by Amy Brent
Because I had been pretty damn sure from our last conversation that the two of us were heading towards finally giving things a shot. Maybe I had been a little too keen to hear that, or maybe he had led me on without intending to, but I could have been damn certain that everything he told me was leading up to an “and now I realize that I have to be with you and that there was no way in hell I could ever be with anyone else”. That was certainly what my whole thing had been heading towards, and now that it hadn’t turned out the way I planned I felt somewhat lied to.
Which was unfair. Because I had gone over that conversation we’d had, the one where we’d told each other the truth for the first time, and had realized that I had all but told him that I had only gotten together with him because I wanted someone to take my mind off some drama in my personal life. Maybe he felt used or hurt by that. I wouldn’t have blamed him – I sure as hell would have. I had scanned every word that came out of my mouth that day, lying awake at night and trying to figure out what I could have done or said differently to get the answer I wanted, but I figured that all of it was the truth and he deserved to hear it in full. Every time my brain made another go-around, I reminded myself that if I wasn’t honest with him then we would have been starting the relationship on uneven ground, and that was just asking for trouble. No, I either wanted to be with him properly and without holding back, or I didn’t want to be with him at all. It just seemed like he had already chosen the latter option for us.
And that was driving me a little crazy. Because I was sure something had brought us together – every inch of the relationship to date seemed to have been brought together by some impossible coincidence, a one-in-a-million chance that had dumped us back together, again and again, as though the universe was urging us to catch on already and figure out that we were meant to be together. I felt as though I had already gotten to that point, and now I was just waiting for Nate to catch the hell up already and jump on board. From our first meeting when I had been sent up to his office to drop off those papers, to trying to end things, to meeting each other once more at the launch event, to the pregnancy; the world had thrown everything at the wall in an attempt to get the two of us to stick together.
But he was still hurting from his ex-wife. That much was obvious, even to me. As much as he tried to play the carefree bachelor with this crazy-luxurious lifestyle and a worldview that seemed more focused on success and victory than it did on anything else, there was this soft side to him, one that he had exposed to his ex and that was clearly still hurting from the pain of her leaving him. With me and Matt, I had always been careful to keep him at arm’s length, to play-act being in love for him and for all our friends and for myself, but I had never truly fallen for him, not the way I had fallen for Nate. Nate had loved fiercely before, and it had ended in agony for him. I could understand why he didn’t want to do it again, even if it hurt to accept that.
So I tried to focus on building my life outside of him. Applying for jobs, seeing my friends – it was all practice and preparation for what I thought was inevitable, his dumping of me as soon as he got the chance. He was still hurting and still scared and I wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t want to do that all over again. Even if I wasn’t sure that I would ever stop hoping he would change his mind and finally come round to what the two of us shared together.
In fact, I was applying for jobs when I got the phone call. I had been expecting to hear back from one of the companies I put in an application for, so I wasn’t exactly surprised to get a call. I yawned and reached for my phone, running my fingers through my hair and glancing at the time on the computer. It was past eight, later than I thought any company would be getting in touch with me, but I would take it if it meant a chance to get my foot in the order. I cleared my throat and straightened my back, even though I knew they couldn’t see me, and picked up the phone, only to see that it was my Dad calling. My shoulders sank. Oh, well. We had caught up when he had been in the city a couple of weeks ago and I thought that would be enough to keep him at bay for a while, but evidently not. I took the call, lifting the phone to my ear and putting on a smile.
“Hey, dad,” I greeted him, but before I could say anything else his furious voice came crashing down the line, taking me by surprise.
“You’re fucking pregnant?” He exclaimed, and my stomach dropped. What in the name of holy hell? How did he know that?
“What are you talking about?” I answered as smoothly as I could, given that my brain was lunching itself off in a thousand different directions at what he’d just said to me. Had Mom found the pregnancy test in the bathroom? No, I had been careful to dispose of it to make sure that that didn’t happen.
“Nathan called me,” he snarled. My mouth hung open, halfway through a defense of myself, but I couldn’t come up with anything convincing. Nate had told him? What the fuck had he been thinking? And now I had to dive in and cover for the two of us, coming up with something a little bit more convincing than just gobsmacked silence.
“Oh yeah?” I prompted him, daring him to tell me more. “What did he tell you?”
“He told me everything about what happened between the two of you,” Dad went on, and I could hear the disbelief in his voice mixed with fury mixed with – a little sadness, if I wasn’t much mistaken. Well, I didn’t want to be an asshole, but I wasn’t going to let him speak to me like that.
“Okay,” I nodded, taking a deep breath. “Well, yeah. I am pregnant. And I’m keeping it. So-”
“You can’t do that,” Dad cut me off emphatically, and I rolled my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. I was so mad at Nate for dropping me in this without warning, and I still couldn’t figure out why he thought this was anything close to a good idea.
“Why not?” I rounded on him. I felt like a kid again when he told me off, but I wasn’t just going to docilely lie back and take all this from him. I was a grown-ass woman and I didn’t want to be spoken to like a child. Dad was going to have to learn, at some point soon, that I was an adult and that I could make decisions for myself and there was nothing he could do to stop me. If he wanted to be in this kid’s life, and I had a feeling that he would, then he needed to get that through his head sooner rather than later.
“Because…” He trailed off, and it was clear that he’d snatched up the phone right after getting the information from Nate and hadn’t given much though to what he was actually going to say to me. “Because you spent so long getting your damn college education and planning to have a career and now that’s all down the drain.”
“Nate said he’s going to support me every way he can when the baby comes along,” I assured him. “And I’m not going to be sitting at home on my butt every day, trust me.”
“Are you guys even together?” He demanded. “You certainly didn’t seem it when-”
“I don’t know,” I cut him off swiftly. It was too painful to consider that right now. “But that isn’t important.”
“I think it really fucking is,” he went on. I wondered where Mom was and if she knew about any of this yet. I had a feeling the answer was no, because I was pretty sure that she would have dived in to intervene in this phone call if she did. She wouldn’t have subjected me to this on top of the stress of everything else that was going on in my life right now.
“He’s good enough for you as a business partner, right?” I tried again, coming at it from a different angle. My father was a businessman, after all, and if I could appeal to that side of him maybe I could actually land him on my side for a change.
“That’s got nothing to do with this and you know it,” Dad replied firmly. “Besides, you really think I’d have gotten into this deal with him if I’d known about any of this?”
“Yeah, I think you would have, because you know that business and…everything else are completely removed from each other,” I argued as best I could. “Does any of this change what kind of businessman he is? How hard he’s worked to get where he is?”
“I�
�m not talking about him as the guy who runs that business,” Dad dismissed me once more. “I’m talking about him as the guy who got my daughter pregnant and won’t even do the decent thing-”
“What, you expect him to drop everything and marry me?” I demanded. “Really? What kind of world do you think we’re living in that that’s even a possibility? He’s offered to support me every way he can and that’s about the best I can ask for him, don’t you think?”
“You don’t know how hard it’s going to be,” He warned me, like he took great pleasure in letting me know how badly he disapproved of my decision. “You have no idea-”
“Yeah, you know what, I don’t!” I finally exclaimed back at him. “I have no fucking clue how difficult this is going to be and maybe all of this is a really dumb idea, but I’m going through with it now and I could really use the support of my family to help me get through it, okay, Dad?”
He fell silent, and I realized that I was breathing more heavily than I had been before. I had also gotten to my feet, waving my arm around wildly as I spoke; it was still frozen in the air in front of me and I slowly let it drop to my side, like I was backing down from a stand-off. I could hear him breathing down the end of the line, the rushes of static making my ear prickle as I waited for him to respond.
“You don’t know what you’re dealing with,” he repeated himself, as though he wasn’t convinced that I’d taken in the seriousness of his warning the first time around. “You have no idea, Nia. And if I can’t talk you out of it-”
“You can’t,” I cut him off, a little childishly, but I wasn’t going to let him come at me with that shit any more. I had made my decision and come to terms with it and was confident (if a little terrified) in what I had decided on, and I wasn’t going to let one stroppy phone call from my father change all that.
“Then I guess…” He trailed off and I held my breath as I waited for him to finish out that sentence.
“I guess I just have to hope you come to your senses,” he sighed, and then hung up the phone, leaving me standing in that apartment all by myself with the dead phone pinned to my ear. My stomach was churning again, but this time I knew it wasn’t the food.
Chapter Twenty
I dropped the phone on the couch and fell into my computer chair, tears pricking my eyes. I knew I shouldn’t let this get to me, but how could it not?
I just couldn’t figure out why Nate thought this was a good idea. Why he would have pulled this shit. He must have known that my father was going to blow up at me and this wasn’t exactly how I’d wanted my family to find out that we were going to have a new member before they knew it. But now it was out there and I knew that my parents (or my father, at least) were set against the choice that I’d made. I knew he would come around a little as time went on, but that had been a lot to come around from. He sounded actively angry at me, like I had betrayed him in some deep and unthinkable way.
There was a knock at the door, and for one insane second I was sure that my father had someone used his anger to power him all the way across the country to me so he could chew me out in person. I got to my feet slowly, as though I was half-expecting something to leap out on me, and peered through the peephole in the door. My heart exploded upwards when I saw who was out there waiting for me. Nate.
I pulled the door open, and the flood of feelings that hit me when I laid eyes on him properly almost knocked me off my feet – relief, anger, joy, confusion. He leaned down and pulled me into his arms and before I could think twice about it I wrapped my arms around him and let him hold me close, the two of us clinging to each other in that doorway as though we were the only things keeping each other pinned to the Earth. He pressed his face into my hair, inhaling deeply, like he was reminding himself of the parts of me he hadn’t been able to commit to memory while we’d been apart.
And then, reality came flooding back and I pulled away from him, planted my hands on my hips, and glared up at him.
“What the fuck did you think you were doing telling my father about us?” I demanded, my voice louder than I’d intended; he stepped over the threshold and pushed the door shut behind him, making it so my neighbors didn’t hear this entire confrontation. It was probably for the best – the people who lived in this place with me were gossips and I didn’t exactly want them knowing everything that was going on in my personal life right now.
“I’m sorry, I know I should have come to you first,” he shook his head. “I didn’t think he’d react as badly as he did, so I came down here as soon as I was off the phone with him-”
“Yeah, he called me as soon as he was done with you,” I raised my eyebrows at him. “He was fucking furious. He thinks that this is a terrible idea and says he wouldn’t have worked with you had he known about everything that was happening with us.”
“Yeah, that figures,” Nate winced. “Does he want to call off the deal?”
“He didn’t say anything about it,” I shrugged. “But I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Nate took a deep breath and nodded.
“Okay,” he replied at last, as though it was a simple as that. “That’s okay.”
I stared up at him for a long moment, trying to make sense of the words that had just come out of his mouth.
“What do you mean, it’s okay?” I demanded. “My father pretty much thinks I’ve ruined my life and oh, already knows how pregnant I am thanks to you. None of this is alright. Why did you do it?”
He didn’t reply for a second, and I was sure for as long as it lasted that he was about to walk out on me, that he had realized how detrimental all of this was going to be to him and was going to call my father and somehow take it all back. But he didn’t move.
“You’re right,” he conceded. “I should have told you about – I should have cleared it with you before I told your family about us.”
“You think?” I raised my eyebrows at him pointedly.
“I just wanted the slate to be clear for the two of us,” he explained as best he could. It was obvious, like it had been back in that apartment, that he wasn’t used to having these kinds of intense emotional conversations with anyone. I wondered how long after his wife had left it had been since he had really told someone the truth about the way he felt. He seemed to have worked so hard at tramping down his true feelings for so long. Maybe I should have expected him to act out in some way when it came to dealing with us.
“Clear slate?” I prompted him. “What does that mean?”
“I didn’t want there to be anything else that the two of us had to hide from if we were…if we were going to be together,” he explained haltingly. “And I went back and forth on it for so long, the thought of telling your father about it, but I figured that – shit, he’s going to find out one way or another that I was the one who put that baby in you-”
“Nice turn of phrase,” I teased, but he kept going anyway, like he was on a roll.
“And I couldn’t keep it from him forever, so I should just get it out in the open early enough that you know I value you and this and what we have over any business deal I could ever make,” he finished off breathlessly, as though he’d been carrying that around for longer than he realized. I fell silent, no snarky comments this time. I didn’t have anything to say to that. For once, I was completely out of words.
All I could do was stare up at him and try to make some sense of what he’d just told me. He had done it because he wanted to be with me. That was what he was telling me. After all this time, after all this mess, it was all out in the open because Nathan Richards wanted to be with me at last. A smile slowly broke over my face, despite everything that had happened that evening. I couldn’t believe it. It felt as though I had lifted a few feet off the ground, my feet trailing behind me as I stared up at him.
“Do you still want to do this?” Nate asked, and I could hear the fear in his voice and realized that he must have been terrified that I had changed my mind and didn’t want to be with him any more. I nodded at once
, still unable to dredge up the words to say it.
I leaned up and planted my lips against his, answering him in the only way I knew how to in that moment. He slipped his arms around my waist and pulled me close and for a second none of it mattered – not my furious father on the other end of the line, not the danger this posed to his company, not any of it. I could handle all of it as long as I could find myself back here in his arms at the end of it all.
I pulled back reluctantly, and pressed my forehead to his; he smelled so good, so much of him that it almost took me over. I wanted to take him straight through to my bedroom and remind myself exactly what it was about him that I had missed so badly, but I was so exhausted by everything that had happened that what I needed more than anything else was a good night’s sleep to try and deal with what had been happening the last couple of weeks.
“I’m so fucking glad you’re here,” I murmured, and he smiled.
“I’m glad you’ll let me be here,” He grinned widely in return. “I know I’ve messed you around, but I just-”
“Let’s not go over that shit again tonight, huh?” I cut him off, and he obligingly pressed a kiss to the middle of my forehead and stayed silent. I knew we would have to deal with all of that stuff tomorrow, but for the time being I just wanted to be happy that my man had finally accepted that he was, indeed, my man.