Riff takes one look at me and my trembling chin, and his eyes widen with fear. “Oh, fuck. Did I say something wrong? Were you actually—” He shakes his head at himself.
“I …” There’s no way I can say it out loud. Not to anyone. Especially not to him. But I can’t deny it either. And part of me does want him to know.
When I don’t finish, he scoots closer to me. I watch him mentally put the pieces together, each expression that shifts to another: guilt, pity, even fear.
“If you …” he starts. “If you were … But right now you don’t have … That would mean …”
He has to wait what feels like a very long time before I manage to reply, but he does it with patience.
Finally, I tell him, “I didn’t know … until it was already over.”
“‘Over’ …” he repeats with a knowing tone.
My hands tremble now. I clench them into fists to steady them. My pulse races because I haven’t thought about this in so long, because I’ve buried it deeply and kept it all to myself.
“It was an hour before one of my shows,” I explain. “I had my costume on, I was warming up, my team was all over the place making sure everything was ready. But something didn’t feel right.”
Our marshmallows are dark brown and textured now, but neither of us touches them. Riff waits for me to go on.
“I had … an odd pain. Cramping, sort of. Except it wasn’t time for that. My period was weeks away. Then, suddenly, it was like a tiny dam broke. I didn’t understand how it could be, but I knew I was bleeding—and that it was a lot at once. I hurried to check and …”
Tears brim my eyes.
How do you explain being sad about something you hadn’t wanted, and didn’t know about until after it was gone? How do you describe the rotten, sinking feeling that your body has betrayed you?
This time Riff doesn’t ask permission, he just puts his arm around me, and this time it isn’t awkward. This time I need it—desperately.
“Since it wasn’t on purpose, and I didn’t know a lot about that sort of thing, I wasn’t sure. Except … I was. I knew exactly what was happening.”
He picks up our beach blanket, which has since slid off our shoulders, and puts it around me. “Please say you didn’t go ahead and do the show.”
“Of course I did.” I scoff, letting tears fall as new ones well up. The fact that he would even say that stirs new emotions in me—because that’s not how Luke responded.
“Harmony …”
“What else was I supposed to do? Tell my team I’d been pregnant for a minute, and that I wasn’t anymore?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. Did you tellanyone, though?”
“I told Luke.”
Riff pales.
I’m sure he’s aware of my dating history, but that won’t make it less of a shock.
The tabloids, for once, weren’t lying, even if by coincidence. “She’s Having a Baby! Harmony Sonora, Pregnant by Luke Onstenk?”
That header was plastered above a paparazzi photo of me in which a bit of my stomach had squeezed out over my jeans, labeled “telltale bump” with a little arrow pointing right at it. Ironically, that photo had been taken six months earlier, well before the pregnancy scare.
“I called him from the bathroom,” I say.
“And he said you shouldn’t do the show …”
“He said …” I swallow hard. “He said, ‘You’re so lucky, Harm. That was a close one.’”
It’s Riff’s turn to make a fist, I guess, although I suspect his is for a different reason than mine. His jaw flexes like he’s also clenching his teeth.
I wipe my eyes. “When I got upset, he told me I should be thankful—that a lot of women in my position would kill to have an easy way out like that. Even better, it happenedbeforethe show, so I could clean up, take some Advil, and no one would be the wiser.”
