But I don’t have to now, do I?
I don’t have to buy the test all alone. I don’t have to take the test all alone either.
Because he already bought me one and he’s here.
I blink as I feel tears filling my eyes again.
God, I have to stop this. I get emotional about everything, on the littlest things.
But then, this is not little, is it?
Nothing that has happened here today is little.
Because somehow there’s an us.
“Thank you,” I whisper, hugging it to my chest, hugging it right where my heart is spinning.
He watches me for a few seconds and then throws out a short nod. “I’ll wait outside.”
With that he leaves.
And I do the very first thing a girl does when she finds out she’s pregnant: take a pregnancy test.
Chapter Seventeen
The door is thrown open as soon as we get there.
The door to my house, I mean.
We live in a decent neighborhood, not too rich and not too poor, where all the houses pretty much look the same. All the front yards look the same too, mostly with slightly overgrown shrubs and messier grass — people don’t have a lot of time to tend to their gardens or the money to hire regular help so they do the best that they can — and more often than not cracked cement driveways.
It belonged to my mother. I’ve lived here all my life. All my brothers have lived here all their lives too.
And despite being a house full of rowdy boys, who have been parentless for the last fourteen years, this is the first time a noise of this level has erupted out of our house.
An explosion, followed by the brother who’s closest to me in age marching out of the house, bounding down the stairs before I’ve even gotten out of Reed’s Mustang.
The sky is slowly lighting up and dawn is breaking.
After taking the pregnancy test, which basically confirmed that I’m pregnant — that dark pink line was really hard to miss— I was ready to leave. I was ready to race back home because I knew my brothers would be up and I knew they would’ve somehow figured out that I wasn’t home.
Iknewthat they wouldn’t have been able to sleep all night after the news I gave them and they would be worried sick.
But as it turned out, Reed’s scent could only hold off my morning sickness for so long. Because as soon as Reed pocketed the test — he’s keeping it, and when I told him that was gross, he simply looked at me and said that he didn’t care — my nausea won the battle.
I spent the next hour alternately heaving and dry heaving in his toilet bowl.
While he wasrightby my side, holding my hair back and God, he wouldn’t go away.
No matter how many times I told him to.
Although I will admit that I didn’t want him to leave. I liked being held by him. I liked that he was rubbing my back and making soothing noises.
I know I should guard myself better.
I should care about not getting too close to him now that we’re doing this together.
But my nauseated self, my scared self from the past week ever since I found out that I’m pregnant, liked his nearness, his support, his strength. And the fact that he didn’t let me leave that cozy house without having some tea and saltines. The fact that hecared.
