by Kylie Scott
“I guess driving back to Sydney is out,” I said, carefully hopping down off the bed.
Dad grunted. “You’re flying. I’m buying you a ticket.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said, moved by the display of parental affection.
“I don’t care if you have to go first class,” he continued. “You’re leaving today. I can’t take any more. The sooner you two are separated, the better and safer for everyone.”
Pete just hummed in agreement.
“What about my car?” I asked.
“You’re not going to be able to drive it for at least six weeks, anyway,” said Dad.
“We’ll sort it out later,” said Shanti. Even she seemed to agree that running me out of the state was for the best, patting me on the shoulder. “Alright, darling, let’s get you home. Enough adventures for one night, I think.”
We drove home in silence. Pete was either asleep or determinedly ignoring me, or a mixture of both. I tried to snooze. God knows I was tired and the painkillers had made me drowsy. But this was it. Again. The end. And what an end it was. We all climbed out of the car, yawning and weary.
“I’ll sleep on Pete’s couch in case he needs anything,” said Dad.
“Yes, dear.” Shanti kissed him on the cheek. “See you at breakfast. A late one, I think.”
Dad just nodded.
I turned to Pete to say something, but he just slowly stumbled off into the night. Nothing I could do. Apparently, I’d already done it all. It wasn’t even my fault. Not really.
“Come on, darling,” said Shanti, taking my unbroken arm.
“He didn’t even say goodbye.”
Her brows rose. “Maybe that means it’s not the end? Who knows?”
“I think maybe it means he blames me for everything and hates me,” I said glumly. “That seems the most likely answer.”
Her arm went around my shoulders, squeezing me tight, her sigh soft in the darkness. “Perhaps walking away right now is for the best. It’s sad, but sometimes loving someone isn’t enough. One day, if the stars are aligned, you might be ready for each other and come together for the right reasons.”
“A pretty thought.” I gave her a small smile and we headed in.
Not so surprisingly, I didn’t see Pete again before I left.
Chapter Fourteen
Eight Weeks Later
“We have Indian.”
“What’d you get?” asked Hazel.
She and Maddie were cuddling on the couch, the very picture of happiness and love in the late afternoon. Ah, togetherness. It barely even hurt anymore to see. Them, random couples on the street . . . none of it really bothered me anymore. Sure, living with people who were in love had been a drag at first. But now I was over him. So over him. After all, life was a glorious thing full of opportunities and experiences, not to be wasted fretting over some penis-wielding moron.
I slid the bag full of spicy awesomeness onto the kitchen counter. “Chicken tikka masala, lamb rogan josh, something vegetarian with paneer, raita, pickles, and cheese and spinach naan breads. Everything we need for a feast to celebrate the removal of my gruesome cast.”
Maddie smiled. “Nice. We have something for you too.”
A brown paper bag sat on the table, waiting. Curious.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Open it,” instructed Hazel, rising to her feet.
Maddie watched, eyes guarded.
“Alright.” I picked up the package. “I applied for another position today; this one’s at the offices of a plumbing imports company. Italian toilets are cool, right?”
“Funny you should mention toilets,” said Maddie.
“Why?” I opened the paper bag and immediately dropped it with a gasp. A brown snake appearing in my hands would be less shocking. “What the hell!”
“Just breathe,” said Hazel, using her counselor voice. It kind of made you want to confess your darkest sins or cry about your childhood. Sometimes both.
“It’s not funny,” I said. “Why on earth would you buy me that?”
“It’s not a joke.”
Maddie picked up the pregnancy test, holding it out to me with a determined sort of smile. “The symptoms are all there. It’s time you found out for sure.”
“No.”
“Yes,” they both said.
“It was just a stomach bug.”
“For six weeks?” Maddie raised her brows.
“You made puking look like your new hobby,” added Hazel, not helpfully.
“And then there’s the tits.” Maddie blew out a breath, tucking a strand of curly blond hair behind her ear. “You’ve gone up a size, haven’t you?”
“I’d say two,” said Hazel.
“Stop ganging up on me,” I cried. “Oh my God.”
“Adele, be honest. When was the last time you had your period?”
“It’s been a very stressful time,” I said. “Stress can affect the body like that. You’re studying medicine, Maddie—you know these things. Tell her.”
Hazel tilted her head. “It was Maddie’s idea to get the test.”
“Why don’t you just quickly go pee on the stick and then we’ll know for sure?” asked Maddie, henceforth known as the betrayer.
“Because it’s pointless. It’s going to be negative.” I was surrounded, encircled by two completely wrong best friends. The wrongest best friends in all of time and space.
“Then it’s not a big deal, right?” Hazel smiled. “We’ll have a glass of wine and eat all of that yummy curry you bought to celebrate.”
“Wanting spicy food is a big indicator, by the way,” said Maddie.
“No, it’s not, I was just craving . . .”
Oh shit. No.
Maddie pressed the test into my hand. My numb fingers closed around it, my brain in the process of shutting down completely. It couldn’t be. I couldn’t be. This was all a horrible, terrible mistake. The bigger boobs were a gift from God and the puking thing had just been a virus. Any sudden sensitivity regarding my middle was just a weird anomaly. Skinny jeans were sure to go out of fashion eventually anyway.
“No need to panic,” said Hazel, using the irritatingly soothing voice again. “But it’s best to know for certain, right?”
Not really.
Sweat broke out across my back, my heart beating double time. I swallowed hard, my throat and everything below or above it feeling god-awful for some reason. More stress. It was just more stress. This time inflicted on me by my soon-to-be ex-best friends. Next time, I’d be sure to find people who neither cared about my physical well-being nor noticed the size of my breasts or any persistent puking I happened to partake in. Much simpler.
“Okay,” I said, eventually finding my voice.
They nodded, giving me encouraging smiles.
“Right.” The pregnancy test was clutched tight in my hands. “I’m going to go and do it now.”
“We love you,” said Maddie. “Good luck.”
“Whatever the result is, we’ll work it out,” promised Hazel. “Everything will be fine.”
Bathrooms were surprisingly comfortable for both short- and long-term stays. You had water. Facilities should your bladder or bowels require attention. Why, you could even have a nice, long hot soak in the bath should you be so inclined.
Right then, I wasn’t so inclined.
I just sat on the cool terra-cotta tile floor with my arms looped around my knees. Balanced on the edge of the sink above my head was the dreaded test. It didn’t count, however, if I refused to look at it. There was no possible way it could turn my life upside down if I just continued to ignore the damn thing. I was safe. Quietly terrified, but still.
“Are you ready to come out yet?” asked Hazel through the door.
“No.”
“It’s been almost two hours.”
“I’m fine,” I lied.
“Okay.” She sighed. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Truth was, my stomach had been grumbling for a w
hile now. All of the wonderful Indian food was just sitting out there going cold while I had to be stuck in here with that thing. People were talking farther back in the apartment; I heard a deeper voice than either Hazel or Maddie could attempt. Shit. They’d called for backup. I wondered who it was. The pregnancy test police maybe. I couldn’t hear what they said, but it couldn’t be good.
Knuckles rapped on the door. “Adele?”
I sat up, startled. “Pete?”
“Ah, yeah,” he said in his usual low, rough tone. “Want to let me in?”
I nodded yes, but said, “No.”
“Hazel and Mat—”
“Maddie,” corrected Maddie.
“Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “Hazel and Maddie said you’re doing a pregnancy test? That’s a bit of a surprise.”
“You told him?” I yelled. “Holy shit, guys!”
“I’m sorry,” said Maddie. “He saw the box on the table.”
That made no sense. “What? How? I’ve got it in here with me.”
Hazel sighed. “We got extras in case you had a positive result and needed to do another to be sure. You freaked out enough at the sight of one; imagine what two would have done to you.”
“Okay,” said Pete. “Do you really think you’re pregnant?”
I just frowned. “Why are you here?”
“I brought your car down. Figured you might need it since your cast was due to come off.”
“She just got it off today,” confirmed Maddie.
“Great,” he said. “Had some business to see to down here anyway, so . . .”
Of course he wasn’t here for any romantic dying-without-me-type reason. Damn my stupid heart for hoping otherwise. After all of the countless lectures I’d given myself about giving up on him, some idiot part of me still held on. It had to just be a bad habit. There should be wrong-man rehab. Counseling, hand holding, and maybe a little waterboarding for the extreme cases like me. Whatever it took to get the him in question out of your head.
“Will you come out, please?” he asked.
I said nothing.
“Come on, beautiful. I feel like an idiot talking to you through a door.”
“Yeah, well, I feel like an idiot sitting on the bathroom floor too scared to look at the test results,” I said, wiping away a tear. “But here we are.”
Nothing.
“And don’t call me that.”
“Ladies, would you mind giving us some privacy?” he asked.
I heard shuffling, a whispered threat from Hazel to cut off his dick if he upset me. Then silence.
“A baby? Hell,” he said, voice coming from closer and lower, like he’d sat down next to the door. “I don’t know what to say.”
“We don’t know for sure that there is one.”
“Hm.”
“We never talked about kids seriously. For no reason in particular—just wondering—how would you feel about having one?”
“Honestly, my own experience being one was so shit I never saw a good reason to inflict that on someone else,” he said. “Plus, I didn’t have the best example for parenting. What if I fucked it up?”
“But you wouldn’t. You’d care. Besides, look how good you were with the kid who you got stuck with during the summers all those years. Practically your finest moments.”
He was silent for a moment, then he asked, “What about you? And kids, I mean.”
“Sure, someday maybe. Not now.”
One of the taps was dripping. I’d never realized they could be so loud. The tiny sound echoing in the small room until it seemed like thunder.
“What do you want to do if you’re pregnant, Adele?”
“I don’t know.” I covered my head with my hands, pinching my eyes shut. “I just . . . I don’t know.”
Silence.
“Truth is, you’re the business I’ve got in town,” he said. “I drove down because I missed you.”
I frowned in disbelief.
“After you left, well . . . I was pissed at you for a while about the tree.”
“That wasn’t my fault.”
“It wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t been climbing trees in the middle of the night like a crazy woman,” he said. “You realize people don’t generally do that sort of thing. You do realize that, right?”
I rolled my eyes. A sophisticated and superior gesture that was lost on him, courtesy of the wall of wood standing between us.
Silence.
“I was late taking the pill when I was on holidays,” I confessed, just getting it out. “I took it as soon as I remembered. I thought it would be okay. But if I’m pregnant, this is my fault.”
“Pretty sure it would have taken both of us to make a baby,” he said. “I could have used condoms with you, but I didn’t want to. Never done that before, but I liked being bare in you too much.”
I had nothing.
“Have you looked at it yet?” he asked, voice softer.
“No.”
“You’re going to have to sometime.”
“I know.”
“Adele, whatever you want to do, I’ll support you.”
“Thanks,” I said. Then stopped. “How do I take care of a baby? There isn’t room in my life for a child, not right now.”
He said nothing. Probably busy doing his own panicking on his side of the door. Which would be fair enough, really.
“Hazel and Maddie are great, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t planning on me having a baby here anytime soon,” I said. “Babies are loud and they need stuff. Lots of stuff. I’ll have to find someplace else to live. I guess there’s maternity leave, so work should be okay . . .”
“You’d stay in Sydney?”
I just concentrated on breathing for a moment, needing to calm the fuck down. “I honestly don’t know what I’d do.”
“If you are pregnant,” he said, “I want you to know, we could raise the baby together. I don’t want to be some absentee asshole that just sends money. You and a baby would need more than that and you’d deserve more than that.”
“You’d want me to move north.”
“I’d want my child near me, of course.” He made a noise in his throat. “I mean, I’d want both of you near me so I could help. Fuck, I’m just . . . I’m trying to figure out what the right thing to do here is.”
“Me too.”
Nothing.
“You missed me?”
“Yeah.”
“Want to expand on that?” I asked. “You seemed pretty sure about the whole me-not-turning-your-life-upside-down thing and now you’re here?”
This time, the sigh was closer to a groan. “I was. Or I thought I was. I like my life how it is, Adele. Worked hard at my job to get Andrew to raise me to management. It took me years to build my house, get everything exactly how I wanted, how I always imagined it. I’ve finally got my own space, a home I can be proud of, the money to do some things, and a couple of good friends. Then you come back.”
I kept quiet.
“I thought everything would go back to being the same after you left, but I couldn’t move on,” he said. “Didn’t want to. Kept thinking about you and . . .”
“And what?”
“Come back up north with me now.”
My eyes popped open in surprise.
“Regardless of if you’re pregnant or not. I’ve been thinking about it and I think you should move north and take the job,” he said. “That’s what I came down here to tell you. The car was just an excuse.”
Huh.
“I think that if things hadn’t gone to shit with us, that’s what you would have done.”
I shrugged. He was probably right.
“Maybe things would work out between us, maybe not,” he continued. “I don’t know. But either way, I didn’t come all this way not to be involved in your life. Whatever else has happened, we were always friends. I want that back. I’ve always wanted that back.”
Huh.
“I’m asking for your
patience, I guess.”
Interesting. Though he had said something eerily similar about seeing how things worked out between us before and it hadn’t ended well. Maybe we hadn’t had enough time for him to figure out how he felt about me and the offer was genuine. It had only been a few days, after all. Or maybe this was him keeping me close, yet at a safe distance. The same as every other woman he got vaguely involved with. Hard to tell. Though given current circumstances, we probably had more pressing issues.
“Say something,” he said.
I reached up for the test. Two pink lines. My insides flipped up and over.
I was going to be a mother. Holy shit.
A collection of cells was happening in my uterus right now, made up of me and the man I’d loved, right or wrong, since time immemorial. This was big, so incredibly huge, my brain could barely wrap itself around it. Consequences from this event went on forever and ever.
“Adele?”
“I looked.” A small voice.
“Okay.”
“I’m pregnant.”
A pause. “Okay.”
“I think I want to keep it.” The two pink lines wavered, my eyes filling with tears. Shock and fear and I don’t know what else. “I can’t . . . it’s us, you know?”
“Open the door, please.”
I walked over on my knees, flicked the lock, and then scooted backwards.
Carefully, the door eased inward and Pete appeared. Hair all messy and in disarray like he’d been shoving his fingers through it, as he was wont to do when stressed. Eyes a little tired and stubble on his cheeks. Clothes distinctly crushed.
“You didn’t go to a hotel or something? You came straight here?” I asked.
He looked down at me and nodded. “I needed to see you.”
“I missed you too.”
Pete didn’t go to a motel, but he did sleep on the couch.
Maddie and Hazel were great about having a guest. I don’t know that Pete was happy about the couch situation. But we’d been back and forth in this maybe relationship so many times, I was too nervous to consider anything more right now. Perhaps in the future things would work out between us. Perhaps not.