by Amy Brent
“Nia?”
Another voice spoke my name, and this one I recognized too – but instead of relief it sent panic through my system, and I jumped away from Nate so fast it was like someone had sent a shock from his body to mine. Mom was standing there, frowning at us, the chatter and laughter from the party beyond leaking through the door. She was outlined in the dim golden light so I couldn’t see the expression on her face, but I got the feeling it wasn’t exactly approving.
“What are you doing out here?” She demanded, striding towards me. I knew that I had gone bright red. That was my curse, not being able to hide my emotions when I needed to – I glanced over at Nate who had already slotted comfortably back into the cool, calm, casual mood that he seemed to adept at. He stepped forward to mitigate the situation, taking control in that way of his that made my heart flip-flop.
“Nia was just feeling a little faint,” Nate explained, placing a hand on my shoulder – it could have been construed for platonic if you didn’t know any better, but it sent this sharp shudder through my system and I almost forgot that my mother was standing there at all.
“She came outside to get some air and I noticed that she wasn’t looking so hot so I came out to check that she was okay,” he finished up smoothly, as though it had been on the tip of his tongue since the moment he’d walked out here with me. My mother raised her eyebrows, obviously impressed.
“Well, that’s very gentlemanly of you,” she nodded, looking pleased. “Good to know that my husband picked such a winning partner for his business.”
“I try my best,” he bowed his head playfully and she let out a small laugh.
“And modest too, I see,” she smiled. Nate’s hand was still resting on my shoulder and I stepped away, knowing how easy it would have been to just let it sit there even longer. But I had noticed my mother’s eyes heading in that direction and knew we wouldn’t get away with it much longer.
“Are you feeling alright, Nia?” She asked, and I nodded, even though it was a lie. If anything, I was even more confused than I had been only a few minutes before, when I had been so sure that I would never see Nate again in my life. But now he was here and he wanted me but we had another reason that we couldn’t so much as lay a hand on each other, and it just didn’t feel entirely fair.
“Come on, let’s get back to the party,” Mom suggested, grabbing my hand. “I’m sure there’s lots of people my husband would like to introduce you to, Nathaniel.”
“Sounds great,” Nate nodded, and the two of us exchanged a look as we headed back inside the party. Was this really happening? And if it was, what the hell were the two of us meant to do about it?
Chapter Twelve
I was packing my stuff slowly, just like I had back home, because once again I didn’t want to leave but knew that I didn’t really have that much of a choice. I needed to get out of here, to leave Nate behind again while I was ahead – even if it pained me to think about being so far from him once more, I knew there was no choice. It was the best thing for both of us. Even if he didn’t know it yet. Even if I wasn’t sure that I would ever truly believe what I kept telling myself.
Because even now, sitting here amongst the rubble of my room, it was hard to actually believe that getting out of this place was the best thing for me. I knew Nate would be in town for a few days longer, and that the two of us could easily sneak in a meet-up if that’s what we wanted. We had swapped numbers – something we’d failed to do while we were just fooling around at the office – and we’d been texting practically non-stop. Jokes, flirtations, maybe even a little more than that. But I knew it had to stay at arm’s length. I knew I was asking for trouble even going that far. And yet, there was some small, sure part of me that didn’t want any of it to stop.
Why would I? I didn’t much believe in fate or destiny or any of that kind of crap, but there was something undeniable about the fact that he had rocked up back in my life just like that after so much time apart. As though the two of us had willed it into being. As though the world had seen the two of us, so far apart, and seen the energy we were both pouring into being back together once more and decided to let us catch a break. Even now, thinking about him, sitting in the middle of my childhood bedroom floor, I found myself smiling broadly despite myself. Even though I knew I had to get out of here and had to leave him and have to pretend that none of this had ever happened.
I found myself going through it all again in my head, checking to see if there was a loophole that I had somehow missed. But I knew there wasn’t. I had been over and over and over and over every detail of this in my head so many times I felt as though my brain my shatter and break under the stress of all of it, and I hadn’t found one little thing that meant that this could somehow work. He was my father’s business partner. And that meant that, no matter how strongly I found myself drawn to him or how much I wanted to believe that the two of us could make something work, that whatever it was between us was doomed to fail and I needed to accept that for the two of us.
I clutched my stomach – I still felt like shit, the nausea that had consumed me the last few days hitting me in waves that felt as though they were going to straight knock me off my feet. They seemed to have gotten worse since I’d seen Nate at the gala, and I assumed that he had something to do with them, that this was my body trying to warn me that he was close and that I should keep my guard up. Well, it hadn’t worked. I had still been drawn to him, pathetically attached to him, as soon as I’d laid eyes on him again.
Or maybe it was my period finally coming. I paused for a moment as I folded one of my shirts, and tried to count out the days since my period had last come – was I a week late or two weeks? It was hard to remember with any kind of clarity, as things had been such a mess that I hadn’t exactly been doing a great job of keeping an eye on my cycle. I checked the date on my phone, closed my eyes, and counted backwards. Yeah, okay, I was two weeks late. So, that wasn’t great news on top of everything else.
I continued to fold the shirt, trying to ignore the twist of sickness in my stomach once more. Maybe I just needed something to eat, but nothing that I knew we would have in the kitchen sounded anything close to good to me. I carefully put the shirt in my bag and stared down at it for a second, the purple fabric blurring in the corners of my vision. No appetite, sickness, late period. I was adding the pieces together in my head, and I knew damn well what the tallied up to.
I should just take a test. Just to be on the safe side. It didn’t have to be some big, crazy deal – no, it could just be a little thing, something that I did to make sure I could walk out of this place without looking back. A confirmation that nothing was attaching me to Nate beyond the new deal he’d struck with my father. As soon as I was done with this then I could focus on going home and setting up my life once more, a life that didn’t involve Nate or Matt or any of them.
I had a pregnancy test in the bathroom – don’t ask me why, I was a seriously neurotic teenager and as soon as I had started hooking up with dudes I had begun keeping pregnancy tests around the house just to make sure that I wasn’t going to find myself caught out. I had taken at least three that I could remember over the course of my sexual career, and all of them had come up negative, thank God, especially considering the guys I had been seeing at the time. I was sure I was safe this time around, but now that the thought was in my head I knew I wouldn’t be able to shake it unless I checked once and for all.
I made my way into the bathroom that was attached to my bedroom and rustled through the cupboard for a moment – it was like going through my high school make-up bag, a handful of old shiny lip glosses falling from the shelf they’d been gathering dust on and some bright purple eyeshadow that I had been convinced I had looked the shit in catching my eye. But eventually I came across what I was looking for – an opened pack of a half-dozen tests, with one left. Damn, I had taken more of these than I thought. I pulled out the last one and checked that it was still in-date and wasn’t going to give
me some crazy-erroneous reading. Nope, we were good. My heart was hammering in my chest as I went to use it, slowly peeling it out of the packaging as though that would keep me from having to look at the results a little longer. I knew I’d be fine. We had always used condoms, and what were the chances of getting pregnant when you were using condoms? Like, one percent? Maybe two? I would have to be ridiculously unlucky to turn up a positive result here. Ridiculously so.
I tapped my feet on the floor in a random rhythm and tried to ignore the fact that my scalp was prickling with discomfort as I sat on the toilet and waited for the results to come in. I still felt sick, but this time I knew what it was about – every time I took a test like this one I found myself in a state of panic, no matter how unlikely it was that I was actually pregnant. I mean, the chances of it happening would have been crazy-small. But then, I reminded myself, what were the chances of Nate turning out to be the guy that my father had formed a business deal with? The odds on that had to be pretty slim, and yet it had still happened, the two of us finding our way back to each other even when we both wanted nothing more than a break from one another.
I stared at the ceiling, counting down the seconds in my head, and then slowly, finally, I looked down at the stick once more. And I blinked.
No. No.
It couldn’t be right. It had to be some kind of mistake. That was the only explanation for something like this, that there had been some malfunctions in the stick and I would have to call the manufacturers and get my money back and find some way for this not to be happening. Oh God. My pulse had picked up so quickly that I felt as though my heart was going to bust right out of the front of my chest. I couldn’t handle this. I couldn’t take it.
I knew, as well, that all of this added up to the truth. I might not have wanted it to be the case but there was no denying the fact that everything pointed towards me being pregnant – the way I’d been feeling, the lack of period, and now the test. And it had to be Nate’s. There was no question of that in my mind, no matter how badly I wanted it to be someone else’s. He was the only guy that I’d had sex with since my last period, and he was the only feasible father to this little baby that was growing inside of me.
That thought was enough to get me to finally throw up – I whirled around and made it just in time, heaving up what felt like the entirety of my guts into the pan in front of me. I gripped the sides of the toilet and gasped for air, and wondered if this was what my rock-bottom felt like. Trying to deal with the fact that I was pregnant by a man who everyone knew shouldn’t have been laying a finger on a girl like me, trying to pretend that it wasn’t happening. What was I going to tell him?
Then the dark thought flitted over my brain space. I could just not tell him. He didn’t need to know, really. I could easily take care of this myself, deal with what was to come without him by my side. Whether I decided to keep it or not, I could deal with that without him. Couldn’t I? If I wanted to. I imagined me, back at that apartment, rocking a baby in my arms in the middle of the night. I could do it, if I really wanted to. I just didn’t really want to.
No. I had to tell him. I was sick of us constantly lying to each other, constantly finding ways to squirm out of responsibility when it came to one another, whether it was him hiding from me after we’d shared that kiss in the street or me about to flee back across the country away from him to deal with facing up to my feelings. This had to be different. This had to be more than just the two of us and our stupid back-and-forth. I put my hand on my stomach, gingerly, as though I half-expected to feel something their already even though I knew that would be ridiculous. There was another life in this now, another creature, someone else to whom our bullshit back-and-forth mattered. I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to centre myself. None of this made sense to me. None of it clicked in my head. And yet, I was going to have to find a way to make it click, because I needed to be together enough to get in touch with Nate and tell him what the hell had just happened here.
I got to my feet slowly and looked in the mirror, and for a moment I struggled to recognize myself. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. This kind of thing, it had never been who I was – sure, I had been careful when I was with Nate, but this was still the kind of shit that happened to someone other than me. Someone careless and reckless, someone who threw caution to the wind all the time and hooked up with whoever they wanted whenever they wanted to. I couldn’t connect the person looking back at me in the mirror with the knowledge of what was happening to me in that moment, even though I knew that was ridiculous.
Because what kind of person had I become since I had met Nate? I had become the kind of woman who hooked up with her hot boss because it seemed like it would be fun, the kind of woman who got pregnant from a guy that she barely knew and had only just reconnected with. I wasn’t the kind of woman I had been a few months ago, the one who lived that boring life with an asshole boyfriend and looked over all the rough edges in the hopes of making them disappear. No, here I was, stuck in the rough edges, stuck in the bad parts. And I was just going to have to find some way to make it work.
I reached for my toothbrush and scrubbed the taste of where I’d just thrown up out of my mouth. That was a start. I was going to get myself feeling more like a human being, and then I was going to pack the rest of my stuff – and fuck, then I was going to make sure that I got rid of this pregnancy test so my mother didn’t stumble across it at the worst possible time and find out that I was pregnant before I wanted her to. If I ever wanted her to. No, I would cross that bridge when I came to it, no point getting hung up on hypotheticals for the time being. I would get myself together, and then I would find Nate and I would tell him that the two of us had something to talk about. And hopefully, hopefully, he would be able to help me through the nightmare that was exploding in my head. I had never dealt with anything like this before, and all I wanted was to crawl back into my bed and pretend none of it was happening.
I splashed some water on my face and looked at myself in the mirror again. There. That would do it. I could see myself once more, the resolve flashing in my eyes. I took a deep breath and shot one more look at the test, like it might have changed it’s mind since I last looked, but no, there it was, still showing me the truth I didn’t want to accept. But I was going to have to if I wanted to move forward.
Chapter Thirteen
I drummed my feet on the floor of the taxi and felt a twist of sickness in my stomach once more, but I knew it wasn’t about the pregnancy this time. It was about seeing Nate again, after all this time apart. About having him to myself once more. And I had to admit that I couldn’t wait to get my hands on him.
Not that there was going to be anything of that nature going on, some prim part of me reminded me for the dozenth time that morning. I was there for a reason, and it wasn’t to get laid. Much as it was tempting to give in to that.
Nate had passed on the address of the hotel he was staying at when I had contacted him, and I imagined that he likely thought I was coming down there to finally give in to how much I wanted him. And, honestly, I would be lying if I said that had never crossed my mind. I did want him, badly – it was just that the wanting him was all tied up in the stuff that he didn’t know yet, in the stuff that I had kept from him so far, the stuff that I knew he needed to hear from me.
“We’re here,” the driver remarked from the front of the cab, and I blinked and brought myself back to reality and realized we were sitting outside a fancy-ass hotel on the outskirts of the town. I wondered how long we’d been sitting there, how long the driver had let me sit with my racing, rambling thoughts before he got tired of watching the meter count up and decided to boot me out. I handed him some money, not bothering to check how much, and scrambled out of the car, standing in front of the building for a moment before heading in to the lobby. I could do this. I had to do this. I wasn’t sure whether it was fear or excitement or some combination of the two, but I could hardly put one foot in front of the ot
her as I approached the front desk.
“Hi, I’m here to see Nate Richards?” I asked, my voice sounding decidedly higher-pitched than it normally did. The receptionist eyed me for a moment and then picked up the phone, called him, and checked that he was expecting me.
“Go ahead,” she waved her hand towards the elevator. “He’s expecting you. Room four-oh-two.”
“Thanks,” I nodded to her as politely as I could, considering the fact that she was still hitting me with a dirty look for no reason. Maybe she thought I was a prostitute? But then, she’d seen Nate – she knew that guys that hot didn’t need to pay for what they could get for free.
I stood in the elevator and it whisked me up to his room and I shifted my weight from one foot to the other as I tried to muster up the resolve that I had put in place in the car. I wasn’t going to hook up with him. Well, maybe I was, but I at least had to tell him the real reason for my visit first. Or maybe –
The doors slid open and I hurried down the corridor, stilling my overthinking thoughts. They weren’t going to do anything helpful. I would just let what was going to happen, happen, and that would be that. I hesitated for a moment when I came to his door, lifted my knuckles, and then knocked.
He pulled the door open a second later and I forgot about everything that I had worked so hard to hold together. I knew I couldn’t resist him. Why in the hell had I ever thought I could? Look at him – the mess in his hair, the stubble on his jaw, the easy, casual t-shirt that clung to his arms and his-