HUGE STEPS

by Stephanie Brother

  The very last thing I want to talk about is food at the moment. “I think it’s the sushi,” I mumble, trying so hard to concentrate. “And I did do up the last advanced order today. There were only two so far.”

  The look Shay gives me is unmistakable and the possible reason for my tummy woes hits me like a ton of bricks. “Your favorite California spring rolls are making you feel sick?”

  Even though my mouth is now as dry as cotton, panic surging through me like molten metal, I wipe my hands on my apron and shrug. Morning sickness. Ugh. I shake my head as though that’s gonna work to remove the shudder-inducing realization. “Well, I mean maybe they’re just not cooked well enough. They have a new chef in there, and I noticed last time that the burger was a little extra greasy, so maybe that’s why it’s making me feel gross.” It’s the lamest response in the long history of me and Shay’s friendship, so I’m not at all surprised when she doesn’t buy it.

  “God, when I was pregnant with Kevin? Ugh. I remember I couldn’t eat Thai food for the whole nine months and I even waited after that until I was absolutely positive it wouldn’t make me sick anymore. It was that bad. Imagine…no red curry for over nine months! I swear I’m not having any more kids…”

  Shay cuts the next strip of ribbon, obviously waiting for me to chime in, but when I don’t, she turns slowly to look at me. “But that was just me, and this is probably just some stomach bug or something, probably. Right?”

  Almost instinctively, I fight the urge to touch my stomach, even though I know I won’t find anything there yet. All the blood drains from my face. In fact, it feels like all the everything in my body has just drained away, leaving me as a sad sack of skin on the floor. I take a deep breath, trying to remain calm. But all I can think is, fuck…fuck…fuck…

  “You’re not pregnant?” Her voice isn’t as strong as it usually is.

  Shay’s hand slips from its usual place on her hip, and she reaches out to touch my shoulder, concern plain as day on her face. “I mean, it’s not possible, right?” She lowers her voice, checking to make sure Dandie and the customer up front can’t hear us. “You and Cody were…being all weird and chaste, right? Didn’t you tell me something about Cody wanting to wait until the actual wedding to have sex again?” There’s a pause and then, “Fuck, girl. Do we need to go get you a pregnancy test?”

  The only thing that is making any sense in the world right now is snipping the ends off the stems of the cascade’s flowers—because things like pregnancy tests just don’t compute.

  It wouldn’t be Cody’s baby. It couldn’t be Cody’s baby…because Shay’s right. Cody had been acting weird for a couple of months leading up to the engagement party. He kept pushing off sex with me, claiming it would make it even ‘hotter’ if we held back as much as we could until the actual wedding. I wasn’t a fan of the idea at all, but there really wasn’t much of a choice given to me.

  I crunch the numbers in my head. I’ve had my period since he mentioned that, twice, in fact. My stomach fills with lead, practically bringing me to my knees right here in the middle of the shop.

  If there’s a baby, it can’t be Cody’s baby.

  It would be Jamie’s. Or Jared’s. And there’s no way of telling which one…

  “We need to go. I need to get out of here right now,” I say desperately, clinging to the edge of the counter. “Where’s the closest place I can find a pregnancy test?”

  16

  Jared

  “We need to figure this out.” Jamie steps into the mudroom, throwing his tool bag onto the bench. “I couldn’t concentrate worth shit today. And I’m fucking tired of it.”

  “I know,” I reply, sighing. “I’m the same.”

  I can tell just by looking at my brother’s face that he’s frustrated and I get it.

  “So, what are we going to do, then?”

  Heading into the living room, I drop down onto the couch and rub my temples. It’s been a long day with Abi and my feelings for her on my mind.

  “Look at you. You look like shit!” Jamie exclaims. “We need to figure out what to do. Like, right now.”

  He’s not wrong. When Abi was just an impossible fantasy, I could push her to the back of my mind. I could pretend to myself that I was okay with how things were, but now I’m not. I know what it’s like to wrap her copper hair around my fingers and feel her soft, pale thighs around me. I know how it feels to have her fingers run through my hair. All of these torturous thoughts are circling around and around in my head, followed by the pang of jealousy that threads through them. Jamie and Abi on their own, laughing, kissing, holding each other. It’s like some kind of macabre merry-go-round. Whatever the case may be, we have to establish that there is no separating us, at the very least. There is no way I could deal with being the third wheel.

  “Yeah, okay.” I stand up a few feet away from Jamie and pull out my phone.

  “Okay… What?”

  “We need to settle this now. No more skirting around it. I’m tired, you’re tired, and if we don’t go over there and tell Abigail what the deal is, it’s just going to keep going on like this. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t exactly sound like a walk in the park to me.”

  He nods. “All right. Good. We got a game plan going now. So we go over there and say what exactly.”

  He brings up a good point.

  “Ah, well, yeah. We should probably figure that out.” I scratch at the five o’clock shadow that I didn’t have the energy to shave off this morning.

  “We both want her, right?” he asks.

  “I think that’s the consensus here, yeah.”

  Jamie shrugs. “Then we tell her we get to share. That’s the only way things can work with us.”

  “We get to share? I don’t know, Jamie, I don’t want Abi thinking she’s just some kind of object to us. Like we’re fighting over a toy or something.”

  He frowns, his eyebrows drawing closer. “Well, what do we tell her, then? She needs to know the score…”

  Holding up my hand, I cut him off. “Yeah, I know, man. But it’s the way we phrase it, you know what I mean? It’s not us sharing her, it’s her sharing us. I don’t want us to come off like some a barbarian, that’s all. I don’t think that would go over well with her.”

  “All right, fine, but we do need her to be clear on that bit. She has to know that this is a combined thing, here. Both of us, or neither of us. I want her to know that we both feel the same for her, too.”

  It would be easy to think of anyone else’s feelings for Abi as less than mine, but the way Jamie’s eyes blaze under his furrowed brow is enough to remind me that’s not the case with him, my twin brother. “Right,” I agree, leaning up against the threshold of the doorway. “Now we just need to wait to for her to get home.”

  Jamie casually peeks through the blinds, before looking over his shoulder back at me. “That should be no problem. She’s walking up the sidewalk to her apartment right now.”

  “Let’s wait for a few minutes. Let her get sorted.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  We both sit on the sofa and stare at the TV which currently isn’t on. I turn to my brother and he’s biting his fingernails as though he’s nervous. My brother isn’t usually bothered by this kind of thing. He’s a take-it-leave-it kind of guy, I guess because there is never a shortage of women who are interested. With Abi, though, he’s different. He’s not his usual cocky self.

  “Stop looking at me like that,” he mumbles under his breath just loud enough for me to hear him.

  “What?”

  “You know what.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  He shoots me his trademark pissed off look. “You’re looking at me like you’re wondering why the hell I’m so bothered about all this.”

  I shrug, used to Jamie’s ability to read my mind. It’s a twin thing, I guess.

  “Abi’s special,” he says sternly. “She’s always been different. Maybe it’s beca
use I’ve had the chance to get to know her for so long. I don’t know. All I know is that if she says no, I don’t know what the fuck I’m gonna do about it. I don’t think I can stand by and let her start dating another one of these fuckwits who has no idea what an amazing girl she is or how to treat her. I don’t want to just be her stepbrother anymore.”

  I nod. “It’s how I feel too.”

  “That’s good then, isn’t it? We both feel the same way. No jealousy. No divisiveness. This is what I want.”

  I grin at my brother. “Guess we’d better get over there and convince that woman to be our girl.”

  We make our way over to Abi’s apartment. The warmth of the sun is perfect against my skin. As I stroll beside my brother, a sense of ‘rightness’ settles over me. There are days when I think that Jamie has the capacity to drive me insane, but I don’t know what I’d do if one of us found a girl and wanted to move on without the other. I’ve never been without him. Not even for a day. I know it’s clichéd to say but he’s like my other half. If we can convince Abi that we want her, and not just for a fling, maybe this is the answer. I’ll have to share the woman I want but that means that I get to keep my brother close too. It seems like the ideal solution.

  There’s only one problem.

  Abi.

  She’s been so resistant. The thing is we haven’t told her how we feel. Not really. I guess this is make or break.

  Abi makes next to no noise though, when she slowly pulls the door open, her eyes fixated on a spot somewhere between me and my brother. Something feels off the moment she shifts away from us to let us inside, still not quite meeting our eyes. It dawns on me that she may be feeling something too, especially having kissed both me and Jamie in the same twenty-four hours, but I keep it to myself as we head inside after her.

  “Hey, Abi.” Jamie breaks the silence.

  “Hi,” she replies softly, fidgeting with the lace on her shirt. If I didn’t know any better, I would think she looked like she might cry. This is not good.

  “Abigail… Abi. We wanted to come over and talk to you about what’s been going on –”

  “Between the three of us,” Jamie adds.

  It’s here where I notice how flushed her cheeks are, but I don’t want my concern for her to get in the way of the conversation. “Yes, we need to talk about that. Me and Jamie have been talking about it, and we have to be truthful with you. This whole going back and forth between being with us, and then not wanting to be with us, but then more kissing and uh,” I clear my throat, “and things like that…we can’t keep doing this.”

  “And it’s not that we don’t want to do the kissing and the things like that,” Jamie adds his eyes darting to mine for a second, sending what I imagine to be violent death threats via his mind. “But we need to know where we stand…and where you stand.”

  “We both have feelings for you, but I think you already know that…and we’re not willing to let our feelings for you come in between us,” I explain taking another step closer to Abi. “The only way this could work is if you are willing to be with both of us.”

  Jamie steps closer to her, his gaze intense. “We are a package deal, simple as that and we don’t want you to feel like you have to choose between us. You have both of us, however you’d like us. It probably sounds complicated, but it’s —”

  Abi shakes her head, some kind of panic coloring her features. “No, it’s not that. I just… Well, I don’t know who…” her voice trails off, and I take the opening, suddenly remembering the guilty look she had when she first answered the door.

  “Abi, you don’t have to feel bad about kissing both of us. There’s no need to feel guilty. We could make it work, I promise you,” I say as her eyes widen. Taking her clammy hand in mine.

  She stares down at our hands and then slips hers out of mine, turning to pick up a small glass of water behind me. I don’t do anything but watch as she slowly drains the glass.

  “I have something I need to tell you,” she stutters, chewing on her bottom lip like crazy. All I want to do is to soothe it, run my tongue along it and hold her in my arms again. I don’t understand why she looks like she’s about to run away.

  “What? What’s wrong?” Jamie asks, closing up the space between the three of us.

  She takes a deep breath and says something that blows my fucking mind.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  17

  Jamie

  I’m completely frozen, probably stuck in this position with my jaw unhinged, looking like a goddamn cartoon character, forever.

  Pregnant.

  Shit. With Cody’s baby? What the hell is she going to do now?

  Abi squints up at us, waiting.

  Waiting for a response. What can I say? Congratulations? Like fuck I can.

  This is the woman I want to be mine.

  There’s barely any space between me and Abi and Jared, but it feels like we all just got put on one of those carnival rides where the floor drops away from your feet because you’re spinning so fast. I don’t get how everything is standing so still, so silent, but my insides feel like I’m in a blender.

  Jared comes to his senses first. “Do you…” He clears his throat and tries again. Do you know who the father is?”

  I haul off and punch him right in his damn arm. What the fuck is his problem? “What the hell, man? You can’t just go around asking people who knocked them up!”

  Abi sticks up for him, holding her hands up and stepping in between us. It’s okay, Jamie. It’s a totally valid question. And I get why you’re asking,” she says quickly. “This is so difficult to tell you.”

  Jared puts his hand on Abi’s shoulder. “It’s okay. Just take your time.”

  “It’s can’t be Cody,” she says softly. “We didn’t do anything…you know…sexually in a few months.”

  I stare at her. Not Cody’s. That’s good. But who’s is it? A flash of the night we all had sex crosses my mind. The feeling of pushing inside her. It was so fucking good…I wasn’t wearing a rubber.

  Fuck.

  Abi shifts from foot to foot, looking a little green. Is she feeling sick? Sick from the pregnancy or sick from having to tell us. “I don’t know…who the father is?”

  For the second time, my stomach seems to drop. Could it be someone else’s? Maybe Jared and I weren’t the only men she’s been drowning her sorrows in. The thought makes me want to punch the fucking wall.

  “What do you mean?” Jared says quietly.

  “I mean…neither of you wore a condom, did you? That means it could be either of you.”

  It takes a few seconds for her words to sink in. Seems I wasn’t the only reckless fucker that night. “You didn’t wear a condom?” I turn to Jared. He shakes his head looking sheepish. We’re usually meticulous about using contraception. Neither of us wanted to have any kids and not be around for them full time. We had that enough when we were growing up.

  There’s this weird quiet moment where I’m looking at Jared, Jared looking at me.

  He shakes his head and I think his expression must be a mirror image of mine. We’ve fucked up. I can’t imagine how Abi must be feeling right now.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to her. “We should have been more careful.”

  Abi shakes her head. “I was there too. I could have told you.”

  “We were all lost in the moment,” Jared says gently.

  I take in a breath to give myself a moment to gather my thoughts. I’m not usually good at dealing with ‘feelings’. They’re too subtle for me to wrap my head around, but I get that she must be feeling worried right now. “What are you thinking, Abi? How do you feel about it?”

  She gazes up at me, her eyes glassy and my heart fucking shatters. I don’t want her to cry. Not now. Not ever.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Shocked. I mean, I was supposed to be getting engaged and now that’s over and this…” She puts her hand protectively over her stomach and I get a fucking lump in my throat. “
I have a life inside of me, and I didn’t think it would ever happen this way…you know…without planning it.”

  Jared nods. “Do you need anything? Is there anything we can do for you?”

  “Whatever you need, Abi,” I agree.

  The look of nervousness on Abi’s face fades into something less panicky “I don’t know what I need right now…other than time…and space. I just can’t get my mind to wrap around what’s happening…and I need to think things through.” She pauses. “But I appreciate you guys worrying about me. I’m trying to keep it all straight in my head, you know?”

  The way she says it doesn’t sound ominous but it still doesn’t stop the way my stomach twists in on itself. What exactly does she need time to think about?

  “We can give you that,” Jared replies, stepping aside and giving her some actual space. Wait, we can?

  I find myself nodding and doing the same, despite the way everything in me is screaming to tell her that I want her and I want this baby. “Yeah, whatever you need, Abi,” is what my mouth actually says.

  Abi bites down softly on her bottom lip. “Thank you. I’m so tired right now. It’s so early but it’s really affecting me. I think I’m going to make myself something quick to eat and call it a night. I’ll call you guys when I know…when I work things out, okay?”

  What she’s saying is so vague. How can we walk away like this? Abi’s not herself and with all the shit that she’s been through over the past few months, I don’t want to leave her to deal with this by herself.

  We’re back to not knowing. We’re no further forward but what can we do? I turned to Jared, desperate for his usual relaxed way with the words.

  “Yes, it’s definitely been a long day. For all of us. Just let us know whenever you’re ready to talk again.”

  I’m the first to go in for a hug, but it’s awkward — somehow being too intimate and not intimate enough for me — so I end up giving her a quick squeeze and pat on her back. The smell of her sweet shampoo tickles my nose, making me want to pull her closer back to me, but she’s already stepped out of range and Jared gives her a pretty weird-looking hug as well, the strange look on his face giving him away. He hates the idea of waiting just as much as I do.