On Saturday night, Monica and Rachel both felt tense, and Monica expressed her nervousness by being a freakishly obsessed hostess. She kept running around the apartment, double checking that the decorations and the food were perfect.

"Honey, honey, calm down," Rachel tried to soothe her in the kitchen. "You need to relax. Just breathe and tell yourself it's just a baby shower."

Monica snorted and almost shouted, "Just a--!"

Rachel covered her mouth and gave her a stern look of warning. "Just a baby shower."

Taking a deep breath, Monica nodded and repeated quietly, "Just a baby shower."

Rachel hugged her, then led Monica back to the living room to take a seat.

Ross and Phoebe were sitting on the couch together, toying with the unopened presents and awaiting the arrival of their guests.

"Ooh, I'm so excited!" Phoebe giggled and clapped her hands. "This is gonna be so much better than my last baby shower." She reached out and hugged Monica and Rachel gratefully. "Thanks for doing this again, especially after how moody I was last time."

"Oh, that's all right," Rachel said. "You were having your brother's triplets, and were much more pregnant than you are now. It must have been very hard."

"Yeah," Phoebe sighed as she remembered how irritable and mean she was to her guests. "And I was so sad when I had to give the babies to Frank and Alice afterward." Then she cheered up and grinned. "But this time I'm gonna have my very own baby to keep, and even better than that, I have Ross to help me out."

Ross smiled and kissed her cheek. "Well, I'm glad to help. I can't wait for Ben to have a little brother or sister."

"I think it's gonna be a girl," Phoebe said, "but then again, my psychic abilities are always thrown off a bit when I'm pregnant."

"You've only been pregnant twice," Ross pointed out.

"In this lifetime," she answered. "I've been knocked up lots of times in the past, 'cause, you know, birth control was much harder to come by in the olden days. Unless you were a witch who knew the right potions, of course, but I got burned at the stake for that in Salem."

"Ohhhh." Everyone nodded and exchanged glances as they imagined Phoebe as a witch in colonial times.

Ross cleared his throat and changed the subject. "Well, um, I guess we'll just wait and see what the sonogram says about the baby."

Phoebe tsked disapprovingly at his naive trust in Western medicine. In her past lives as witches, nurses, midwives, and the like, Phoebe had developed considerable skepticism about doctors, and in this lifetime at least, her experience with various doctors during her surrogacy and labor had only confirmed her opinion that doctors were often overrated, for they could easily be stupid, crazy, or too young to be taken seriously.

Phoebe patted Ross's head patiently. "That's not reliable either, honey. That fertility doctor who implanted Frank and Alice's embryos in me didn't know anything, and my OB-GYN admitted that doctors are wrong all the time. Then she proved it by getting mixed up when she read the sex of triplets!"

Ross protested, "To be fair, she was trying to read a sonogram with three fetuses crowded together. It would be easy to mistake a body part then."

"Oh hey!" Rachel sat up with an idea. "What if you guys have triplets too, since you're both extra fertile?"

Ross gasped and blinked; he evidently hadn't considered that possibility before, despite their long discussion when planning parenthood together.

Phoebe rubbed her belly and replied, "Oh, I think it's going to be just one baby this time. Or maybe twins, 'cause my birthmom told me on the phone, when she got the invitation to the shower, that twins run in our family. That's partly why she got so scared and abandoned me and Ursula after she gave birth to us."

"Oh!"

They all murmured sympathetically, and Ross hugged her close and kissed her forehead. Realizing that she needed him to be supportive, he pulled himself together and reassured her, "Whatever we have, Pheebs, we're gonna love our kids no matter what, right?"

"Right." Phoebe smiled at him for readily making the adjustment from "kid" to "kids." She wanted to kiss him so much, but since they weren't alone, she settled for laying her head upon his shoulder. She could easily imagine staying in his arms for much longer than just nine months.

Ross stroked her hair and wished that he could make up for all of the people who had ever abandoned and disappointed Phoebe instead of loving her.

"Aw," Rachel smiled at how sweet Ross and Phoebe looked together, almost like a couple. "You guys are going to make great parents I bet."

"Yeah," Monica nodded and felt a twinge of sorrow and envy. She still yearned for a baby so much, and she suggested, only half in jest, "Hey, if you do have twins, then maybe me and Rachel could take one of them."

"Monica!" Rachel scolded her, both for the inappropriateness of the request, and the slip about their relationship.

Ross and Phoebe turned to them with surprise, but didn't take the hint about Monica and Rachel. Ross met Phoebe's eyes to read her reaction, then he answered as delicately as he could, "Well, um, you're always welcome to babysit, of course, Mon. But to actually give you one of our babies..." He sighed and shook his head. "I mean, we--we do know how much you want a baby too, but we were just both really looking forward to not having to share our kid or kids this time around."

Phoebe added, "Yeah, don't worry, Mon. You're still young, and maybe that new boyfriend of yours is the one that you're gonna end up marrying and having kids with. I'll get a better idea when I meet him and read his aura. That is, as long as my pregnancy doesn't throw me off too much, you know."

"Oh." Monica blushed and glanced at Rachel nervously, remembering the lie they had told everyone to explain why she broke up with Chandler so suddenly. What name did they invent for her new boyfriend again?

Ross interrupted his sister's thoughts by asking, "By the way, when is your boyfriend gonna get here, Mon? You said we'd meet him tonight, since Chandler wasn't going to come to the shower."

She blushed even more and struggled to remember their cover story. "Um, he--he won't get here until the end of the party, actually. We just, we want to focus on your baby shower first, and save that other stuff for when all the other guests have gone home." Monica and Rachel wanted to avoid having an unpleasant scene, in case Ross got very upset when they came out to him and Phoebe.

"Really?" Ross was disappointed. "I was looking forward to not being the only guy here. None of the NYU professors that I invited or even the old dinosaur dudes from the museum wanted to come to a baby shower. They just sent me some of the gifts that we registered for at the stores." Ross gestured to the pile of presents that were wrapped in dinosaur wrapping paper.

"Sorry, Ross." Rachel patted his arm sympathetically. "Don't worry, we'll make sure that you have fun too."

"Yeah, let me get you guys some punch." Monica returned to the kitchen and sighed in relief. Rachel was right; it was better to have their relationship out in the open instead of always having to worry about pronouns and cover stories and so many little details.

Just then, there was a knock on the door. "It's us!"

"Ooh, our first guests!" Phoebe clapped her hands excitedly.

Monica and Rachel both answered the door for Carol and Susan. "Hi!"

"Welcome to the party!"

"We wouldn't miss the Geller-Buffay shower for anything!"

Laughing and taking off their coats, Carol and Susan came in and went over to greet Ross and Phoebe with hugs and kisses.

"Hi!"

"Hey!"

"Oh, look at you, Phoebe! You're glowing!"

"Thank you!" She giggled again.

They added their gifts to the pile on Monica's living room table, then sat down to chat with the parents-to-be. Soon after that, other guests began arriving, and the celebration began.


Across the hall, Joey and Chandler were making love again to distract them from the noise of the party next door. Chandler was almost tempted to join the baby shower, just to spend time with their friends again, but then he remembered that Monica would be there, so he stayed home.

As they lounged in bed, Joey kissed him and asked, "You wanna go out and watch a movie or something?"

"Nah. We should stay here 'cause Carol and Susan are coming over after the party."

"Oh, right. I forgot. Do you think they'll be surprised when we tell them that we're together?"

Chandler shrugged and traced his fingers down Joey's chest. "What if they actually catch us doing it?"

Joey grinned. "What, you wanna do it in the living room?"

Chandler kissed him and sat up in bed. "Last one to the couch has to be on bottom!" He got out of bed and raced to the living room.

Joey laughed and got up to follow his lover, but he paused to grab some blankets first. He didn't mind being last, and thought that blankets would come in handy, both to cover them up in hurry if someone walked in, and to keep their naked sweaty bodies from sticking to the leather couch.


After all the presents were opened and the party guests began leaving, Phoebe got up and hugged her birthmother. "Bye, mom." It still felt odd to call this woman her mom, especially when Lily was the only mom she had known for years, but she was getting used to it.

"Bye, honey," Phoebe Abbott kissed her daughter's cheek. "I'm so happy that you get to have a baby for yourself this time."

"Yeah, so am I," she answered with a happy sigh. "Especially with Ross. Do you like Ross, mom?"

Phoebe Sr. turned to glance at Ross, who was saying goodbye to guests at the door. She shrugged and murmured, "Well, I don't know, I just met him. He seems a little boring and into dinosaurs."

Phoebe nodded. "Yeah, but he's really sweet and such a great father. You should see him with his son Ben."

"Oh, well maybe I'll come visit sometime when Ben's around. Just let me know when."

"Yeah, that would be great! Or maybe all of us can come see you at Montauk. We could like have a picnic at the beach, and make sand castles, and go swimming."

"Sure, any time." But Phoebe Sr. noticed how her daughter kept smiling fondly at Ross as she imagined this family outing at the beach. This confused her, since Phoebe had said on the phone that Ross was not her boyfriend. So Phoebe Sr. asked again, "Sweetie, are you and Ross--?"

"No, no, we're just friends," Phoebe insisted, then whispered confidentially, "He's still in love with Rachel."

Phoebe Sr. frowned skeptically, especially since she saw Ross continually kissing or touching Phoebe during the entire party, as if they were lovers. But who was she to argue about her daughter's love life? "Well, congratulations on your baby anyway."

"Thanks, mom." They hugged one more time before Phoebe's birthmom grabbed her purse and left so that she could drive back to Montauk.

Finally, when there was no one in the apartment except Monica, Rachel, Ross, Phoebe, Carol, and Susan, the crucial moment had arrived.

Ross glanced at his watch and asked, "Mon, how come your boyfriend didn't show up yet?"

Monica glanced at Rachel and said, "Uh, Ross, can you sit down for a minute?"

Rachel ushered Phoebe back to the couch as well. "Yeah, we actually have something to confess to you guys."

Carol and Susan sat down, looking supportive, but letting Monica and Rachel speak for themselves.

"What do you mean? What's going on?" Ross looked to Phoebe, who was puzzled too, but she became suspicious when she saw Monica and Rachel stand close together and hold hands.

Monica cleared her throat. "Okay, first of all, there's no new boyfriend, Ross. There never was."

"What?" Ross stared at them. "Then why did you break up with Chandler? What happened?"

Rachel watched his face intently as Monica answered, "What happened was--was that I got a girlfriend instead. I-I'm in love with Rachel now."

Ross didn't know how to react at first, just staring at them blankly. Phoebe also turned to look at him, and she squeezed his hand.

Rachel continued, hoping that she wasn't breaking his heart. "It's true, Ross. Monica and I are dating now. We, um, we didn't know how to tell you, but--"

Ross sat forward suddenly, obviously struggling to find words. They all waited for him, and finally he managed to stammer, "Well, tha-that's two of my ex-wives."

Glancing at Carol and Susan, Monica and Rachel wondered if Ross was taking it philosophically, or if he was just warming up to a rage.