Excerpt from The Almost Sisters by Joshilyn Jackson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Oh, shut up," I told them. I'd never realized that fish were so judgmental.

Two minutes later I was looking at a pink plus sign.

I stood there squinting as if my eyes had gone wonky and were seeing wrong. I was in the outsize master bathroom that, along with the skylight studio upstairs, had made me fall in love with my funky Georgian house. Now the room seemed cavernous; if I yelled, it might echo. The test's pink packaging looked frivolous sitting on my sink, much too silly to be the bearer of real tidings.

I didn't want to go to my regular lady-parts doc, as if I had a UTI or needed to schedule a Pap smear. Instead I called my friend Margot Phan.

"Can you give me an emergency appointment? Now?" I asked. She and her husband had been in my tight-knit clot of Tuesday gamers for twelve years now, but I'd never been to see her as a doctor. She was a pediatrician.

"My waiting room is stuffed with snot-filled toddlers. I'm on yellow alert here, Leia," she told me.

"I'm past yellow. This is a big, fat, blaring red," I told her. "You see teenage girls, right? You can check for if I'm pregnant?"

"Oh, shit!" said Margot. "Batman? Are you kidding me? Come right now."

Margot installed me in a tiny exam room with puffy cartoon forest animals all over the wallpaper. She did another pee test, which was positive, and then at my insistence took the world's most awkward look at my cervix.

"Leia, honey. You are knocked up," she told me.

"All the way up?" I asked, even though Margot was one of my closest friends. She wouldn't screw with me on something medical. But this still felt like some elaborate prank, as if she were about to pop up between my thighs while my feet were in the stirrups, holding a waffle iron and saying, Look what I found! "Maybe you should do a blood test?"

"That would be gratuitous. Much like this," Margot said, standing and heading for the door. I sat up, clutching the sheet around me. "Get dressed and then come to my office, okay? Let's talk. You're not in this alone."

I was so gobsmacked that for a second I thought she meant that I had Batman on my side. The real thing. Not a one-shot superhero in an Etsy cowl named Matt or Mark. Or Marcus. I couldn't quite remember.

I did remember that he was from someplace that ended in an a. Florida? India? Maybe Canada, like the beer we'd drunk in between tequila shots. He was taller than me, but who wasn't? He might have been genuinely funny; he'd certainly seemed funny at the time. He was black—I was pretty definite on that—and his smile, his jawline, had been absolutely beautiful. At some point he must have taken off his pointy-eared iconic mask, because I had a fuzzy memory of oversize brown eyes, slow-blinking and shy, with a thick fringe of lashes. They made his whole face sweeter than the cocky smile had led me to expect.

I also remembered that he loved Violence in Violet. He'd recognized me at the hotel bar and came over to describe all his favorite panels. He'd noticed the birds and little animals I'd hidden here and there in the artwork, disguised as shadows or curls of Violence's hair. He'd asked when the prequel would be published, saying he couldn't wait to get his hands on it. His admiration had been balm, and I had needed balm. Earlier that day I'd gotten so damn burned. Plus, tequila never was the handmaiden of good decisions. I'd asked him up to my room.

We'd started kissing in the elevator, where he'd grabbed fistfuls of my long hair to tip my face back in a way I liked so much. I remembered my hands working up under his chest piece, seeking warm and living skin. I remembered his naked body sprawled across my hotel carpet, me naked, too, hops and agave leaking out our very pores, rolling, me on top now with my head thrown back—had I put on his Batman cowl and cape?

Excerpted from The Almost Sisters by Joshilyn Jackson. Copyright © 2017 by Joshilyn Jackson. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.