by Lia Lee
A borderline manic laugh pierced the bathroom, and it took a few seconds to register that it had come from me. I dropped the second test in the trash after the other, my fingers too numb to hold onto anything.
Somehow, I managed to find the way to my bed, and I sank down onto it, folding my hands over my tummy. I was so lost in thought that I didn’t hear Mark knock, but suddenly, he was there, his head peeking through the door he had cracked open. I hadn’t even heard him come home.
“I’m taking out the trash, can I come get the stuff in your bathroom?”
I nodded absently, barely noticing the big black bag he held in his hands. I stroked my tummy, soothing my tiny baby and myself.
Then it hit me. I sat bolt upright at the exact same time that Mark came storming out of my bathroom, holding the damning plastic tube. Having been so shocked, so numb, I hadn’t wrapped the tests in toilet paper. I hadn’t even thought about hiding the evidence.
“What the fuck, Sophia?” he roared, waving the test at me. “What is this?”
“It’s a pregnancy test,” I said dumbly.
Mark scowled, thunder ripping across his face in a flash of fury. He threw the test against the wall. “I know that. Is it yours? Please tell me Beth was over earlier.”
I was incapable of lying to him about this, though I knew that I probably should have. At the very least, until I’d spoken to Brett. “She wasn’t. It’s mine.”
The anger fell from his face, replaced by the same kind of numb disbelief that I was sure was on mine. “You’re… You’re pregnant?”
He shoved both hands into his hair, pacing the length of my room like he was a caged lion. I could do nothing but watch him, still too freaked out to offer any kind of excuse of reassurance.
“Yes.”
“Fuck.” His gaze snapped to mine, blue eyes blazing with intensity and rage bubbling below the surface. “I know we haven’t talked about it, but haven’t you heard of fucking birth control? Condoms? The patch? The pill?”
I interrupted his rant when a sudden wave of anger crashed into me at his reaction. “Of course, I have. And I used it. None of those things are infallible, you know?”
Mark glared at me. “Don’t be fucking snarky with me right now.”
“What do want me to do, Mark?” I snapped. “I just got the biggest shock of my life not an hour ago, and now you’re yelling at me about birth control?”
He stopped his pacing, and I saw the fight rush out of his body. His shoulders dropped, and he came to collapse onto the bed beside me. “What’re you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t really prepared for this.”
Releasing a heavy sigh, he turned to face me. “Have you told Mom and Dad?”
“No, not yet,” I said, staring at him like he’d grown antlers. “I told you. I just found out less than an hour ago. I haven’t told anyone. I’m not even really sure that I know yet.”
“How did this happen?”
I wasn’t in the mood to deal with him. I had to wrap my head around so many things that I didn’t even know where to start. “Well, you know, when two people—”
“Shut the fuck up with that shit,” he grumbled and rolled off the bed. “When you’re ready to actually talk, come find me. For the record, I’m hugely disappointed in you.”
“I know.” But I couldn’t bring myself to share the sentiment.
Mark crossed my room and leaned against the door. “Who’s the father?”
That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? Because it could only be one man, and I had no idea how I was going to break it to him. “Some random guy. I’ll handle it.”
Mark shoved his hands into his hair again, dragging them through it as he shook his head. Then he slammed my bedroom door behind him.
I sank back onto my bed, staring up at the white ceiling in my bedroom for who knew how long. The disappointed rage in Mark’s eyes was a crushing weight on my heart. My stomach roiled and rolled. For the briefest of moments, I considered calling Beth, but then I decided against it. Brett had the right to be the first person I told, voluntarily anyway.
I just had to figure out how to tell him that he was going to be a dad. And I was going to be a mom. How freaking crazy is that?
Chapter Eleven
Brett
“Sophia’s fucking pregnant,” Mark roared into my ear as soon as I answered my phone.
“What?” I asked stupidly. I thought he was calling because we had plans later. It took my brain a few seconds to catch up with what he was saying.
As if someone set the volume of the world on mute, the noise of my office just faded away. I was in the middle of the bull pen, just having checked the end-of-week performance reports, but it suddenly felt like I was in the middle of nowhere. My surroundings were completely irrelevant as five freight trains hit me with every frantic word that Mark said.
“Yeah, I just found out.”
It couldn’t be true. He had to be fucking with me, but he still didn’t know about Sophia and me, so he had no reason to think that pulling a prank like that would have any bearing on me whatsoever. “Are you sure?” I asked.
“She took two tests, man. So yes, I’m sure.”
“Holy shit.”
The world slammed to a dead stop around me. It wasn’t hard to do the math. I was the only guy Sophia had ever slept with. But it still took me several loud, drumming heartbeats to put two and two together.
Sophia was pregnant with my baby.
Then her voice was in the background of the call. “Mark, who’re you talking to?”
“Not you,” he snapped at her, and it stirred some protective instinct in me.
“I’ll be right there,” I told him and hung up the phone without waiting for an answer. I was already in motion, my feet carrying me to the elevator and then to my car without the need for me to think about it.
Reeling. That was what I was doing.
For the first time in my life, I was absolutely, positively reeling.
A small part of me, a part that I was immediately ashamed of, wondered if Sophia had been with somebody else after all. A fierce stab of jealousy and possessiveness ripped through my gut unexpectedly at even the thought.
The facts were the facts, though, and I had to face them: I’d worn a condom every time I’d been with her, and none of them had been broken. I was sure of it.
But I was also sure of Sophia. I’d known her for most of my life. We’d never talked about it, but I wasn’t fucking anyone else, and she wouldn’t, either. Would she?
Had she?
That same jealousy from before grew from my gut to my heart, an ugly green monster taking root in my very blood. I wasn’t one to get jealous about women. I’d never had any reason to be, but I couldn’t stop the feeling from poisoning my thoughts and growing in my body.
Sophia was mine, damnit. I didn’t know when it happened or how, but she was mine. And so was that baby.
If there was a baby. My mind raced with a million possibilities, but none of them made any sense to me. Was she making it up to get me to come clean to Mark? Was she trying to force my hand into a relationship? She knew me. She knew I didn’t date seriously. At most, I found women who had sex drives that matched up with mine, and we fucked for a few months before one or both of us got bored.
The ugliest thought I’d had so far came crashing into my mind before I had a hope of stopping it. Was she trying to get to my money? I only cared about money insofar as it was necessary to provide for Mom, but I’d heard other people in my position talk. People got used for their money all the time.
I shut that train of thought down as fast as I could, but it still gnawed at me. It swirled around in my head along with all the other questions that I had no answers to.
The drive to the apartment she shared with Mark was quick, but I made it in a daze. Thoughts and questions appeared and evaporated like smoke in my mind. I didn’t even know if I wanted kids. I’d never allowed myself to cons
ider the possibility, and now, it was hitting me square in the face.
Not even just the possibility. If Sophia really was pregnant and if she was who I thought she was, which was someone who wasn’t fucking someone else on the side, then it was the reality. I was having a baby, whether I wanted it or not.
Because if there was one other thing I knew with absolute certainty, Sophia would want to keep the baby.
A baby.
A fucking baby. I’d never even held a damn baby.
I was an only child. My mom was my only family, so there weren’t a bunch of cousins or nieces or nephews running around. My friends, though some of them were married and stuff, hadn’t started crossing that frontier yet.
Babies were a complete and utter mystery to me. The way I saw it, they were just little pink lumps that pooped and cried all day.
I’d always just assumed that the supposed natural instinct to want to sow my seed and procreate had skipped me because I’d never felt that need.
And yet… No, that couldn’t be one of the feelings fighting each other inside me.
Shit, I couldn’t believe that this was happening. Maybe it was all just some cruel joke. It had to be. Kids weren’t a part of the plan. Certainly not now. I would be a terrible father. That much I was sure of. Hell, if I looked at the stock that I came from, there wasn’t a chance that I would be anything but an awful father. Mom was great, fantastic, but my dad hadn’t exactly stuck around. As far as I was concerned, that was the worst possible type of father. The one who was so much of a coward that he just abandoned his kid. That was the gene pool I came from.
My tires squealed when I pulled up outside their apartment building. It took a couple of deep breaths before I was calm enough to get out of the car and take the stairs two at a time to work off some of the excess nervous energy that was pouring into me.
Before I was nearly ready to face the situation, I was banging down their door, and I stormed past a red-faced Mark, right to Sophia’s room. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, staring at the middle distance like she was in a trance.
It was almost like she wasn’t even aware of the fact that I’d come crashing through her door. My gaze dropped to where a cracked plastic thing lay on the floor near her bed. I scooped it up and stared at the evidence that what Mark had said was true.
Sophia was fucking pregnant.
“Brett—” she started, finally having broken out of whatever had taken hold her before I got there.
“Is this real?” I asked, holding the test out to her.
Her jaw dropped a little, and a deep line appeared between her manicured eyebrows. “What?”
“Is this a real pregnancy test?” Of all the questions I had shooting into my head like bullets from an automatic rifle, somehow, that was the one that made it out of my mouth first.
Sophia couldn’t have looked more surprised if I’d slapped her. “Of course, it’s real. Don’t be an idiot. Why would I fake a pregnancy test?”
“I don’t know, for fun?” What the hell was going on with my mouth?
Sophia’s eyes widened into incredulous orbs. “Are you having fun yet? Because I’m not. Stop being an ass. It’s not fake.”
Maybe it was the tears that were welling behind those eyes or maybe it was the fact that I suddenly became aware of Mark standing in the doorway, watching us with narrowed eyes, but out of nowhere, I was back in control.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know where that came from, I know it’s not fake.”
Sophia exhaled on a deep sigh and nodded slowly. “It’s okay, You’re shocked, too. I—”
Mark stepped into my line of vision, pointing his finger first at me and then jabbed it at Sophia. “Woah, back up. Brett’s shocked, too? Why would he be?”
When Sophia’s eyes met mine, they were filled with resignation and apology, and I instantly knew what was coming. I gave her a small nod of encouragement. It was inevitable that Mark would find out now, and I could see that she wanted to be the one to tell him.
She sucked in a rattled breath, folded her arms, and looked her brother right in eye. “Brett’s the baby’s father.”
For what could’ve been a second, a minute, or an hour, Mark just stood there. Frozen. Blinking rapidly. He turned on me slowly, a look in his eyes that I’d never seen before. It took the guilt in my stomach and twisted a big, sharp knife into it.
I saw his fist coming from a mile away, but I let him get his shot in. It was the least that I deserved. Dull pain flowed from my jaw to my nose when it landed, but it didn’t hurt that bad. Mark didn’t share my dedication to working out, and since he worked an office job, I hated to even think it, but he was pretty weak.
When he went to land another punch, I grabbed his wrist and held it away from me. “Mark, just listen to—”
“It was all my fault,” Sophia blurted out, her voice shaky.
I shook my head, meeting Mark’s gaze. “It wasn’t. None of this was your fault, Soph. This is all on me.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about whose fault it was. How could you? Both of you?” There was such hurt in his voice that it ripped into my heart, and I winced.
“We didn’t mean to hurt you, brother,” I said. “Honest—”
“You didn’t mean to hurt me?” Mark yelled, a vein starting to throb in his temple. “You thought I was just going to be okay with this? Christ, I thought I could trust you, of all people, with her.”
“And you can, Mark. Really, I—”
“Can I? Because from where I’m standing, you’ve not only hurt and betrayed me, but you’ve ruined her fucking life.”
“He hasn’t,” Sophia interjected, tears streaming down her face. “Mark, he hasn’t.”
Mark turned on Sophia, and even though I knew he’d never physically hurt her, the instinct to protect her and my baby, roared into place from somewhere previously unknown. I shifted and angled my body so that I was between them, Sophia safely behind my back.
“Look, I get that you’re hurt and betrayed and shocked and god knows what else,” I said. “That’s why I let you take a shot at me. I’ll let you have however many more later, but right now, you’re upsetting Sophia, and that’s the last thing that she needs. So, you need to get out. Go.”
I didn’t have the first idea what Sophia needed, but I was sure that it wasn’t her brother shouting about how her life was ruined. I pointed to the door, and although Mark looked like he wanted nothing more than to clock me again, his gaze flickered to Sophia sobbing on the bed. With a final shake of his head, he spun on his heel and stalked out of the room.
Sobbing women were not my thing. Not at all. But knowing what to do came to me naturally with Sophia. I walked over to her bed, sank down next to her, pulled her into my lap, and let her cry into my chest. Her warm tears were soaking my shirt, but I didn’t mind.
She cried so hard that she hiccuped a few times, but I didn’t interrupt her. I just let her get it out. An indeterminable amount of time later, her sobs finally subsided, and her body stilled. I wondered if she’d fallen asleep, but when I pulled away slightly to look down at her, her eyes were wide open.
“What’s going on in your head?” I asked her. At least my mouth was working properly again.
She was quiet for another few beats. Then she released a deep sigh and met my eyes with hers. “Honestly? I don’t know. My mind’s racing so fast that I can’t grab hold of any thought. You?”
“Same.”
Sophia smiled sadly. “I’m sorry. If there was a way I could slow it down for you, I would.”
“You have nothing to be sorry about, but I might know how I can slow both of our minds for a while.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly, then she raised one of her eyebrows. “Surely, you can’t mean what I think you mean?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.” Before she could argue, I leaned down and kissed her. Hard.
Chapter Twelve
Sophia
He was insane. Certifiably in
sane. But as soon as Brett’s lips touched mine, that familiar zooming out of the world thing happened, and kissing him was the only thing I could focus on.
True to his word, he kissed me so deeply and so fiercely that I finally managed to catch a thought and hang onto it. It wasn’t a particularly productive one, however. It was blatantly sexual.
If his hardening underneath my ass was anything to go by, he’d had the same one. I shifted in his lap so that I was straddling him, threading my hands into his hair and kissing him like my life depended on it.
His hair was thick and soft as I scrunched it with my fingers, and he tasted like a strange mix of spearmint and rich coffee. With his muscular arms around me and strong chest against mine, it felt like everything was actually going to be okay. Like I could breathe properly for the first time since those words had popped up on that screen.
It was going to be okay. We were going to get through this. I was safe here in the circle of his arms. So long as he stayed, I would be fine. We were so in sync that at the same time the thought hit, he broke the kiss to look deep into my eyes.
“I’m going to be here for you, Soph. I promise. For you and the baby. I’m not going anywhere.”
There was a funny pressing feeling in my heart, and the words popped out of mouth before I’d had so much as a split second to process them. “I love you.”
As soon as they were out, I knew with everything in me that they were true. I also wished that I could’ve taken them back and said them at a more appropriate time. Or maybe not said them at all, for a long, long time.
Early afternoon light shone softly through the windows, illuminating Brett like a gentle spotlight. His gray eyes widened, and some unnamed emotion passed through them as he let my words wash over him. Whether it was a positive or a negative emotion remained to be seen.
A part of me knew that I was kidding myself. Brett wasn’t the kind of guy who would fall in love. Much less with a girl like me. Yet, I couldn’t help but hang onto the tiny shard of hope that was blooming in my chest because he was still there, still holding me, still hard underneath me.