by Aubrey Gross
Owen shrugged. “Beats me. You’re the ladies’ man here. I do know, though, that Jenn’s a good woman, and I want nothing but happiness for her. Hell, I wish I could find a woman like her…but not. If that makes any sense.”
“Not a damn bit, but that’s okay considering we’ve been sitting here talking about feelings like a bunch of chicks.”
“Right. So how do you think the Wranglers are going to do now that the All Star Break’s over?”
Matt willingly followed the topic change, even if talking about his team was almost as frustrating as thinking about the red-haired woman who was driving him crazy.
#
Two hours later Matt pulled into Jenn’s driveway. He’d left April’s almost thirty minutes ago and had driven around a bit, trying to figure out what he should do next, struggling with the sense his life was spinning out of control.
His career was in the hands of other people.
His brain and skull weren’t healing as fast as he would like.
He had no idea what the future held.
He was tired of being a verbal punching bag when he wasn’t sure he deserved to be one in the first place.
The only one of those things he had any sort of control over was the last one, and even then the idea of control was specious at best. Considering he’d never been one to give up, though, Matt decided to grab the bull by the horns and get to the bottom of Jenn’s attitude once and for all.
This is either going to go really well, or you’re going to end up with another head injury.
Matt turned off the JEEP and got out, locking it behind him as he walked to Jenn’s door. He knocked twice and waited. After long moments, the door finally swung open, revealing Jenn with a frown on her face, her red curls piled high on her head, and those mile-long legs in a teeny tiny pair of boxers. She crossed her arms over her chest, making him realize she was wearing a tank top and no bra. His body tightened with the same response he always had around her.
Shit. This could be harder than he’d thought.
No pun intended.
Feeling slightly off-kilter but determined to regain some semblance of control over his life, Matt allowed his gaze to travel the length of her body—making sure to pause at the interesting spots—before saying, “Mind if I come in?”
“As a matter of fact, yes, Matt, I do.”
He adopted an air of calmness and hooked his thumbs inside the back pockets of his jeans. “Well, if you want to have this conversation in the front yard so all of your neighbors can hear, that’s fine with me. What’s one more YouTube video?”
Jenn narrowed her eyes but stepped aside. “Fine, asshole.”
Matt stepped inside, wondering when he’d become such a masochist that he was turned on by someone who sometimes seemed to hate his guts. Jenn closed the door behind her and walked back over to the couch, where she picked up a remote and turned off the TV.
“I would say I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’m not.”
She heaved a sigh and flopped back onto the cushions. “Just get it out, Matt. What do you want?”
He stalked over to the couch and sat on the coffee table in front of her, took a quiet, steadying breath and said, “Well, after you left, Owen and I got to talking and it occurred to me that in the entire time you and I have been around one another I’ve never known you to hold a grudge. Sure, you can have a bit of a temper at times, but you generally seem to be able to forgive and forget. Yes, I realize what I did was a dick move and that you had every right to be mad at me—hell, I was pissed at myself. What I don’t understand, though, is why you’ve held a grudge for ten fucking years, and why you at turns seem to like me and hate my guts while wanting to get me naked. So what gives, Jenn? What’s really going on in that head of yours?”
She rolled her eyes. “I so do not want to get you naked.”
“Bullshit, but that’s also not the point here.” Matt leaned closer, lightly placing his hands on her knees. “I’m sorry for what I did ten years ago—I regretted it that night and I regret it now—but something tells me no matter how much I apologize you’re still going to hold this unexplainable anger towards me. Why is that, Jenn?”
She looked away and pressed her lips together. Matt stood up and headed towards what he assumed was her bedroom. He got halfway down the hall before she yelled, “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“Fact-finding,” he tossed over his shoulder.
“The hell you are,” she muttered. Seconds later she slapped his arm. “I swear to God, if you go into my bedroom I will castrate you.”
He winced internally. “That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”
“Not at all.”
“Threaten me all you want, but I’m going to get some answers. I’m tired of being your verbal punching bag.” He turned and began walking again, just steps away from her bedroom.
“Then why the fuck do you keep coming around, Matt?” Jenn shouted.
Finally, some honest emotion.
He turned around and walked back towards her, crowded her against the wall. “Because I like you, Jenn. Despite the fact that you’re almost always a bitch to me, and despite the fact that sometimes you act like you wish I didn’t even exist, I fucking like you.”
“For the love of God, why? I treat you like shit.”
“Honestly? Sometimes I wonder. But then I remember that night in San Antonio and how easy it was to make you laugh, and how much we had in common, and how it felt to be inside of you and I want nothing more than to go back to that night and do things differently. Then I think about now, and the times when you let down your guard and you let me in, and I see this amazing, smart, fun, loyal and absolutely beautiful woman and I wonder what it’ll take for you to let me in all the way, because, dammit, Jenn, I want in all the way.”
And there went any sense of control he’d had over the situation.
“You’re insane.”
Matt pushed away from the wall. “Seriously? That’s all you have to say? I’m insane? For the love of God woman, I’m standing here basically cutting myself open and bleeding for you and all you can say is I’m insane? Just let me in, Jenn, let someone in because something has obviously been hurting you for a long, long time and all signs are pointing towards me being the culprit. So please, just tell me something, anything. Tell me your truth.”
#
Matt was pacing like a caged animal, and Jenn could feel his frustration pulsing in the air around them. Her hands pressed into the wall behind her. She had to restrain herself from clawing, trying to escape into the drywall and insulation.
She didn’t want to have this conversation. Didn’t want to tell Matt her truth.
Because it wasn’t pretty.
It was awful and beautiful and painful. Oh, so, painful.
She closed her eyes against the sting of tears and the frantic pounding of her heart that almost always accompanied her memories. She drew in a shaky breath, and moments later Matt’s body was against hers. She wanted to sink into it and lose herself in him.
God, she wanted to lose herself. Her memories. Her truth.
His hand gently cupped her face, and his voice was just above a whisper when he asked, “What is it, Jenn? What happened?”
She shook her head. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t tell him.
His lips gently landed on her forehead, her nose, her cheeks. Feather light, like a blessing. Or maybe a curse. She didn’t know anymore.
She felt like she didn’t know much anymore, other than that ever since Matt had been injured she felt like she’d been losing herself. Some days it seemed like the very fabric of who she was and the life she’d built was being torn apart, the stitches slowly, painfully ripped out one by one, to the point where she couldn’t hide and hold all of her pieces inside anymore. They were spilling out, one by one, messily leaving behind emotions she’d thought she’d long buried.
“Jenn,” he whispered. Just her name. But it sounded like a plea and
a prayer, an invitation she’d never intended to accept.
She opened her eyes and held Matt’s gaze with her own, the stinging in her eyes now a river, a flood that threatened to sweep them both away. “You want my truth, Matt? You want to know why I’m angry and bitter and why I try to keep you at a distance despite—yes—wanting you?”
She gulped in a huge breath of air, made sure she had his full and undivided attention, and told him her truth.
#
Del Rio, Texas, Ten Years Ago
Jenn mentally counted back the days. Once. Twice. Three times.
Fought to stuff down the panic that threatened to take over.
Six weeks.
She glanced at the stick resting on the counter of the bathroom sink, afraid to fully focus and actually see it.
Just do it. Just get it over with.
Slowly, she reached out a shaking hand and gingerly picked up the white plastic.
Two pink lines.
She swallowed down the panic-laced bile that burned the back of her throat, checked the instructions one more time and barely managed to lean over the toilet in time.
Once her stomach was turned inside out and the heaving had finally stopped, she curled into the fetal position on the floor, the pregnancy test still clutched in one hand and the instructions in the other.
Minutes or hours later, she wasn’t sure, Jenn pulled herself up off the floor, gently set the pregnancy test and instructions in the trashcan and walked into the living room of her tiny one-bedroom apartment. She’d been scrimping and saving since she was in college for the down payment on a house (thank you, full-ride scholarship and dual credit courses), and she was realistically a couple of months away from being where she wanted to be for that, especially considering she was just about to wrap up her first full year of teaching.
I can’t raise a baby, a child, in this tiny apartment.
She sat on her couch, more exhausted than she could ever remember being. Mentally and emotionally she felt wrung out, confused, scared shitless and yet filled with wonder. She rested the palm of one hand on her stomach, rubbed her still-flat belly.
There’s a life in there.
It wasn’t how she’d planned it. She wanted children, but they hadn’t been in the plan for right now. Not yet.
And there was that little fact of not being in a relationship with the baby’s father.
Yeah, that made things slightly more difficult.
She didn’t know how she was going to tell Matt. She expected him to be pissed, and she couldn’t blame him. After all, she wasn’t exactly happy about the current situation, either.
But still, there was a life under her hand.
Her thoughts swirling in her head and her eyelids heavy, Jenn lay down on the couch and pulled a throw over her body. With her palm still pressed against her belly, she fell into a hard, dreamless sleep.
The next morning she woke up mentally refreshed but with a hell of a crick in her neck. Slightly more at peace with her current situation, Jenn spent her Sunday making plans, looking over her finances and finally getting in touch with a mortgage broker her family had known since she was a kid. If she was going to have this baby, she was damned sure going to do so in a house with a yard in a good part of town, even if she had to pinch a few more pennies.
The following weeks were a whirlwind of activity, but a month later she’d found the perfect house—a small, two-bedroom, one bath with a fenced-in yard in a good neighborhood. Even better had been the price. A fellow teacher’s mother had recently passed away, and she had decided to sell the house rather than try to maintain the upkeep on it since she and her husband owned a home already. She’d approached Jenn before even looking for a Realtor to list it, and had offered Jenn the house at a price well below appraisal. It needed a little bit of work, but she could handle having new floors put in, repainting the walls and bringing in a plumber.
A few weeks later she was a homeowner.
As contractors came in and out of her new house, replacing the 1970s shag carpet, painting the walls and fixing the plumbing, Jenn wrapped up the school year and enjoyed her little secret while packing up her apartment in her spare time. So far, the only person who knew about the baby was her OBGYN, and she was content to keep it that way.
She still hadn’t figured out how to tell Matt, but she’d watched every Wranglers game she could, especially if he was the starting pitcher. Even though it was early in the season, he was already on pace to have an All Star year. Every time he stood on the mound Jenn would rub her stomach and whisper, “That’s your daddy up there.”
Sometimes, her stomach would bubble in response, but she knew enough to know that the feeling was probably just gas since it was still too early to feel the baby moving.
Her OBGYN had set her due date at December 20. A winter baby. Possibly a Christmas baby.
Matt wouldn’t be playing baseball then. In fact, he might even be home.
The thought would slip through her mind, unbidden, and she knew she needed to tell him. She just didn’t know how.
“Oh, by the way, remember how I told you I was on the pill and it was perfectly fine to not use a condom that night? Yeah, so, apparently your little swimmers are just as competitive as you are and decided hormonal birth control was no big deal.”
Somehow she didn’t think that would go over too well.
So instead of asking Chase for Matt’s phone number (which was going to be awkward as hell), she kept putting it off, secretly growing her baby and telling people who asked that she’d simply thought it was time to buy a house and she’d been presented with an offer she couldn’t refuse. It wasn’t really lying if it was telling part of the truth, right?
She couldn’t imagine how Matt would react. Anger. Disbelief. She couldn’t blame him for feeling any of those things and more, considering she’d been the one to tell him it was okay to have sex without a condom. In all fairness it should have been okay—she’d been on the pill since she was a teenager to regulate her periods, and the failure rate was something like less than one percent.
In other words, she shouldn’t have gotten pregnant that night.
But she had.
She would often think back to the days before that night, trying to remember if she’d accidentally forgotten to take a pill or had taken one late. She couldn’t remember that happening—she took it like clockwork every morning as soon as she woke up. She hadn’t been sick or on antibiotics, either, so that excuse had to be thrown out the window.
No, this had been a fluke of Mother Nature. A fluke she was quickly falling more and more in love with. She’d cried at her twelve week checkup when the doctor had listened for the baby’s heartbeat the first time. She could hear it lightly whooshing through the machine. It was the most miraculous, wondrous thing in the world.
Sometimes it was hard to believe that for those first few disbelieving hours, she’d wanted to rail against the world and fate. Once she’d woken up to the dawn of a new day, she’d done so with an overwhelming feeling of love and protectiveness towards the life growing inside of her. No, none of this was ideal, but she was pregnant and would soon be responsible for another human being, and she was damned sure going to be the best mother she could be.
Which meant she should probably tell the father.
A few times over the next week, she picked up her phone to call Chase and ask him for Matt’s number. She always chickened out right before the first ring.
In a matter of weeks the floors had been replaced, the paint had dried, the plumbing had been repaired and Jenn was ready to move into her new house. Seventeen weeks after that wonderful, heart breaking night with Matt, Jenn moved out of her apartment and into her new house, effectively closing the door on her past and opening the door to her future.
She still hadn’t told anyone but her OBGYN about the baby. The fact that she hadn’t started to show yet definitely helped her to keep the secret a little longer. She’d remembered her mom showing pretty
early with all three of her younger siblings, so she’d asked her doctor, worried that something was wrong with the baby. The doctor had smiled her kind smile and reassured Jenn that her baby was doing just fine.
Over the summer break she discreetly bought a couple of items for the baby’s room—a crib and a car seat on a trip to San Antonio, unisex baby clothes that she told people were for a friend if they asked.
A part of her wanted to shout from the rooftops and share her news. The other part enjoyed knowing something no one else was privy to and feeling fascination as her baby began to move and become more active.
There was still that pesky little fact that she still hadn’t managed to tell Matt.
At twenty weeks she went in for a full ultrasound, and gripped the edges of the exam table as the sonographer took picture after picture of her growing baby. Finally, towards the end of the exam, the baby moved and they got a fairly clear look at the sex.
She was having a boy.
Somehow that only seemed fitting, and already she could form a picture in her mind of what he would look like. He would have her red hair and Matt’s hazel eyes. He would be athletic like his uncle and father, and share her love of books (not that Matt was a mental slouch).
He was probably going to be a handful. She was definitely going to love every minute of it.
She also mentioned to her doctor that she’d been having some mild back pain and abdominal cramps. Her OBGYN assured her that was normal—her body was going through a lot of changes, after all—and that they only needed to worry if the pain and cramps were accompanied by vaginal bleeding.
She left feeling reassured and excited, yet determined to finally tell Matt. She went home and tried to muster the courage to call Chase and get Matt’s number.
Three times she picked up her phone.
Three times she set it back down.
Instead of calling Chase, she sat on the couch and looked at the black and white picture the sonographer had printed out for her. Her baby.
Every time she thought to call Chase to get Matt’s number, she allowed herself to get distracted by something else. Lesson plans. Baby names. Making the two and a half hour drive into San Antonio for maternity clothes, since her normal clothes had finally gotten too snug and the school year would be starting in a week. The back pain and cramps would come and go, but they never stuck around long and she hadn’t experienced any bleeding, so she didn’t worry too much about anything other than how to tell Matt.