Levi (Heartbreakers & Troublemakers Book 4)

by Hope Hitchens

  Why wouldn’t she… why wouldn’t she want to tell me?

  “I wanted to tell you in person,” she said.

  “Then why didn’t you?” I demanded.

  “Because-”

  She stopped when a nurse entered the room. I stepped away from her to give the two of them some privacy. I barely heard what the two of them discussed. I was trying not to break something. We were in a hospital; I had to at least wait till we got outside first. I thought of every conversation we had had since our first date. None of those conversations, none of those times; all that communication and she hadn’t found one time to speak up about being pregnant.

  Was it me? Was it because she was ashamed? Her behavior that night suddenly made sense. Suddenly I felt like shit. She wasn’t doing well, and she hadn’t come to me. I hadn’t been there for her or had made her feel like she couldn’t come to me. I still didn’t know the reason why she was here.

  The nurse left, and Audra sat again. She must have been doing her discharge paperwork. I walked up to her.

  “Do you know how much you need to pay?”

  “I have insurance.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Levi-”

  “Don’t argue with me, Audra,” I snapped. “Just handle your discharge papers so we can leave.”

  “We? Didn’t you rush here from New York? Don’t you need to get back?”

  “What did I tell you about pushing me away?”

  “I’m not pushing you anywhere. I didn’t ask you to come. I don’t know why you did. Now that you know everything’s fine you can leave.”

  “Everything’s fine? We’re in a fucking hospital. I know ultrasounds don’t require overnight stays for observation. What’s wrong with the baby? And don’t tell me nothing. You can’t tell me you’re pregnant and expect me not to care.”

  “Oh, well that’s great. Since you care so much, you’ll be happy to hear there’s nothing to worry about. I’m pregnant now but give it a few weeks; I might not be anymore.”

  “What are you talking about? Are you getting an abortion?”

  “No. I came here because I was bleeding. The doctor said it’s something called a subchorionic hematoma. Basically, a pocket of blood between the placenta and my uterus. If I don’t bleed it out, or reabsorb it, I’ll lose the baby.”

  I had just learned that she was pregnant, what? Ten minutes ago? Now she was losing it? The news was coming too fast, and all of it was bad.

  “Then why are they letting you leave?”

  “Because there’s nothing they can do. I have to wait it out. They said that these things tend to sort themselves out, but if the bleeding gets worse, or the pocket gets bigger… there’s a chance that the pregnancy will… terminate naturally,” her voice cracked as she said it. I walked forward and hugged her. I felt her body shake as she cried. Fuck, how long had she been dealing with this alone? Not just the pregnancy, but this? Being scared that she’d lose it. She obviously didn’t want to. It made her upset, so I didn’t want her to either.

  This wasn’t about me. It was, sort of, but it wasn’t. I needed to get her home.

  “Let me take you home,” I said to her quietly. She didn’t argue with me. I took care of the bill, and we got a ride to her house in a taxi. I walked her upstairs, and she was silent till we got into the house.

  “Thanks for the ride,” she said quietly. “Will I still see you this weekend?” she asked. We were in the kitchen.

  “I’m not going back to New York now. I’m not leaving you.”

  “Why?” she asked. Why? Why? It wasn’t clear already?

  “Because I love you, and you need me. What did the doctors tell you?”

  “If this is because of the thing, it happens to so many women, it’s really common and-”

  “Stop it, Audra. Just stop. Why are you punishing me for loving you? I want to stay. Just tell me what they said.” She looked down before starting again.

  “They told me I should take it easy for the next few weeks till I go in for the twelve-week ultrasound. No lifting anything heavy, no exercise, lots of rest. They also gave me a prescription for something to help me with my nausea.”

  “I’ll pick it up for you. What about work?”

  “I told them where I worked, and they said that since the pregnancy isn’t high risk, as long as I am not on my feet too long, or moving anything heavy around, then I should be okay to keep working. What about you?”

  “What? Work?” she nodded. “There’s no boss for me to get in trouble with if I’m not there. I don’t have to be there to get stuff done. I have to leave eventually, but not until next week.”

  “You can take that much time off?”

  “I’m going to. I’m staying here with you. I’m not flying back to New York until I know you and our baby are okay.” Our baby. It sounded weird coming out of my mouth, but I didn’t hate it. It was true. It was our baby.

  “I thought this would be the thing that pushed you away. That made you feel like the trips back and forth weren’t worth it. That…” she sighed like she didn’t know how to tell me she thought I didn’t love her. “I felt like you had me. I was hooked, but you could always leave if you wanted to. Like I wanted you more than you did me, and when it ended, it would be because you wanted something different.”

  “I want you, Audra. Don’t run from me. When your friend called me, I thought you’d been in a car accident or something. I want you to talk to me.”

  “What would you have done if I’d told you last weekend? Would you have been mad?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. You hiding from me makes me mad. It scares me. I don’t want you to think that I would ever hurt you, or leave you. I love you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” She smiled a little.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t honest with you,” she said.

  “Just tell me the next time I make you pregnant.”

  She smiled and leaned up to hug me. I heard her say she loved me too, but quietly enough that I could have missed it. I kissed her, feeling her surrender to me. I lifted her up onto the kitchen counter and ran my hands up her back, inside her shirt.

  “Levi… we can’t,” she said, pushing me away.

  “What?”

  “Sex. We can’t have sex. That was one of the things the doctor said I can’t do. I’m still bleeding a little, and that means I’d be at risk of infection.”

  “Okay… we can’t fuck, but can I…?”

  “No. No orgasms. They don’t want me doing anything that might cause my uterus to contract.” I frowned.

  “What can we do?”

  “You can kiss me,” she suggested, “and we can hold hands.”

  “Like teenagers?”

  “Like a couple,” she said, taking my hand and lacing our fingers together. Not something I did often, but it was alright. It was Audra; it was more than alright.

  It was perfect.

  24

  Audra

  Levi’s suggestion to move into the Pacific Heights house wasn’t a suggestion at all. It was a, not a command, but a non-negotiable direction. He wanted to move me to New York for the duration of the pregnancy, but that wasn’t going to happen. Yeah, Strickland’s was opening on the East Coast, but I still worked here. I would at least until the baby came and then we would talk about it.

  I understood that he just wanted to make sure I was okay. He was good at hiding it, but he was a lot more stressed out about the hematoma than I was. The bleeding went on sometimes heavier, sometimes lighter, but I never had any pain.

  The best of the three possible eventualities had ended up happening. The hematoma had bled out. The bedrest had only lasted a month. The pelvic rest, however, had been longer by a couple of weeks and had been hellish for both of us.

  Pelvic rest meant no sex, no insertion of anything and no orgasms. Levi took it better than me, but the poor guy, his arm was probably going to fall off. At least he didn’t have rivers of hormones running through
him, making his libido spike.

  It got so bad I started having dreams about fucking, like a teenage boy going through puberty. I couldn’t help Levi out, sucking him off because that turned me on. The one time I’d relented and played with my nipples, I’d had a bloody discharge the next day.

  Even though I had been staying in Pacific Heights, Levi had still been flying back and forth between the Bay and New York, his stays in San Francisco longer than just weekends. It wasn’t a permanent arrangement; it was just till my bed and pelvic rest were over. Till I got the all clear after the twelve-week ultrasound.

  He said that it was easier to make sure I had care while he was away if I was staying in his condo. My only condition was the cats got to come too. I wasn’t going to fight him about it. I had to give him something. He was there. I was the one who had been shutting him out. When he had said care, I thought he meant a midwife or nurse. I’d been horrified to find out he meant his mother.

  Silvia Guzman was a great roommate, but it had taken days to get used to asking her for help. She was excited about the baby, more than Levi and I combined. Apparently, she had thought the way I had, that he wouldn’t want one. She had ended up coming with me to my twelve-week ultrasound because Levi couldn’t make it back to the Bay for the appointment. Twelve weeks was when you found out your due date.

  She had cried when we saw the baby on the monitor. I had had ultrasounds before the twelve weeks because of the hematoma, but all they would tell me when they looked in there was whether the baby was okay, their heart rate and the condition of the hematoma. I knew what the baby looked like; I had seen it before, so it didn’t hit me the way it hit Silvia.

  It was nice, though. Being there with her made it feel a little special, I guess. Closer to Levi in a way. It had been just me and my mother my whole life. Even after she started taking in foster kids, our family never felt big. All this love was suddenly coming at me from these new people, from new directions, and it overwhelmed me. It wasn’t just Levi who had entered my life.

  It was his mother, Celeste, even Max a little bit, when he was in a good enough mood to have a conversation once in a while. I had known from the beginning that he had a little crush on me, but we both knew it wouldn’t come to anything. He never brought the pictures that Zahira had shown me of us up again, but I never heard about them anywhere else, so I let it slide. Levi’s closeness to his family had sort of left me bemused at first. I hadn’t known what to make of it, but now I knew it just made me love him even more.

  Silvia stayed with me the couple of days before Levi came back. She would head back to LA when he came back. She had me help her cook dinner the day he landed back in the Bay, teasing me that I would have to learn how to cook Argentinian food to keep her son well fed. Levi had arrived from the airport sometime during the preparation and sat in the kitchen with us. I had never asked Levi how much he talked to her about me, but it was probably safe to say a lot.

  A lot and long term. The thought of losing him shrunk with each passing day. I shouldn’t have been thinking it in the first place. It was me. I was thinking it. He wasn’t. He wasn’t giving me reasons to think he didn’t want me. I had been.

  I had been mad at Levi for making decisions on my behalf, but I couldn’t be mad at Zahira the same way for calling him when I was at the hospital, basically deciding that he was going to know about the baby before I made the decision to tell him. If she hadn’t, who was to say what would have happened? By shutting up about it, I had just let my fear stop me from pursuing what I wanted.

  When I started bleeding, I thought it was over. I thought that was the end and I wouldn’t have to tell him because I was losing it anyway. When we learned it wasn’t what I had thought it was, I was relieved and stressed out all at once. I didn’t want to lose it, but then I still had to break the news to Levi. He had shown up before I had figured out how to do it yet. He hadn’t had the reaction that I had ideally wanted, but he hadn’t had the one that I had dreaded he would. He was just scared for my health. He just wanted to take care of me. He was just upset that I had shut him out; the same thing I had felt when we first got together.

  More than that, he was worried about the baby too. He cared about the baby. He was excited about the baby. He was going to have the baby with me. In the beginning, I thought he was just doing it because he didn’t want to ask me to get rid of it, but when he started absently placing his hand on my stomach, and asking me what I thought about names, I knew it wasn’t just for me. He had told me about the sort of father Jackson Strickland had been to him and his siblings. Something told me it was one aspect in which he definitely wasn’t going to follow in his footsteps.

  Silvia teased her son relentlessly through dinner when she wasn’t gushing over ultrasound images of the baby. She suggested us abandoning New York as an idea completely and just moving to LA so we could live near her. We would have to have the conversation eventually, and I could sympathize, but the kid would have a grandmother in New York too. We still had some time to think. Besides, it was New York, not New Zealand, right?

  After she left, Levi cleared the table, telling me to rest on the couch. He joined me when he was done, bringing me a mug of hot water with honey and lemon. Didn’t come close to coffee or booze, but it tasted good.

  “How’s that? Too sweet?” he asked.

  “No, it’s delicious. Thank you. How was your flight?”

  “Long. Oh, I have a present for you,” he said, pulling something out of his pocket. The box was the wrong shape and wrong type for what I couldn’t help thinking it might be, but I thought it anyway.

  “What is it?” I asked, pulling the lid off. It was a key. Not a normal key that went in a door. It was like the key I had seen his assistant use when she was letting me into his penthouse in New York. One of those access keys that you used in the elevator to give you access to private floors. It was a key to his house. I hadn’t been back there since the weekend we had spent together in New York, but it still surprised me.

  “I told you I wanted us to live together,” he said.

  “We never talked about me moving back to New York with you after that weekend.”

  “I know. I know your life is here right now, but I want you to have it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t live there, I want you to feel like it’s your home too. You have a key. You can come and go as you please.”

  “There’s no chance you’ll move to California for me?” I asked, more to see what he’d say than an actual request.

  “I’d do anything for you,” he said, brushing the back of his hand on my cheek.

  “What about moving to Brooklyn?”

  “Hm. Anything but that,” he said smiling. I kissed him, and it was supposed to be sweet, but he had been holding back all evening. He had been on his best behavior when his mother was there, but now we were alone. My pelvic rest had been over for a little while, but I hadn’t tried anything. Partly out of fear, but also because I didn’t want to waste my first orgasm in weeks on my hand or a vibrator.

  He picked me up and walked us to the bedroom, setting me down on the bed before he climbed on top of me. His restraint quickly expired from there. His hands and mouth were on me at the same time pulling clothes loose, his and mine, like he couldn’t get us naked fast enough. I was in a dress so that came off easy. Most of the buttons on his shirt were lost trying to get it off.

  “I feel like we should start slow,” I said.

  “I haven’t touched you in weeks; I cannot do slow,” he said.

  “I don’t want it to be over before we’ve begun.”

  “When have I ever given you a reason to worry about that?” he asked, smirking. True. I surrendered, letting him take me. Once our clothes were off his tongue was between my legs, darting in and out of me quickly. His thumb rotated firm circles over my clitoris, just heightening the quick, shallow, erotic penetration.

  I was coming, grinding against his face in seconds. He had to hold me down on the bed so I’d s
top moving. He didn’t stop when I came, letting his mouth take over from his hand on my clit and sliding two fingers inside me. He sucked and licked slower, but like he said, he hadn’t touched me in weeks. I didn’t stand a chance. I felt wild with desire. There was no holding off when my second orgasm came. I screamed, feeling it shoot through me, just made stronger as he continued to lick me as I rode it out.

  I pushed him away clamping my thighs together. If he made me come again so soon after the other two, I’d pass out.

  “Levi… stop,” I gasped. He leaned into me kissing my forehead, then my lips.

  “Too much?” he asked slyly, gently prying my thighs apart and settling between them again. He kissed me languorously, letting me taste myself on his tongue. His hard cock was pressed against my stomach.

  “Let me make you come,” I said, reaching between us and stroking him.

  “Not like that. I want you to milk me dry with your pussy, sweetheart,” he growled.

  He held himself over me and filled me up, thick and smooth. He felt incredible pressing against my walls. It had been way too long. I had missed this. His weight above me and his length inside me. His smell, his hard, muscled body. They were vivid in my fantasies and dreams, but overwhelming in reality; completely possessing me, rendering me helpless.

  “Fuck me, you’re so tight,” he said like we had never had sex before. He thrust into me slowly, his strokes long and deep. He looked at me, staring directly into my eyes. I fought to keep my gaze leveled with his; it was so intense. He was there. He was open, and he was present, he was inside of me, but I felt like I was inside of him too. Pushing my legs up behind the knee, the head of his cock stroked the spot inside me he had stimulated with his fingers earlier. The spot that made me writhe and moan underneath him. I felt him speed up, his stroke becoming harder to control the closer he got to coming.