by Tay Marley
“Hey.” Drayton tugged on my arm as I absentmindedly headed toward the dance floor. I turned and let him pull me into a tender embrace, his hands fanning out on my hips. “Have I told you that you look beautiful? Like, breathtaking. The most stunning girl that I’ve ever laid eyes on.”
I giggled at the soft pecks he laid on my cheeks between each compliment. He was being careful not to smudge my makeup. I could feel a multitude of envious eyes boring into the two of us. People had accepted that Drayton and I were in a relationship, but that didn’t stop the girls from pining and wishing for what was mine.
“You’ve told me about”—I narrowed my eyes, tilting my head from side to side as I pretended to think it over—“a thousand times.”
“And I’m going to keep telling you because I cannot get over how damn incredible you look.” He stepped back and lifted my hand above my head so that I could do a twirl.
He kept his hand around mine and pulled me in close again, his sigh content. He led us onto the dance floor. A relatively slow song was playing, allowing us to dance intimately. His free hand rested on my lower back, just above my bum, and I held his shoulder. As we moved, slowly and sweetly, to the song, I looked up and felt inexplicably grateful for finding a love like his. He was so appreciative of all that he had, and it was uplifting. I rested my head on his chest and felt the beat of his heart. It was in time with mine.
“You know,” he said, “I remember the first time that I realized how gorgeous you are.”
“You do?”
“I mean, I always knew you were attractive. Even when we didn’t have anything to do with each other. But the moment that you first took my breath away, the first moment that you floored me was the night that I kidnapped you and took you back to my place. You came out of the bathroom wearing my T-shirt and I swear I almost lost it.”
“That was the moment?” I laughed. “Not when I was dressed up in my club outfit?”
“You looked hot as hell in that little rose-gold dress”—my heart skipped a beat at the fact that he remembered what I was wearing—“but there was just something so damn gorgeous about seeing you in my shirt, seeing you dressed down and comfortable. Seeing you in my clothing is a huge turn on, and I knew right then and there that I wanted to see it more often. It was definitely hard keeping my hands to myself that night.”
“Why did you?”
“You’d been drinking,” he stated with a lopsided smile. “Call me crazy, but I knew you were special, more special than a drunken hookup. I couldn’t leave you alone after that, though. But I wanted you to want me too.”
I laughed. “I can’t believe we didn’t just get it all out there in the beginning. We both felt the same way. Talk about a lack of communication.”
“I wasted so much time,” he said with a slightly more somber expression than before. “I fucked around, playing games and waiting for you to want me back when I should have just told you how I felt.”
His knuckles gently grazed the nape of my neck as his fingers fanned out and he locked me in an intense stare. “I’m doing my best to make up for that lost time, Cheer. I’ll tell you all day, every day, just how much you mean to me. Because I’m an idiot and it took me way too long to say it in the first place.”
I watched him, breathless. “I love you, Drayton.”
“I love you too.”
His hands, tender and gentle but powerful, held my face. As if I wasn’t close enough, he moved one hand a time, repositioning them on my back so that he could hold me tight. He was almost lifting me off the ground as his tongue lapped at mine and I wrapped my arms around his neck.
“Excuse me, you two.”
Drayton and I broke apart and found Miss Fowler’s disapproving glare. She towered over even Drayton, and she scowled behind her thin wire-framed glasses.
“Enough of that.”
The middle-aged woman tsked before moving back through the crowd of dancing teenagers. Drayton and I shared an amused laugh and continued to kiss as though we provided the air to each other’s lungs. If anyone wanted us to stop, they were going to have to physically keep us apart.
Good luck to them.
We danced for a while, never letting go of each other. Drayton studied me with a heated gaze, worshipping my every move with the most admiring expression that had ever adorned his face. Later, we found Gabby and Josh, and danced with them for a while before we all headed off to the photo area. We took group shots, friend shots, and couple shots. The poses ranged from cute and romantic to wildly outrageous and possibly somewhat inappropriate . . . but I hadn’t expected anything less from my man.
I let him go for a little while so that he could take photos with the team and his friends. Those photos ended up taking the longest, I thought. Everyone wanted a picture with their captain. Even I got in on a few of the photos with the cheer team. Emily looked beautiful. She didn’t care when I told her that, but when she turned around and didn’t realize that I was watching, she smiled.
“Should we go and wait for him on the balcony?” Gabby suggested while we sat at a nearby table, watching Drayton with his team. “I haven’t been out there yet.”
Josh and I nodded, and we got up, pushing our ribboned seats back under the table.
I was amazed at how big the patio was. It stretched from one corner of the building to the other and extended at least thirteen feet out in front. The railing had been wrapped with fairy lights that twinkled in a timed pattern, and there were a few scattered two-person tables and seats that were all occupied by various students who, on closer inspection, looked as though they were sharing a blunt.
Of course.
The night air wasn’t warm, but it was a welcomed refresher. I hadn’t realized how suffocated I was beginning to feel inside until I was able to inhale some of the fresh oxygen outside. We stood by the railing and looked out over central Castle Rock. There wasn’t a lot of traffic, but a couple of car roofs were idle at the red traffic lights. Store lights illuminated the footpaths.
“How is Drayton doing after that whole thing that happened earlier?” Gabby asked. She held her hand out to Josh, who seemed confused for a moment but then reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved a flask.
“He’s fine,” I answered, pointing at the object in her hand. “Where did that come from?”
“Josh had the flask.” She pointed at her boyfriend, who leaned an elbow on the railing, watching the street below. “He filled it up with something from the liquor cabinet at home. What is it?”
“Bourbon,” he answered.
I watched her unscrew the lid and felt weird about it. She drank all the time. That wasn’t what the problem was. I looked at her dress, tight. I looked at her boobs, huge. I stood up straight, stepped forward, and slapped the flask out of her hand. It splashed a potent-smelling liquid and narrowly missed my dress as it flew over the railing and disappeared out of sight.
“What the . . . ?” Gabby leaned over and I was worried that her addiction had got to the point where she’d jump to her death just to save her precious poison.
“You can’t drink,” I yelped, but lowered my voice as she and Josh stared, not able to understand what the issue was.
“Why can’t she drink?”
“Yeah, why?” Gabby threw her hands up.
This wasn’t the gentlest way of telling someone that you thought she might be pregnant. Hell, I shouldn’t have had to tell her at all. Surely, she’d suspected it herself. Surely? No, she wouldn’t have been drinking if she thought it was possible, which just brought me back to the disbelief I felt at the fact that she hadn’t even considered it.
“Can we talk?” I grabbed her wrist. “In private. Josh, find Drayton. We’ll be—around.”
“Okay?” He followed behind us, looking like a lost puppy as we stepped back into the stuffy banquet room. I felt a pang of disappointment because
“I Like Me Better” was playing and I’d have loved to dance to it with Drayton. But I saw that he was still busy with photos and the team, so we split off from Josh and I dragged Gabby into the corridor and into the elevator.
“What. The. Fuck. Is. Happening?” Gabby banged her head against the lift wall while I aggressively smacked the ground-level button.
“I think you’re pregnant!” I blurted.
Her forehead remained on the wall, but she stared at me from the corner of her eye, her mouth open. Her chest rose and fell rapidly, and when the elevator doors opened with a bell, breaking the piercing silence, we both jumped in fright.
“Where are we going?” she mumbled as I once again grabbed her wrist before dragging her through the hotel lobby.
“We’re going to get a pregnancy test from the convenience store across the road.”
“I can’t be pregnant.”
I brought us to a halt on the sidewalk outside and turned to face her. She looked beyond lost under the hotel lights, like her brain had up and left, and she was just a shell that continued to exist.
“Are you sure that you can’t be pregnant? Have you had your period recently? Used a condom? Every. Single. Time?”
Something on the pavement must have been fascinating because she stared at it. “No,” she mumbled.
“No what? Which question were you answering?”
“No.”
“Okaaaaay.” I spun on my heel, my dress billowing around me as I shook my head in bewilderment. “Let’s go.”
I was a woman on a mission. The pregnancy test was slammed on the store counter within a matter of minutes. Gabby was still dazed and confused behind me. She really was something else.
“You can wipe that look off your face, Jeremy,” I warned the obnoxious seventeen-year-old sales clerk who’d been working there for years. He was a chubby, greasy perv, and he was in no position to judge. “Just bag it and mind your business.”
I pushed Gabby inside the women’s restroom on the lobby floor of the hotel. There was a plush waiting sofa and a wall of stalls. The marble floors gleamed and the white sinks were immaculate. There was nothing worse than hotel toilets that weren’t cared for.
“You take this and go pee on it, now,” I ordered, pulling the test out of the paper bag and aggressively discarding the plastic film that surrounded the box.
I let the rubbish fall to the floor and practically threw the box over my shoulder before I uncapped the stick and placed it in Gabby’s hand.
“There, I’ve done everything I can, save for pissing on the stick myself. That’s all you.” I steered her toward a stall, but she stopped at the threshold and turned around with wide eyes.
“What if I’m pregnant?”
“We’ll talk about the what ifs when you know for sure, okay? There’s no point talking about it when you can get a definitive answer right now.”
She nodded and took a deep breath before she slipped inside and shut the door. I felt a little dizzy when I finally took a minute to be still. The whole situation was overwhelming, but I’d shut out the reality of it while I whizzed around and babied my best friend. Pun intended.
I picked up the discarded wrappers and paper bag, throwing them into the bin before I sat down on the sofa. I remembered that I’d felt my phone vibrating while I’d been in the convenience store, so I fished it out of my cleavage and unlocked it, seeing a message from Drayton.
Everything okay baby? Josh said you two took off.
It’s all good. Just helping Gabs with something downstairs. I’ll explain later. Be back up soon.
“It’s negative.” She shrugged her shoulders and dropped down beside me. She grunted when the silk of her dress pulled taut around her middle.
I watched her, wondering why she wasn’t throwing a damn party. Her life could have been turned upside down in a matter of moments. I was a little surprised that I’d misread the symptoms, but I supposed there could be other reasons for nausea and barely there weight gain.
“You’re happy about that, right?”
“Yeah—I mean, it wouldn’t have been ideal.” She sat forward, resting her chin in her hand and her elbow on her knee. I was worried about the seams of her dress splitting. “But it’s weird. I feel—almost disappointed.”
“I get that,” I admitted, smiling at her confusion. “I’ve read about lots of woman who say that even if they absolutely didn’t want it to be positive, they feel disappointed when it’s negative. It’s a weird emotion. Especially considering you aren’t the most maternal person I know.”
“That’s why it’s even weirder to feel disappointed. I don’t know what to do with kids. But maybe it would have been different with my own.”
“You’d hope so.”
“You would,” she huffed and stood up, the test swinging from her hand.
“Wait, give me that,” I snapped, standing up. I rushed toward her before she could discard the test in the bin.
“Gabby! You said this was negative!” I practically screamed, staring at the white stick in my hands. “This has two lines! Two very red lines!”
“I thought two lines was negative,” she shouted back, ripping the test out of my hand so that she could stare at it.
“No! Two lines is positive. You’re pregnant!”
“I’m pregnant?”
“Yes!”
“Yes?”
“Yes!”
She gasped. “Holy shit!”
“Holy shit,” a third, more masculine voice joined us and we whipped our heads in the direction of the door, where Josh watched us with ghost-white skin. Drayton stood behind him, similar shock on his face.
Josh looked like he was going to throw up. He stared at the test in Gabby’s hand and she stammered with panic, not able to get a coherent word out.
“You two should talk.” I walked toward the door, my heels clacking on the marble floors, providing the only noise among the awkward silence.
“This is the women’s restroom?” Gabby mumbled as I pushed Josh into the bathroom, giving him a shove so that he snapped out of his stupor.
“Who gives a shit,” I told her and pulled the door shut, shoving Drayton out of the way with my butt. “Talk!”
Emily won the crown for prom queen. Drayton was announced as king and I was named a princess. There was no king and queen dance, and I did not end up on stage to get a tiara because we weren’t there. Emily didn’t care about her first dance. She was just pleased to have the crown.
Instead of being at the end of our prom night, Drayton and I were consoling our friends who were soon to be parents. We found out all of this information about winners and dances from Melissa, who called me at midnight last night to fill me in.
“Ooh, girl you should have seen her up on that stage, acting like she won a damn Golden Globe . . .
“. . . The whole damn room was out with their Nancy Drew sleuth kits looking for Drayton. You better know what conclusion was made, girl. You two were getting smack on in a hotel room. Nasties. That’s what they said. Not me . . .
“. . . I didn’t set them straight, though. I thought so too . . .”
The conversation went on for quite some time, but I didn’t once mention the real reason that we weren’t there for Drayton to receive his crown. I let her believe that we were doing what we were accused of.
Which, once we had safely delivered Gabby and Josh to her house, we did do. In the back of the car.
And then again when we got to his house.
Gabby knew that she needed to tell her mom. As terrified as she was to have her ass handed to her, she knew it was what she had to do. Josh refused to let her go it alone, which made me proud.
Drayton and I were in his kitchen. His parents were out for the day, which I was quietly relieved about. The midmorning sun was coming through the glass doors and it was r
elaxing to sit on the sofa and absorb the beams of vitamin D without enduring the chill. My hair was still curled from the salon, but it was up in a knot on top of my head and I was wearing shorts and a camisole.
Drayton sat at the other end of the sofa in nothing but his boxer shorts. The sunshine illuminated his olive skin. He glowed. My feet rested in his lap and he ran his hands over my legs while I read a text message from Gabby.
Been up all night with Mom. She’s cried SO MUCH. Threatened to murder Josh. Apologized for being violent. Cried some more. Told me I’m a dumbass. But we pulled through. Still a lot to figure out. I’m buzzing. But we’re doing this.
“I can’t believe Gabby is having a baby.” I put the phone down and picked up the coffee beside the couch. I rubbed the inner corner of my eye to get out the morning sleep.
Drayton nodded. “Josh sent me a text. He’s shitting bricks but he’s in it.”
“So he should be.” I stared at the black goop on my fingertip and winced. I could have sworn that I’d washed my face properly last night. I swiped under my eyes. “He had a part in it. If he ditches her, I will beat him the fuck up.”
“Damn,” he laughed. “You know how to turn a man on.”
My lips curled upward as I wrapped them around the cup rim and sipped on hot caffeine. What a long night.
“You want to do that one day?” He rested an arm along the back of the sofa and watched me. His stubble was coming in; he looked good with a bit of scruff.
“Do what?”
“Have my babies?”
“I wouldn’t mind having a couple of little athletes.” We stared at each other and I wondered if he felt as confident as I did. Or if he was just messing around.
He slid over, and his hand moved up my thigh as he half lay on top of me. “We should practice. A lot. Just to be sure that we get it right.”
“Sure,” I murmured, smiling, as he shifted so that I was encased beneath him. He held the back of the sofa and knelt on either side of me. His kiss was soft and gentle as his free hand slipped under my back and pulled me upward.