“Damn that pizza,” I said, grunting. I didn’t wait for the sensation to pass before I continued opening boxes. The energy driving me was frantic, bordering on panic, but with a kind of hyper-focus I had never experienced before in my life.
“Where was this when I was sorting my way through all of those back-logged files?” I wondered out loud. The pizza rumbled in my belly uncomfortably, setting off a series of cramps.
“Braxton Hicks,” I told myself, brushing the discomfort away. I didn’t have time to give in to it, I had to finish the house. For some reason, it felt absolutely vital. But then, just as suddenly as the unboxing urge hit, it was gone; replaced by the overwhelming need to scrub every surface in my kitchen. I moved like a whirlwind—a spherical whirlwind with a bad case of the waddles—into the kitchen, grabbed a rag, and instantly fell to my knees.
It had to be Braxton Hicks. It couldn’t possibly be labor, it was too early for that. But they had never brought me to my knees before. It wasn’t pain so much as it was every muscle across the top of my belly seizing all at once, making my legs go numb and casting the breath out of my lungs. I knelt, gasping, for what seemed an eternity. I looked at the rag in my hand, confused. Why was I holding this?
The seizing stopped and I stood up, feeling at once utterly confused and completely clear-headed. My stomach lurched. As I hurried to the bathroom, I decided that pizza had been a terrible idea.
Chapter 16
Nick
“Runnin’ out on me already, Nick?” Charlie asked, looking up miserably from his beer. “Lord alive, everybody’s runnin’ out on me these days.”
“Sorry, old man,” I said, clapping him heartily on the shoulder. “I’ve racked up too many hours this week. Bad for the books. Robbie’ll take care of you.”
“Somebody should,” Charlie mumbled.
I pulled Robbie aside, speaking to him in hushed tones. “Keep an eye on old Charlie,” I said. “Water his drinks down, but keep them coming. He thinks we’re his only friends in the world right now, and he might be right.”
“What happened?” Robbie asked, glancing at Charlie like a deer in the headlights.
“Wife left him for his proctologist.”
Robbie whistled. “Ain’t that a kick in the ass.”
“It’s a something in the ass,” I said wryly. “Just keep eyes on him, all right?”
“You got it, man.”
I left fuming. This was the third time they’d cut my hours since I’d maxed out on raises, and I knew why. The management had just hired Robbie on at a third of my hourly rate, and now that he’d been trained by the master—that would be me—they were giving him all the hours he could take. Which obviously cut into my hours. “No loyalty at all,” I said angrily.
I wasn’t ready to go home. I’d only been at the bar for five hours, and now that I wasn’t dating with any kind of frequency, I literally had nothing else to do. These days, when I had nothing to do and nothing to occupy my mind, it was invariably filled with thoughts of Carmen.
It was ridiculous. Months had gone by, and I was still obsessing over her. I’d finally left the agency entirely after they wouldn’t stop pestering me to go back to work, deleted all of my social media, and ditched my work phone, just to get some peace. I’d known that I’d been in high demand, I just hadn’t known how high.
Now that I was out of the business, I found I had little interest in dating. Bradley’s wedding hadn’t helped matters at all. He and his bride were clearly made for each other, and the whole ceremony had felt like the pre-party for the raucous celebration that was the reception.
I’d never seen one of my guys fall in love like that before. It had changed my perception of him, of me, of men like us; we weren’t reckless kids fighting somebody else’s war anymore. We were grown, and we’d earned a chance at lasting happiness. He’d taken his. I’d thrown mine away.
My wandering feet brought me to 7th Street. It wasn’t the first time, and I was sure that it wouldn’t be the last. This was the place where it had all started; the place where I’d met Carmen, and been so taken with her that I’d forfeited hundreds of dollars just for the sake of her conversation. Some nights I wanted to take that decision back; it had altered the course of my life, and now my destination was shrouded in mystery. Where on earth was I supposed to go from here?
That was when I saw it. A tiny sign, no bigger than a 3x5 card tucked into the corner of the window at 7th Heaven. “Bar for sale,” it read. “Inquire within.”
“That’s where I go,” I told myself. I stepped back from the wall to take in the building. Nice bar. Looked like offices above it, but it could be a different business entirely. If it were offices, I could probably find a way to make it work as a temporary living space if need be. I’d been putting my dreams off for far too long. It was time to start thinking about them again.
With a mind toward scoping the place out from a business perspective, I pushed my way inside. It was absolutely packed. Definitely a good sign. I remembered that it had been busy the last time I’d been there with Carmen. I saw the table where we’d sat; it was full of women, laughing and talking like old friends.
I didn’t realize that I had been staring until one of them, a loud, dark-haired woman dressed in bright colors, shouted across the bar at me.
“You look lost! Have a seat, we’ve got room!”
What the hell, why not. I sat.
“I’m Tyra,” she told me, flashing her engagement ring as she shook my hand. “Unavailable, I’m afraid, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She winked at me, and I grinned.
“Nice to meet you, unavailable Tyra.”
She laughed and introduced me to her friends. “This is Staci, likewise unavailable.”
“Twice over,” the blonde said as she shook my hand. “Husband plus baby.”
“Yeah, definitely unavailable,” I laughed. “Good to meet you.”
“And this is Alana.”
The smoky-eyed woman almost purred at me as she extended a red-tipped hand. “Charmed. What’s your name, handsome?”
“Nick,” I told her, meeting her sultry gaze with a practiced wink.
“Alana is painfully available.” Tyra laughed. “As is Valeria, but she disappeared. Oh, there she is.” She raised her hand, preparing to call someone over from the dance floor, but Alana tugged the hand sharply down.
“She’s having fun,” Alana purred. “Let her dance.” She turned those smoky eyes at me with an almost hungry look. She didn’t want competition.
Unfortunately for her, the biggest competition was taking place inside my mind and memories. Carmen had sat right where Alana was now sitting, and all I could think about was her.
“Anyway, finish your story,” Staci instructed Tyra with an impatient little bounce.
“Oh! Right. Where was I? Oh, you know what, let’s get our new friend here caught up. Nick, right? Okay, so the drama is that my best friend—don’t give me that look, Staci, you know what’s up—my best friend since college got herself knocked up.”
I glanced over their faces dubiously. All of them looked plenty old enough to get themselves pregnant without it being some kind of sordid drama. Tyra saw my look and waved it away.
“It’s not like that,” she said. “This girl has had the worst possible luck with guys. She wasn’t even dating the man who got her pregnant, and now that she’s like a month away from having his kid, she can’t find him anywhere.”
“One-night stands are risky that way,” I said drily. I signaled to the bartender for a drink, and he hurried over to take my order. Bourbon, neat.
“Oh, it wasn’t a one-night stand,” Staci interjected. “She was really into this guy. They had a thing for weeks.”
“The problem was,” Tyra continued, “that she was dating him, but he wasn’t dating her. He was—let’s say—giving her a free trial?”
I raised a brow, silently inviting her to continue.
“He was a pro,” Alana clarified with a
suggestive look. “Called himself the O Doctor.”
Crap.
The mention of my dead title struck a bolt of fear into my chest. My drink arrived just then, and I swallowed the fear with a gulp of liquid fire.
“By all accounts, he was magnificent at what he did,” Tyra went on. “But he wasn’t looking to settle down, and all she ever wanted was babies and marriage and everything. She probably came on a little strong. She’s the intense kind, you know? And he bolted. I mean, all the way bolted, ‘disappeared off the map’ kind of bolted.”
“Wow,” I said, my voice cracking slightly. This was sounding all too familiar.
“So now she’s pregnant, feels bad for not telling him she’s pregnant, but can’t find the guy anywhere. That’s what I was telling my friends before you showed up. The whole reason I was late was because she was in bad shape today, crying about how she’ll never be able to find him and even if she did, she would never be able to face him.”
“Why does she think she couldn’t face him?” I asked.
“Because she was the one who blocked his number and decided not to tell him at first,” Staci said, her voice hardening.
“You think she should have?” I asked.
“Well, of course, she should have!” Staci’s face was darkening, and she took a swig of her drink. “She decided that he wouldn’t want to be a part of it. She didn’t ask him. She just assumed. She claims that he said something that told her he would never want to be a part of it, but I just can’t believe that. If he didn’t know that she was going to have a baby—and how could he? Then he couldn’t possibly have told her that he wouldn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Staci, you’re being too hard on her,” Tyra said soothingly. “We don’t know what he said. Maybe he told her he never wanted to see her again.”
“Even if he did, that’s no excuse,” Staci snapped. “We don’t even know when he went off the radar. If she had looked him up as soon as she found out, then she might have been able to get in touch with him, and he wouldn’t have a kid running around that he doesn’t know about.” Staci breathed, inhaled deeply and shakily, then knocked back the remainder of her drink.
“You seem to be taking this a little personally,” I said mildly.
“Ugh!” She threw her hands over her face, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. “I know. I am.”
“Why?” Alana asked, her eyes still dreamy, her tone one of general inquiry rather than vested interest.
Staci sighed. “Because apparently I’ve had a nephew for twelve years. My brother never knew, but the kid wants a dad and went looking for him. He found out just a few days ago, and they’ve already missed so many years. It’s just not fair!”
I found myself suddenly envisioning a future in which some kid with my hair and Carmen’s eyes was alone, fatherless, and searching for me, with nothing to go on but “O Doctor.” The idea twisted my stomach.
But I wasn’t the only O Doctor in town, and there was a good chance that Carmen wasn’t the client in question. Well, maybe not a good chance, but at least a bit of a chance. The timing, though… I shook my head and finished my drink.
“The craziest part about the whole thing was that she didn’t even want to go out with him in the first place,” Tyra said to me, patting Staci’s hand comfortingly. “Like, it was a total accident.”
“An accident?” I asked, my gut twisting a little more. “How did she ‘accidentally’ go out with an escort?”
“Oh, she got wasted on my birthday and sent a message to him. She woke up and remembered, tried to cancel, and failed. It was actually pretty crazy, though, because she was supposed to meet me—here, actually, come to think of it—the same night that she’d requested the appointment with the guy. I bailed at the last minute, but he showed up because he never got the cancellation, and she showed up because she was going to meet me. It was like fate or something.”
The chances of these women’s friend being anyone but Carmen had shrunk down to virtually zero. I suppose there was the slightest chance that two women experienced the exact same thing at the exact same place at what had to have been approximately the same time, but I doubted it. There would have had to be a serious glitch in space-time for that to be conceivable.
At just that moment, a giggling brown-haired girl skipped over to the table. She looked strikingly familiar, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on where I knew her from. She spotted me only a second after I’d seen her, and her eyes widened in shock. A fiery blush crept over her cheeks, making her eyes glitter in… Was that shame? Oh, no.
“Nick?” she asked in a voice barely louder than a whisper. She whirled on Tyra. “Is this some kind of a joke?”
“What? No, he was standing around looking lost so I invited him—wait, you two know each other?”
“This is Nick,” she said, putting heavy emphasis on my name. “Nick Steel.”
“Okay?” Tyra looked terribly confused for a moment, but then it began to dawn on her. “Nick Steel…the…”
The woman—I still couldn’t remember her name, and I kicked myself for that—gave Tyra a meaningful look, and Tyra’s eyes widened. She looked at me, then back at the woman, then back at me. I’d been revealed, and there was no reason left not to ask the question that was at the forefront of my mind.
“Tyra, is your pregnant friend’s name Carmen?” I asked.
Her eyes grew even wider, and she nodded silently. I cleared my throat, wishing that I still had a drink in front of me.
“I think I might be that baby’s father.” The words floated out of me as if I was dreaming them. They sounded alien and forced in my mouth, but I’d never been more sure about an uncertainty in all my life. I knew that baby was mine. Still, I looked to Tyra for assurance.
She didn’t give me any. “Do you think so?” she asked.
Somebody’s phone started ringing, but nobody moved to answer. The whole group was staring at me as if I was some kind of ghost or apparition. Silence stretched on, broken only by the repeated jingle coming from somewhere under the table.
“Does she still live at the same place?” I asked.
Nobody answered, but Alana nodded. It was enough to get my feet moving.
I left a few dollars on the table for the drink, nodded to the women, and made for the door. I still remembered how to get to her building from here. Hell, I’d walked that way a hundred times in the last few months, torturing myself with these convoluted feelings. Apparently, I should have just gone up.
The road seemed to stretch out as I walked. Time had slowed down. I was going to be a father. I’d never pictured myself in that role. Then again, I’d never pictured myself leading a strike team against insurgents before I did it either; I knew I could rise to the challenge.
I always had before.
“Assuming she’ll let me,” I muttered to myself. According to Tyra, the only reason Carmen hadn’t contacted me was because of the way I’d left things, but I knew enough about people—and women, specifically—to know that there was likely going to be more to the story. Maybe she wanted to do it herself. Maybe she had something to prove. Maybe she’d grown so bitter toward me over the last few months that she never wanted to see me again in any capacity. Maybe—
My train of thought was cut short as the breath left my chest in a heart-wrenching kick. An ambulance was sitting outside of Carmen’s building.
“Lots of people live there,” I reminded myself. But dread moved my feet, and before I knew it, I was running. It couldn’t be her, it wasn’t her, I was getting worked up for no reason…but as the stretcher came through the front doors, my dread was validated. There she was. Round with child, pale as death, and getting loaded into the back of the ambulance.
I whirled around as the ambulance doors closed.
“Taxi!”
Chapter 17
Nick
“Carmen Jones,” I said breathlessly to the woman at the desk. “Pregnant. Came in on an ambulance.”
“Labor and delivery, third floor,” she told me curtly.
I nodded and raced for the stairs. I didn’t have the patience for an elevator. The cab driver had floored it all the way here, feeding off of my palpable panic, but it had still felt like an eternity in traffic to follow the ambulance from Carmen’s apartment to the hospital. I reached the third floor in record time and skidded to a stop in front of the desk up there.
“Carmen Jones?” I repeated.
“Are you the father?” the nurse asked mildly.
“Yes.” My voice sounded strangled. A little voice inside my head told me not to lie, that I didn’t know for sure, that I would run in there only to find some other guy at her side, but I silenced it with a flash of fury. She never should have been left alone in her condition.
“Room 307,” the nurse said, hitting a button to unlock the doors. “Her doctor is on his way.”
“Thank you.”
I took it a little slower now, careful to avoid disturbing the laboring mothers. The vibration of new life was all around me; the scents of blood and sweat, the muffled sounds of screams and cries, the heightened energy…something pheromonal which got my blood racing hot.
I found Carmen’s door immediately, and all of my momentum stopped short, doused with the icy water of fear.
What if she didn’t want to see me?
A whimper from inside the room cut through my self-absorption like a hot knife. I rushed the last few steps and stopped just outside her open door.
Carmen was curled into a tight ball around her belly, shaking and sweating, swallowing screams. I had never been more terrified than I was at that very moment. Not when I was staring down the barrel of a gun. Not when IEDs were blowing up to my left and right.
Dr. O’s Baby Page 13