by Amy Star
“It’s because of a lot of things,” Harry replied, and it already sounded like his patience was beginning to fray. “But yeah, the fact that you’ve been sort of an unrelenting bitch lately has a bit to do with it.”
Cheyenne recoiled as if she had been struck, and Harry sighed again, dragging a hand down his face. “That didn’t come out right,” he conceded, though it was more of a reluctant mumble.
“No,” Cheyenne replied, voice shaking slightly, “I think it came out exactly the way you wanted it to. I’ll be out of your hair by tonight.”
“Chey—”
She turned and stormed away before he could say anything else, and she had her clothing, her toiletries, and everything else thrown into suitcases within a couple hours. Daphne asked no questions when Cheyenne called and asked if she was still looking for a roommate, and she picked her up that evening without protest.
When Harry asked haltingly if they wanted any help packing Cheyenne’s stuff into the backseat and the trunk of Daphne’s car, Daphne laughed at him, and that, at least, made Cheyenne feel a little bit better.
She would be okay. She would hurt for…a while probably, but she would be alright. That much, she had faith in.
*
Daphne’s apartment seemed so tiny compared to Harry’s house, but it was quaint and comfortable all the same, and Cheyenne was hard pressed to point out the difference between one type of memory foam and the next, regardless of how much more one cost from the other. Cheyenne adapted quickly.
Granted, finding another job took a bit longer, and it wasn’t the sort of job she had envisioned for herself, but it was a paycheck. She refused to freeload off of Daphne for any longer than she needed to, and considering she would only be paying half of the rent, she supposed it wasn’t an entirely unreasonable amount of money.
Even so, being a receptionist wasn’t exactly what she had imagined for herself, regardless of how influential the business she was working for was. ‘Overqualified’ didn’t even begin to describe her situation.
Still, the work wasn’t bad, the hours were decent, and her coworkers were good people. She couldn’t complain about any of that.
She was slow to truly make friends with her coworkers, but that had always been the case with her, and she was generally more content to have a small group of friends than to collect friends at every corner. Even so, she did manage to start befriending them.
They were pleasant people on the whole. People Cheyenne could get lunch or coffee with without a care. And Gregg from the accounting department was cute. True, he didn’t have Harry’s looks, but he was cute in a boyish sort of way, and the way he smiled at Cheyenne whenever they saw each other was endearing.
It didn’t seem like it would turn into anything serious, but it was a good reminder that her romantic life had not actually ended just because things with Harry didn’t quite work out, and it was a reminder that she was sorely in need of at that point, even if she wasn’t quite ready to find someone new just then.
And hey, who was she to say what the future would hold? In time, Cheyenne would get over Harry, she would be ready to find other people, and maybe Gregg would still be cute and he would still smile at her like that whenever the time came. It was a comforting thought, at least, and Cheyenne felt no guilt in entertaining it. It was good to feel like she was moving on.
*
Cheyenne felt a bit foggy when she got out of bed one morning. Not quite ill, but more like the world was moving in slow motion, and everything was chugging to catch up to where it was supposed to be.
It didn’t really come as a shock when that feeling of not-quite-ill increased to definitely-ill, and she had to empty her stomach into the toilet. Daphne tapped on the door carefully from outside, her voice slightly muffled by the door as she asked, “You okay in there?”
“Yeah,” Cheyenne replied, voice wobbling slightly as she hauled herself back to her feet by leaning on the edge of the sink. She grabbed a paper cup from the stack in the medicine cabinet, filled it with water, and then gargled and spit, and she took the time to carefully brush her teeth until the taste went away.
She was already in the bathroom, so by that point she figured she may as well just get cleaned up and ready for the day.
She figured it was dumb luck that had her feeling more or less alright within a half an hour. As it was, her job was still too new for her to go taking days off willy-nilly, so despite Daphne’s fretful fussing, she tossed a bottle of anti-nausea medication into her purse, decided she would just have to eat lightly that day, and left the apartment just as she would on any other day.
By the end of the day, it seemed like Daphne’s fussing had been for naught, as the day passed without incident. By the time Cheyenne was getting back to the apartment, she was willing to simply assume that something she had eaten before bed the night before hadn’t quite agreed with her stomach.
*
Or at least that was what she thought, but then it kept happening. Sometimes it was in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes it was right before bed, but needing to make a mad dash to the bathroom to empty the contents of her stomach into the toilet bowl became a daily occurrence.
She didn’t think it was related to stress or anything like that. After all, a break-up was hardly the most difficult thing she had ever lived through, living with Daphne was about as uncomplicated as living arrangements got as long as Cheyenne remembered not to leave her laundry on the floor for too long, and her job wasn’t what she would call stressful.
At the same time, she also refused to consider that maybe she was well and truly sick, because of all the things she needed at that point, that was nowhere on the list, and she did not have the time for it.
There was…one other possibility it could have been, but it was one she refused to put much thought into until her stomach issues had gone on for weeks and it was beginning to seem like that was the only option.
She wasn’t sure why she didn’t mention anything to Daphne about it. Instead, she simply left a few minutes early for work one morning and picked up a pregnancy test on the way there. It seemed like the sort of thing Daphne would get sort of crazy about, though, when Cheyenne thought about it, so it was probably best to just keep it quiet until she had something at least resembling an answer.
For most of the day, the pregnancy test simply sat in Cheyenne’s purse, practically burning a hole in the fabric of the bag. Until it was time for her lunch break, and she made her escape to the bathroom, locking herself in a stall.
When the test came back positive, she couldn’t quite say she was surprised. The possibility had been niggling at the back of her mind for a couple weeks at that point, even if she had been refusing to simply open her eyes and look at it. So, no, she couldn’t say she was surprised.
The tears came either way. Quietly, though, and only for a few moments before she carefully dabbed her eyes dry with a wad of toilet paper and stepped out of the stall. She checked her reflection in the mirror on the wall, making sure her makeup wasn’t a complete horror show and that no one would be able to tell something was wrong just at a glance. She liked some of her coworkers well enough, true, but she didn’t know any of them well enough to be comfortable dropping that sort of bomb on any of them.
She supposed it was probably a good thing that her flirtation with Gregg hadn’t gone particularly far. It was good that it hadn’t extended beyond just flirting. She doubted he would really want it to continue any further once it became too apparent that she was pregnant for her to hide it.
And really, how was her boss going to react? Could she really expect her job to still be waiting for her if she had to go on maternity leave within less than a year of getting the job? True enough, she couldn’t officially be fired for it, but people could find all sorts of loopholes when they felt properly vindictive.
But those were all problems that she could think about later, when she felt a bit less out of sorts. Just then, she wasn’t really
in any sort of state of mind to be making any big decisions.
She took a picture of the pregnancy test on her phone before wrapping the test up in paper towels and throwing it out.
She skipped most of her lunch break, instead returning to her desk in the lobby. She wasn’t really hungry after that.
The rest of the day seemed to drag on for a week.
*
Daphne worked similar hours to Cheyenne most days, but she also worked closer to the apartment, and so it was common for her to already be home by the time Cheyenne walked in the door. Which meant it took approximately no time at all for her to ask, “What’s wrong?” once Cheyenne walked in the door that evening.
Cheyenne took a slow, deep breath, and she stated simply, “I’m pregnant. We both know whose it is.”
Daphne stared at her for a long moment, wordless and gaping, before she simply stepped forward and engulfed Cheyenne in a hug. For a moment, they simply stood there in the middle of the kitchen, until they slowly leaned apart.
“Are you going to tell him?” Daphne asked slowly, scratching the back of her head as she started pacing around the kitchen.
“Yeah,” Cheyenne sighed, though the idea of just keeping it a secret was tempting. “I don’t want to be the sort of monster who hides that from someone. You know what I mean?”
“You’re a better woman than I am,” Daphne informed her wryly. “Want me to be there when you tell him?” she asked, and honestly, sometimes Cheyenne was convinced she had to have been a saint in a past life to have earned Daphne in her current life.
A knot of unease in her chest began to unravel, and she nodded quickly. “That would be great.”
*
Never before had Cheyenne agonized over a text message quite so much. She typed it and erased it what had to be twenty times before she finally decided to just keep it simple, and she sent Harry a message that read, ‘Can we meet up? We need to talk. It’s important.’ It seemed innocuous enough, she was pretty sure.
And then, she left her phone on the kitchen counter and went about her business around the apartment. She put away a load of dishes and started reloading the dishwasher. She poked through the fridge and started a new shopping list. She tossed a new load of laundry into the washing machine.
It seemed like an eon passed before her phone buzzed and the familiar chime that signaled a new text message went off, and she practically sprinted back into the kitchen and snatched her phone up.
She read Harry’s reply four times, and she could feel her expression twisting more and more with affronted outrage with each reread.
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea. It can’t be so important that you can’t just tell me like this.’
Well, alright then. If that was the game he wanted to play, then Cheyenne would play it. She attached the picture of the pregnancy test to her next message and carefully typed out, ‘Willing to talk to me now, jackass?’ before she hit send.
He changed his mind very quickly after that.
‘Meet me at that cafe tomorrow, around 2. You know which one.’
Cheyenne wrinkled her nose and texted back a simple, brief, ‘k.’ She did know which cafe he was talking about, and while she knew, logically, that it was just a good cafe and that Harry had favored it long before he met Cheyenne, it still felt like he was picking it simply to make her uncomfortable. They had spent a lot of time in that cafe together. On top of that, it seemed more than a little presumptuous. It was only sheer luck that she had the next day off. On any other day, she would need to get permission from her boss to leave early.
She showed the short string of texts to Daphne. Unsurprisingly, Daphne informed her that she would also be attending the meeting at the cafe, and Cheyenne was unexpectedly comforted by the knowledge. She didn’t think Harry would try anything untoward, but she also just did not particularly want to face him on her own. She would appreciate getting a bit of a boost when it came to moral support, and she wasn’t going to protest if Daphne was going to provide that boost.
There was just one detail remaining: she had to make sure she looked absolutely amazing when she walked through the front doors of that cafe tomorrow. Even a hair out of place would be absolutely inexcusable. Just as she expected, Daphne was happy to help make sure she looked incredible.
CHAPTER TWO
Harry was already at the cafe when Cheyenne and Daphne arrived, and he looked up as the bell over the door rang, glanced back down at his phone, and then did a double-take when he realized that Cheyenne wasn’t on her own.
“Don’t you think this should be a private conversation?” he asked blandly, with just a hint of accusation in his tone, and it wasn’t entirely clear whether he was asking Cheyenne or Daphne.
Daphne smiled blithely, calm as a still pond, and sat down across from him. “Nope,” she offered pleasantly as she scooted her chair in towards the table again.
As Cheyenne sat down next to her, Harry offered her a slightly beseeching look. Cheyenne blinked at him slowly, as if she didn’t comprehend any of what he was trying to silently ask her. He gave up trying once it became clear that he wasn’t going to get what he wanted, and he dragged a hand down his face.
“Have you been to a doctor yet?” he finally sighed, evidently deciding that he didn’t want to beat around the bush when the situation was already complicated.
“I only found out yesterday,” Cheyenne reminded him, with the faintly patronizing patience of a kindergarten teacher. After a beat, she added helpfully, “That would be a no.”
Harry’s brow furrowed slightly as he scowled. “Yeah, I got that,” he groused. “You’re going to, right?”
“Oh, no, not at all,” Cheyenne deadpanned, and she reached up to pinch the bridge of her nose between two fingers. “I definitely want to go through this entire complicated, potentially dangerous, potentially life-threatening situation completely blind, without any sort of medical advice, and I definitely don’t want to know in advance if there’s anything wrong.”
Slowly, Harry sighed as if he were truly the most tortured being in the world. “Can we drop the sarcasm?” he requested flatly.
“No,” she answered simply, folding her arms on the table and shrugging one shoulder. “You’ve earned it.”
“What did I do?” he demanded after sputtering for half a second.
Cheyenne stared at him in quiet disbelief for a moment, before she groaned and hid her face behind her hands. “Daph, please,” she whined, slumping down to bury her face in her arms on top of the table. “I can’t.”
Daphne’s expression brightened, and she sat up straighter in her seat. Ticking things off on her fingers, she started listing accusations. “First, brushing her off when she tried to do this the right way and forcing her to tell you over a text message. Second, just presuming she didn’t need to be at work today and was free to meet you just whenever you wanted. Third—”
“Wait, you have a new job?” Harry asked, bewildered, looking at Cheyenne where she was still slumped on the table.
“Oh my god,” she groaned emphatically into her arms.
Daphne cleared her throat sharply. “Third, acting like she’s being so unreasonable for not wanting to deal with you on her own.”
“It’s not like I would hurt her,” Harry protested, features twisting with affronted offense.
Tone dipping into a saccharine mockery, Daphne pointed out, “Statistically, women get the short end of the stick when men think they know best.” She cleared her throat. “Fourth, doubting she has a job? Seriously? What, did you expect me to just take her in like a stray dog?” She shook her head sharply, dropping the subject and getting back on topic. “Fifth, ignoring everything your girlfriend said about your PA being inappropriate.”
“She wasn’t—”
Daphne’s voice rose slightly to drown him out. “Sixth, breaking up with your girlfriend in probably the most callous way you could have chosen to do so because she pointed out that your PA was being inappr
opriate.” She paused, eyes sliding up and to the side as she thought for a moment, before she folded her hands together on the table and decided, “I think that’s most of it.”
Harry was silent for a moment after that, looking as if he was at least trying to mull over everything Daphne said as Cheyenne finally peered up from her arms to watch him. Slowly, he looked at her and stated, “I think you should move back in with me.”
“Um.” Cheyenne lifted her head the rest of the way off of her arms, cleared her throat, and finally managed to make some actual words form. “Why the hell would I want to do that? I mean, yeah, I didn’t plan on hiding the pregnancy from you, but I don’t think that means we need to jump right back into the thick of everything.”
Harry sighed and dragged a hand over his hair. “That’s not what I’m getting at. It would just be safer for you if you did.”