Baby Maker - A Secret Baby Sports Star Romance

by Rayner, Holly

  “I think leaving the Inquisitor over that piece was ethical,” I had replied, finally. It was the best answer I could come up with.

  “Do you stand by it?”

  I met Jim’s gaze, trying to keep my composure in the face of the difficult questions I couldn’t truly answer. “I think I have to,” I said. “I don’t have much choice, since it has my name on it.”

  It was as if Jim were trying to bait me, trying to force me to admit that I hadn’t written the story and that I had been disgraced for nothing.

  “Before that assignment, most of your work for the Inquisitor was not so…impressive, from a subject-matter standpoint,” Jim had pointed out.

  “I did the work that was assigned to me, and gave it as much effort as I would a juicier topic,” I countered. “I believe in paying my dues, and I’m willing to keep doing just that—but I want to know that there’s a destination.”

  The interview had gone over the thirty minutes I’d been quoted, but I’d known better than to expect to get a call back by the end of it. I’d continued applying for other newspapers as soon as I’d gotten home, hoping that I could land another interview. If nothing else, I’d thought, I would be more prepared the second time the questions came up.

  But I got form rejections from the papers and magazines I’d applied to; I didn’t get another interview for weeks. I tried to keep myself optimistic, tried to make myself believe that I would find the opportunity to get in somewhere, but time after time nothing came through. Sometimes I got the form rejections the very same day that I’d applied.

  I had to believe that it was Kent’s fault that I couldn’t get a foot in the door anywhere; I’d even gone so far as to try and see if anyone would take me on as a contractor for a month or two, until they were comfortable with my work, before hiring me, to no avail. I took on some freelance work outside of the industry to keep myself afloat, but it was barely enough to scrape together rent and pay the bills every month.

  I’d run out of newspapers to apply to; obviously, I would have to wait a while longer before I would no longer be publisher poison.

  Of course, there’s always the possibility that no one in the industry around here will hire you until Kent gets overthrown… I stopped that thought. If I had to relocate in order to get a decent job, that was going to have to wait. In the meantime, I’d started widening my net; three months after quitting, I needed a job, period. I gave in and started putting in applications at local businesses that had nothing to do with the publishing industry: since I’d waited tables in college, I applied to a few restaurants, some bars in the downtown area, and a few coffee shops and cafes, hoping that I could get a job to keep me in steady money while I worked off the period of my disgrace from the newspaper world.

  As if my trouble finding a job weren’t bad enough, almost as soon as I’d quit working at the Inquisitor, I’d started feeling seriously under the weather. At first I thought it was just the cold, and grieving over Finn and my career, but about mid-January, I started feeling queasy at random times of day. Jen had suggested I see her friend, who was a naturopath. I visited the guy, and he put me on a gluten-free diet, but that didn’t seem to make much of a difference.

  Alongside the rejection email from the last newspaper I could think to apply to, I’d gotten an invitation to interview with the manager of a cafe downtown. It was a serious comedown from my previous job, but considering the starting salary was $10 an hour plus tips, I didn’t think I could turn it down—especially since my pitches to clients on the freelance site I used weren’t getting me anything.

  I sat in my living room and drank a cup of coffee, going over everything that had happened. Even months later, it was hard to believe that there was absolutely nothing that I could do to clear my name—either with Finn or with the world at large—after what Kent had written.

  I had spent a lot of my suddenly discovered free time thinking about that very same thing. In theory, I could have gone to another newspaper, written a letter to the editor exposing Kent; but I was sure that he had meant it when he told me the Inquisitor would tie me up in court so thoroughly that I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone the real story. I could have gone to Finn myself, tried to get him to listen to me, but I couldn’t afford to bail myself out of jail if he called the police—and I had to count on the possibility of him doing that if I just showed up at his apartment. Someday, I might be able to officially set the record straight, if and when I could ever get another job at a paper, but by the time I did, what good would it do? It wasn’t as if anyone would care about it at that point.

  I went to bed wondering how my life might have been different if things hadn’t happened the way that they had. Would Finn and I ever have progressed beyond the casual fling we’d been having? I knew it was pointless, but I couldn’t stop wondering—what if I had come up with something to turn into Kent: something that wasn’t what the editor had wanted, but close enough that he hadn’t felt the need to write his own piece of garbage? What if I’d planned something with Finn—something that he would have known about ahead of time—and satisfied Kent, without ruining things between us. I smiled bitterly to myself; if I had just thought about that in time, everything would be different. As long as Kent hadn’t find out that I’d worked it out with his preferred target ahead of time, I would have been golden.

  But how did I know that Finn and I would have had anything more than a fling? I didn’t, of course; but some part of me believed that if everything else had worked out, if there hadn’t been that sudden miscommunication, we’d at least still be together a few months later. It was probably stupid of me to cling to that idea, especially when there was no way in the world to actually do anything about it, but it comforted me in a weird way that I couldn’t quite put words to. I went to sleep uneasily, but determined to turn my life around, one way or another.

  FOURTEEN

  Amy

  The next morning, I woke up feeling more nauseated than ever. I told myself it was just nerves—I really needed to land a job soon, coffee shop or otherwise—but I knew that something wasn’t right. I took a shower, and the feeling went away a little bit, but I still couldn’t quite make myself drink my morning coffee, even if I knew I risked yawning in my interviewer’s face.

  Just the thought of anything caffeinated in my system was enough to make my stomach pitch inside of me; it would be better to not even bother trying. I tried to eat a banana and some toast, to put something in my stomach that might settle it, but as I got dressed in a pair of black dress pants and a white button-down shirt—the closest approximation I had to the cafe’s uniform in my closet—I felt like death warmed over. My bones ached, and I felt as though I’d run a marathon in my sleep the night before.

  I knew that I needed to get to a doctor; normal, healthy people didn’t find themselves waking up nauseated, or throwing up their dinner for no apparent reason only to feel better hours later. Normal, healthy people didn’t suddenly develop an aversion to rare meat, or ache all over without any reason for it.

  “As soon as I get done with the interview, I’ll come home, eat, and go to sleep,” I promised myself in the mirror as I checked my makeup. “This has to be some kind of bug.”

  I thought about taking the makeup off altogether, but after my poor night’s sleep, I knew I’d just look exhausted and sick without it. It was better to look overdone than to look like I would have to call out of my first shift—assuming I even got the job. All I wanted was to turn around, take off my clothes, and curl up in my bed for a few more hours, but if I didn’t go to the interview, and try to find some kind of job, whatever I was sick with wouldn’t matter—I’d soon be too broke to get it treated.

  I got into my car and headed downtown towards the coffee shop, willing myself to just get through the interview. I got stuck in traffic—a slowdown rather than a full stop—and tried to ignore the increasingly urgent signals from my stomach. I swallowed hard, keeping my eyes on the road in front of me and trying to men
tally prepare for the interview itself. It was hard to be excited about a job that I’d last done while I was still in college, and one that paid around half my moderate salary at the Inquisitor.

  “You’re going to be fine,” I told myself, taking a deep breath.

  The further away from home I got, though, the more my stomach pitched and twisted inside of me. I hiccupped, and I could feel the acidic burn that rose up in my throat. I was going to be sick. My hands shook on the steering wheel and I swallowed hard, trying to keep the contents of my stomach down long enough to pull over out of traffic.

  Luck was on my side: I managed to get into a parallel parking spot and get my door open just before the first wave rose up and pitched out of me. I heaved again and again, barely holding myself up enough to keep from falling out of the driver’s side of my car.

  Tears streamed down my face and I shuddered as the last spasms wracked me. I pulled myself shakily back into the car and grabbed for the bottle of water I’d barely remembered to bring with me, thinking there was no way that I was going to make it to the interview in the state I was in.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said, cringing as I saw people walking along the sidewalk looking at each other in disgust. I’d avoided going to a doctor because I didn’t have insurance and couldn’t afford it, but it was clear now that there was something seriously wrong with me, and I needed a professional opinion.

  I called Melissa, the manager who had set up my interview, and told her that I wasn’t going to be able to make it that day; I’d come down with some kind of bug. I promised to bring her a doctor’s note for a reschedule, and accepted her sympathies—I must have sounded genuinely ill for her not to question it at all.

  By the time I finished the call, my stomach had settled enough for me to feel like I could make it to a doctor’s office. It would have to be an urgent care place; I knew if I tried to go to my usual doctor, I’d be put off for days, and I had no intention of waiting that long. I looked up the closest clinic and managed to get there in just fifteen minutes, before another wave of nausea started up.

  There were a few people in line in front of me, and I swallowed hard as I plowed through the paperwork, signing my agreement that I understood my rights, that I consented to being given test results over the phone or by email, and that I would accept treatment that day.

  I pretended to watch the mindless morning talk show playing on the TV in the waiting room while one person after another got called through. By the time the medical assistant said my name, I was so distracted that I barely even heard him.

  “Amy Michaels?”

  “Oh—sorry—yes, I’m coming.”

  I gripped my purse and bottle of water and made my way carefully to the door separating the waiting area from the exam rooms.

  “I’m just going to take your vitals and get some information before the doctor comes in to see you,” the man told me, leading me over to one of the empty exam rooms. “Have you had anything to drink in the last twenty minutes?”

  “No. I’ve held off,” I replied.

  “Good,” the assistant said. “Have a seat and we’ll get your temperature, then you can drink some of that.”

  I nodded and he went through the whole process: temperature, blood pressure, weight, heart rate, blood sugar.

  “So, it says on your chart that you’re here for nausea? Any other symptoms I should note down?”

  “I’ve just been feeling off for a really long time,” I said, thinking about it. “Tired all the time, achy, like I have the flu—but it’s been at least a month since that started.”

  “And when was your last period?”

  I thought about it. I’d been on birth control until right about the time I’d quit at the Inquisitor and my doctor had told me it could throw off my cycle, but I couldn’t actually remember when the last time was that I’d gotten my period.

  “I can’t remember,” I said, frowning. My stomach twisted inside me once again.

  “The doctor’s going to want a urine sample,” the medical assistant said. “Think you can manage one?”

  I nodded and drank down about a third of the bottle of water, taking the cup into the bathroom and filling it to the line before going back into the exam room feeling vaguely weirded out. Why couldn’t I remember when I’d last had my period?

  A few minutes later, the doctor came in. “Good morning, Ms. Michaels,” she said, seating herself at the little desk in the room. “I understand you were sick to your stomach this morning?”

  “Yeah—it’s been coming and going for a few weeks,” I told her. “I was supposed to be at a job interview and had to pull over so I thought I should get myself checked out.”

  “Well,” the doctor said, looking at something on my chart and then at me. “We did the standard tests on your urine sample, just to make sure there wasn’t something too serious going on.”

  “Okay,” I said. “And?”

  “And I have some news for you,” the doctor told me. “You’re pregnant.”

  My stomach flipped over. “You’re kidding me,” I said. “I haven’t slept with anyone in months. I can’t be pregnant.”

  “When was your last period?” The doctor—an older woman, with graying-blond hair and bright blue-gray eyes in a subtly wrinkled face—asked me, raising an eyebrow.

  “I can’t remember,” I replied, my voice cracking.

  “Lay back on the table,” the doctor said gently. She pulled one of the machines arranged against the opposite wall of the exam room over and I realized that it was a small, compact ultrasound machine. “Roll up your shirt to just under your bra.”

  I did, and the doctor squirted blue gel across my belly; it was cold, and reminded me uncomfortably of getting a pap smear done. She pressed the wand against my abdomen, moving it around for a while, watching the screen.

  After a few moments, she turned the screen to face me, and I gasped as I saw something there—it didn’t look like a baby, exactly, but it was definitely a blob, definitely a living thing.

  “You look to be about ten weeks along,” the doctor said, though her voice was faint in my ears.

  I checked out, mentally, for the rest of the visit. The only person I’d slept with in the last three months had been Finn. If I was definitely pregnant—and the ultrasound seemed to confirm that I was—he was the only person who could possibly be the father.

  Before I knew it, I was leaving the urgent care unit with a bag of samples of prenatal vitamins, a filled prescription for Zofran for my nausea, and a follow-up appointment for the doctor’s main office in a week’s time.

  FIFTEEN

  Amy

  I barely noticed the slight, springtime chill in the air as I walked back out to my car, stunned with the news I’d just been given. I climbed in behind the steering wheel and stared at it for a moment, not sure whether to laugh, cry, or scream.

  You need to call Finn. You need to tell him…

  Even in my mind, I couldn’t make myself finish the phrase. I drank a few sips of water and closed my eyes, trying to make myself believe the completely unbelievable.

  I found my phone in my purse and pulled up Finn’s number in my contact list, my heart beating faster with dread at what his reaction would be when I told him. I exhaled slowly as I tapped the ‘call’ icon and waited for the other line to ring. It didn’t. Just like before, it went straight to voicemail. My eyes began to tingle and sting and I bit my bottom lip.

  “Oh, great—only minutes after I find out and I’m already getting pregnant-woman weepies,” I said, sniffling.

  I tried to think of any way that I might be able to get in touch with Finn without having to deal with his manager, but I didn’t know anyone in his inner circle. I couldn’t call his coach—I’d never had any dealings with Simmons and I doubted that the man would be interested in helping me out. I didn’t have a choice: I’d have to get Heather to help me.

  I found her number and called it, shifting nervously in the driver’s seat as
I waited for her to answer.

  “You’re through to Heather Cunningham. Who’s calling?”

  “Heather, it’s Amy Michaels,” I said. The words tumbled out of my mouth before I could even completely think them through. “I’m sure I’m the last person you want to talk to right now but I need to get in touch with Finn as soon as humanly possible because I’m pregnant and the baby is his.”

  I couldn’t quite believe that I’d actually said it; only a few minutes before, I hadn’t even been able to fully think the words “I’m pregnant.”

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Heather said. “Are you trying to set up your next hit piece or something? Going to write in the Inquisitor about how he’s some deadbeat dad?”

  “I’m not with the Inquisitor anymore,” I told her. “I quit the day that stupid article came out.”

  “Why would you do a thing like that? It’s not like your paper didn’t have its best sales in years off the back of that one,” Heather said wryly. “If you even are pregnant, it’s low as hell for you to try to pretend like Finn could possibly be the father this long after the fact.”