Page 338 of Nobody's Girl

No wonder I had no dreams about him. “Why not?” I ask him.

“I think Laura will want to tell you that,” he says as he shuts the door.

I look at Laura, who is fast asleep. “Is she okay. Did they find poison?”

He shakes his head. “No, it wasn’t anything that they did to her,” he says.

“That’s a relief, because I would’ve lost it if they’d done something to her. Probably just the stress of the situation had her like that,” I say.

“Eden, can you take me back to the house so I can get cleaned up? Ally can you stay here with Laura for a while?” Kyle asks Eden.

“Sure, Kyle, whatever you need me to do,” Eden says. “We’ll be back in a little while, Alyssa.”

I look at Kyle and sense something’s wrong. His mind is blank, though, almost as if he’s closing himself off to me on purpose. “Kyle, you sure you don’t have something you want to tell me? You seem out of it.”

“No, Ally. I’m really tired,” he says. “She needs you right now, a lot more than she needs me anyway.”

I watch them walk out the door, knowing full well that something has happened between them. I turn to look at Laura sleeping. Her color is better; there are still black circles under her eyes, though. I sit down in the chair next to her bed. The TV is on, so I flip through the channels, leaving the volume on low.

“Ally?” Laura says with a hoarse voice.

I stop and put the remote down. “Yes, Laura, it’s me,” I say, then move in front of her. “Can I get you anything?”

She smiles weakly. “You can get me out of here,” she says as she laughs a little.

“I bet you are ready to come home and sleep in your own bed. Hopefully the doctor will let you go today,” I say.

“I’m sure he will. What’s wrong with me can’t be fixed by staying in the hospital,” she says.

“So what is wrong with you?” I ask.

“You must have seen Kyle,” she says. “He didn’t whine to you about it?”

I shake my head. “Why would he whine about what’s wrong with you?”

“I can’t believe he didn’t tell you,” she says, almost to herself. “I thought he would come crying to you for sure. All he could say when they told us was that you were going to be so upset. It was pretty embarrassing, as the nurse thought we were married and might actually be happy with the news.”

I frown at her. “Well, he didn’t. He asked Eden to take him home so he could get cleaned up.”

“I see. He’s going to cry to Eden about it, then,” she mumbles.

“What is he going to be crying about, Laura?” I ask, getting tired of this runaround.

“I’m pregnant,” she states flatly.

My jaw drops open. “I thought you were using birth control!”

“The thing about birth control pills is that you have to remember to take them and I have trouble remembering that. So I got myself in this predicament. It’s not really Kyle’s fault. I was taking the responsibility for keeping myself from getting pregnant and I failed. He probably hates me now,” she says.

“No, he doesn’t hate you at all, Laura,” I tell her, reaching out to hold her hand. “He was worried sick about you. He told me he knew for sure he loved you because he was so upset over what was happening to you.”

She looks up at me with a blank expression “Do you know that he had the nerve to suggest that we get married?”

Why do I feel like I have just been slapped?

“What do you mean by that?” I ask her.

“I won’t be marrying him just because of this thing,” she says as she motions towards her stomach.