she sees in the vending machine. She bounces on her feet, aiming to not look eager in this rest stop full of people, and then spends the last of her cash on buying three packs of each.

Baby’s hungry, huh? the woman behind her asks, smiling.

Vanessa glances down at her swollen belly just as the woman’s hand lands on it. Erm, she says, blanking on a polite way to extradite herself from this situation.

Is it a girl or a boy? the woman continues, now with two hands on Vanessa.

I don’t know, Vanessa answers, taking a large step back. She hip-checks the vending machine in her haste, hissing under her breath, but manages to get her body far enough away from the woman, at least.

She nods knowingly. Daddy didn’t want to know, hm?

Vanessa tries very, very hard not to scowl. Something like that, she grumbles. Then, armed with her snacks, she turns to go back to the bus.

It takes her a while, even more cautious now that her snacks are taking up her arms and she can’t use them to balance herself. People pass her at humiliating speeds, climbing up on the bus while she grits her teeth and nearly slides on a patch of ice.

You good? the bus driver calls, hands cupped around his mouth.

She smiles at him, her one true ally — he didn’t touch her belly at all even once. Good! she hollers back and continues her snail-like pace.

Eventually, she makes it to the bus. A few people huff at having to wait; she glances at the clock on the dashboard and scowls at them all. It’s only been eleven minutes! Thanks so much, she thinks.

Still, despite it only being eleven minutes, she slumps in relief when she’s back in her seat. The thing is too small for her wide hips, and there’s an uncomfortable pinch in her spine from the weight being pushed down in the unsupportive structure. Still, she’s glad to have the cover of her coat and the relative darkness of the bus. She lays her treats out carefully on her lap, trying to remember how much longer is left on the bus so she can ration out her snacks appropriately.

She’s been here for two hours; the bus ride is meant to take five. But the driver, Gideon, said there would be only one more stop.

She sighs. She’s been in Chicago for so many years now that she had forgotten how rural her family’s town is. Of course the bus wouldn’t have many places to stop.

Vanessa left Shady Springs a decade ago when she was seventeen. Her girlfriend had broken up with her two days after graduation, making her swear to never tell anyone about them, and Vanessa had realized that there was no future for her in the small town dangling on the Bible Belt. It took her another four years in Chicago, dodging her family’s requests for her to visit and answering their phone calls with shuttered half-answers, that Vanessa realized that she was bisexual.

It wasn’t that her family didn’t love her. It wasn’t even that she didn’t love them. But she had spent her whole life with them being told that the things she wanted were bad; she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life fighting for basic respect.

They still spoke on the phone, and she still sent presents to them for the holidays. Thankfully, a budding career in publishing meant that Vanessa’s cries of work over the holidays wasn’t even a lie.

But then, she got pregnant by a stranger from a club who signed away his parental rights almost in the same breath as he told her he didn’t believe her that it was his, and then her little brother called her and begged her to come home so that he could come out to their parents.

And, well. Vanessa knew that her very religious parents finding out about her unwed pregnancy was going to cause fireworks. At the very least, she could let the fireworks distract from her poor kid brother trying to be way braver than she ever was.

As she eats her first bag of Cheetos, Vanessa pulls out her phone and swipes through Denny’s private Instagram. When he sent it to her, accepting her follow request, she felt honored — she knows that to a sixteen-year-old, a private social media account is a sacred place. It’s her payment for coming back after a decade.

She loves her younger siblings; Becca at nineteen and Denny at sixteen, she hasn’t seen them much over the past few years. Becca came to stay with her in Chicago for spring break three years ago and Vanessa had met up with Denny when his traveling hockey team came to Naperville over the last few years. But other than that, she hasn’t really been near them since they were both kids.

The idea that they’re fully fledged human beings now with the ability to come out to their parents is… humbling. Strange. Upsetting and nice all at once.

She’s staring at a photo of Denny from three months ago, wrapped in a Pride Flag with a boy kissing his cheek, when she starts to cry.

It starts off as an easy, sweet sprinkle, thinking about her brother and her family, but it spirals out of control pretty quickly. Within a few minutes, Vanessa is crying about her family’s reaction to her very pregnant self walking off this bus, their potential rejection of her and her fatherless baby, about the woman who touched her belly without asking earlier, about the fact that she only has one bag of Cheetos left. She’s crying about being alone and she’s crying about not being alone for the next few weeks and she’s crying about Neil Armstrong for some reason because now