Knocked Up

by Stacey Lynn

  Him whisking me away from the nightmare at dinner only to call and get us a table at this place on the way is proof of it.

  On the way here, I guided the conversation to Graham and kept it there, what he’s been up to since the last time I saw him, which coincidentally was Jimmy’s funeral, and how he’s been with his studying to pass the bar.

  He failed it his first time. From the sounds of the stress in his voice and the tight pinch of his mouth while he explained studying for it the second time, his test in a few weeks is weighing heavily on him.

  “I got that, honey,” he says, “but what I want to know is why and how it is you’re pregnant in the first place.”

  “Well, you see, sweetie,” I tease, leaning in, “when there’s a boy and a girl, a boy puts his parts inside a girl’s—”

  “Cut the shit, Cara.”

  Oh-kay. Apparently stressed Graham lost his ability to joke.

  “Sorry.” I take another sip of my water and set the glass down, trailing my finger around the stem of the elegant wineglass. “What have you been told?”

  “I was told by my mom, who talked to your mom, that you’re in an unseemly situation”—I all but roll my eyes as he air-quotes “unseemly.” Please.—“And that you’re alone, struggling with no income to raise a baby, and your mom spoke with my mom, and your dad talked to my dad, and they think, since we’ve been family friends forever, that it’s best at this point to become family. Hence,” he points his finger at his chest and scowls, “I’m supposed to marry you. And I’ll do it, honey, you know I will.” He leans forward, and for not the first time in my life, his attractiveness is almost enough to steal my breath away if I still liked the polo shirt, suit-wearing, golf-club-membership kind of guy.

  And, you know, if he was straight.

  Fortunately, I find I have a taste for the tatted-up, knitted-hat, rough scruffy jaw, muscled variety. Which is why I’m boiling, my lid about ready to blow right off my top before he’s done talking.

  “Excuse me?” My forehead aches from the stress of my brows shooting up so high and so fast. “You were told what?”

  “I see that might not be the truth.”

  “It sure as hell isn’t,” I hiss, leaning so close to the table I’m almost bent over it. “I am not alone and I’m most certainly not struggling for income. Granted, I’m not rolling in six figures, or even high five figures, with my job at the gallery, but I sure as hell am not alone. I’m living with Braxton, the father of my child, and we’re together, and Mom and Dad know this considering they showed up at my apartment one night when we were there, and I told them.”

  One would think Graham would be shocked by the fact his parents and mine have had no problem lying to him.

  Fortunately for me, it’s not the first time.

  “I see,” he says, and takes a drink from his glass of white wine. He seems at a loss for saying anything else, and I definitely can’t blame him for that.

  So while he processes the extremely screwed-up nature of our families, I peruse the menu, and when the waiter returns we both place our orders.

  It’s when the waiter leaves, and Graham is already sipping out of his second glass of wine, he says, “I shouldn’t be surprised at this.”

  “I’m certainly not, but why should you not be?”

  “I came out to my parents about six months ago.”

  “You did?” Holy shit! He’s been terrified of that moment since we were so young, since he tried to make out with a girl his first year of college, just to make sure he was really gay, to see if he could swing it, and when he was done, called me and said he never wanted to touch another woman for as long as he lived.

  And he’d sent me a photo of the girl. She was gorgeous. Definitely make-out worthy.

  “How’d it go?” I don’t even need to ask. It explains everything at my parents’ house earlier, and the way he’s swallowing his wine quicker than a starving man chugs water. “That bad?”

  “Pretty much the worst possible scenario I’d ever imagined short of being disowned.”

  “Oh. Graham.” My heart aches for him. His pain is so evident in his expression. I reach across the table and take his hand in mine, squeezing it tightly. “I’m so sorry. Tell me about it.”

  “I’d rather not.” He drains his glass of wine and sets it down, sucking back the taste of his drink. “I think we have enough to talk about with you, woman. Tell me who got you pregnant and why my parents approached, insisting I should marry you so this baby can have a decent upbringing.”

  “Decent?” I arch a brow, teasing. It takes him a minute to smile.

  “Yeah, I get the irony. But fuck decent. Tell me everything.”

  It doesn’t take me more than a breath to let it all spill out. I tell Graham everything. We talk about Braxton and my pregnancy, I tell him about the food trucks. By the time our own food arrives, we dig in, laughing and talking as I continue spilling all my stories about Braxton.

  He asks me about the pregnancy. I give him the rundown on how far along I am, that I am secretly hoping it is a boy and grows up to be just like Braxton, with a bit of Jimmy sprinkled in.

  We laugh about our parents, he jokes that if it doesn’t work out for us, he’ll happily take over and I can be his beard.

  We spend hours at the restaurant, and I completely forget about my parents. I forget about everything except how good it feels to be with Graham, someone who totally gets me, and Braxton, a man who just might love me like I love him.

  So when Graham suggests we head out and go a few blocks east to a jazz club he loves with live music, I don’t hesitate to say yes.

  Chapter 25

  Braxton

  To say I’m fucking pissed as hell at 11:25 p.m. is the fucking understatement of the century.

  Countless calls to Cara’s phone have gone unanswered all night long. I didn’t bother sending a text or leaving a voicemail.

  It became clear she was avoiding me when she never answered, and it became really fucking clear why she was avoiding me when Stella showed up after going out to get food, it taking her longer than an hour, and I know it was because it took her that long to stop being pissed at me.

  When she returned to MadInk, after my fifth unanswered call to Cara, she didn’t just have a bag of Imperial Chinese food with her.

  She had a photo on her phone of Cara, her arms wrapped around some asshole’s neck, her cheek on his shoulder, and both of them were fucking laughing. She had a photo of that same guy with his shirtsleeve rolled up. Cara’s finger on that man’s forearm, tracing what looks like a script tattoo and the way she’s looking at the ink, then looking at the guy in a fucking third photo…it’s the same look she gives me after she comes. The same look she gave me this morning when she said she’d be home. My home. Our home.

  Stella was no longer pissed, but smiling, pretty damn vindicated. Even when I took her phone, sent myself the pics, and then hurled hers across the entryway at MadInk, crashing her phone into my favorite portrait of the Caribbean Sea, she still wasn’t pissed.

  So, yeah, I came home and have spent the last two hours drinking. Heavily. I rarely drink, much more rarely drink to excess, but tonight fucking calls for it.

  I don’t know who the fuck he is. All I know is that the asshole she was out at a bar with, leaning on him on a barstool, is not her fucking father. And since her brother is dead, it’s most definitely not him either.

  Lucy is already kenneled for the night because the last thing I wanted to see was her jump for joy at seeing Cara whenever the hell she decides to come home.

  I’m sipping on a glass of Scotch when I hear the clink of my door. The catch of the lock follows as she locks it behind her and then the clipping sound of her heels on the floor as she enters.

  Then a thud, followed b
y another one that’s deeper as she kicks off her heels and one hits a wall.

  It’s dark in the room, because I can’t be bothered to lean over and switch on a lamp. And in those few seconds, all the shit, all the anger I feel, hurls into my chest at a thunderous speed.

  Just this fucking morning we were talking about being in this together. And I don’t know if it’s the shit with Stella, the fact she’s right and Cara does belong in a different world from mine, or the fact she fucking lied about having dinner with her parents so she could go hang out at a fucking bar with some guy who looks like the exact kind of guy I’m certain her parents would choose for her. But as Cara walks into the living room and flicks on a light, I don’t even flinch at the brightness.

  “Hey,” she says, having the nerve to walk toward me. Clueless. Totally fucking clueless, I know. “What are you doing here sitting in the dark?”

  She stops when I don’t answer, but I’m too fucking stunned to speak. And maybe too drunk. I set down my drink just in case.

  Her hair is messed, flyaways at her temples and around her ears and she has the rest pulled back off her neck and shoulders. Her cheeks are flushed, her mascara slightly smeared beneath her eyes.

  Beautiful, glorious, and completely uninhibited. She looks exactly like she does after I’ve made love to her.

  “Braxton? You okay?”

  “I called you.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” She dips her head and digs into her purse. She pulls out her phone and gives me a guilty look. “It died at some point. I guess I forgot to charge it earlier. I’m sorry if I worried you.”

  “I wasn’t worried.”

  She takes a step forward, hesitantly this time, and tilts her head to the side. “Are you mad at me? I’m sorry I didn’t call, but I said I’d come right home after dinner.”

  Her voice trails off and I laugh coldly.

  “Was worried about you when you didn’t answer my first few calls. Then I got pissed when you didn’t answer my next few. Then, I saw you were in good hands and stopped being worried and just stayed pissed.” While I’m talking, I pull up the photo Stella took and when I’m done, I lean forward, sliding my phone across the coffee table. It lands just on the edge of the table closest to her.

  “I don’t understand—” She glances down and her lips part, forming a circle. Her eyes go round and her fingers go to her ears, brushing back some of her flyaways. “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Looks like a fun dinner with dear old Mom and Dad,” I sneer. I’m unable to stop it. Hours of being anxious about her dinner, worried how it was going, that I wasn’t there to protect her from her parents, then pissed, not only that she’s all over some preppy little asshole, at a bar no less, but the fact there’s a bubbling glass of what looks like champagne in her hand.

  She’s fucking pregnant with my kid. Drinking. That might be the thing that has me pissed most of all since she knows who I came from and how I was brought into this world.

  “Wow. Okay, Braxton, there’s an explanation for all of this and if you calm down for a minute I’ll explain.”

  “You’re fucking drinking alcohol with my kid in you, Cara. You have your fucking hands all over some other guy after having your hands all over me this morning and yesterday and the day before.”

  Hurt splashes across her face but I’m too pissed, both with anger and the Scotch to give a fuck.

  “And you think there’s an explanation that will help calm me down? Go ahead, give it.” I wiggle my fingers. I’m being an asshole.

  It registers, but there’s too much other shit shouting at me to do any good. Stella’s inside my head, telling me she’ll go back to high-class when she can. My mom is there, on her knees, giving some damn guy a blowjob to pay for more drugs, not giving a shit I haven’t eaten in days. Cara’s there, telling me fucking me is a disaster.

  All of it’s slamming around at some high damn decibels, I scratch my fingers across the back of my head and almost miss it when she wipes a tear off her cheek.

  “Don’t be a dick, Braxton. This isn’t what it looks like.”

  “Looks to me you caved to Mommy and Daddy and got with a man they approve of. They happy with you now for once? They proud of you finally?”

  She steps back quickly, almost tripping over the side table behind her and even in my drunken state I think of her falling to her ass. Of getting hurt.

  I reach for her and she smacks my hand away, then smacks my bicep.

  “Don’t you dare touch me,” she hisses, scrambling to regain her balance and moving back quickly. “Don’t you ever touch me, never again, you asshole. I’m leaving and I’ll call you when I can stand to even think of talking to you again, but this…what I thought we had, Braxton. We’re done.”

  “We never had shit,” I snap back at her. “Not if you can turn away from me that quickly.”

  “I don’t know if you’re drunk or if you’ve lost your mind, but this conversation is over.” She turns and hurries to her room, a room she hasn’t spent any time in in a week except to get dressed and showered, and I should have known then, the other day when I told her to move all her stuff into my room, and she refused saying she thought it was best we still had our space, that she still had one damn hand up, holding me back while barely letting me in.

  Now I know why.

  I’m still standing, glaring at the spot she was in before she went to her room, when she returns. In the distance, Lucy’s whining, this sad, soulless moan, but all I see is the bag in Cara’s hand.

  “Sober up and when you realize how big of a dick you’ve been to me tonight, maybe I’ll talk to you. But don’t you ever think you’ll get anything from me again, unless it has to do with the baby. You can go to hell, Braxton, you jumping to your worthless conclusions tonight tells me one damn thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That I’m glad I realized you’re the asshole you are when I’m only starting to fall in love with you, not after I’d completely fallen, because the pain I feel right now, listening to this bullshit, would tear me to shreds if it happened later.”

  I slam back on my heels. Love? Fucking love? Bullshit. Before I can call her on it, she closes the space between us, not because she wants to be close to me, but because I’m blocking her way to the door and her freedom.

  And it’s only then, as she gets close, that I see the devastation on her face, in her eyes.

  She’s not fucking lying.

  I’ve destroyed her.

  “Thank you for showing me that the words you told me about treasuring me were just a bunch of bullshit, just like every other man I’ve ever known, except for Jimmy. Thank you for showing me who you really are now, before I was in too deep to get out.”

  “Cara,” I say, my voice ragged. My tongue is thick. Holy fuck. How much Scotch did I down tonight?

  I reach for her but she slides by me.

  I’m too slow to move, and all I see is her backside, her beautiful ass in that dress that in any other circumstance, I’d want to tear off her to get to the prize beneath, and I must be drunk, and stupid, because even now, as pissed as I still am, as hurt as she is, I still want to do that.

  “Cara.”

  She pulls open the door, and then turns, giving me a blank expression. I haven’t seen it since the night I first brought her here. And it kills me.

  Kills me like a damn knife to my chest.

  “Graham…that guy I was with tonight? He’s gay. He’s been my friend since we were kids and I’d tell you why I was out with him tonight, instead of with my parents, but you don’t deserve an explanation. Fuck you for not thinking better of me.”

  The slam of the door behind her is almost as loud as her parting shot.

  Chapter 26

  Cara

  I’m in desperate need of
coffee and eye drops as I shuffle into Graham’s kitchen the next morning. My head is pounding, I’ve had barely an hour of sleep, and my stomach is screaming for me to fill it. I showed up at his front door, unable to call him and hoping like hell he hadn’t moved in the year since I’ve seen him, and as soon as he opened the door, I collapsed into his arms.

  He held me while I sobbed, barely able to get out the story through my crying and wretched sounds until I could cry no more, but had lost my voice.

  I’ve lost more than my voice.

  I still can’t believe the way Braxton spoke to me. The callous, hurtful things he said are permanently etched into my brain and every time I blink, my eyes sting from the pain but it’s the flash of his furious face when I first looked at him after seeing he had a picture of Graham that hurts more than anything.

  He thinks I’d cheat on him. He thinks I’d go to a bar and get drunk while pregnant. He thinks I’d betray him in such horrific ways, I still can’t fathom it. And he might have been drinking, but he wasn’t so completely wasted as to not understand what he was saying.

  “God,” I groan, filling my cup of coffee from the prepared pot on the counter. Screw decaf today. One cup of the good stuff won’t hurt anything.

  “Not God,” Graham says. His voice makes me jerk, and coffee sloshes over the side of my mug. “But perhaps your knight in shining armor.” He walks straight to me, and I don’t have time to brush the spilled coffee off the dress I’m still in from last night. I passed out on the couch before I could change.

  “How’s my princess?” He presses his lips to the top of my head and sniffs. “Besides stinky.”

  “Broken.”

  “Not broken,” he murmurs before pulling away. “Just maybe dented a little bit.”

  I’d laugh if it wasn’t true, but instead, I don’t respond. Tears are filling my eyes again and it hurts so much to keep crying I turn away from Graham while he goes about getting his own breakfast. He’s dressed in jeans and a gray polo shit, jeans ripped at the ankle hems and around the edges of his back pockets. His hair is tousled, not neatly styled like I’m used to seeing it.