My hands are shaking. My heart is doing something I don't have a name for — not panic, not exactly, something faster and bigger that has panic in it but also has something else, something that is dangerously close to excited and I am not ready to look at that yet so I'm going to focus on the shaking hands.
I'm pregnant.
I'm twenty-one years old and pregnant by my dad's best friend who is twenty-seven years older than me and I am living in his house because a stalker was outside my apartment and my private content tier is offline and my dad doesn't know and I ampregnant.
My brain offers the following contribution:BrattyBaby announces surprise pregnancy. Chat is going to lose their entire minds. The clip will trend for a week.
I almost laugh and then my eyes are wet, which I did not authorize, and I'm laughing and my eyes are leaking and I'm sitting on a heated bathroom floor holding a positive pregnancy test and I am a complete mess.
An actual mess. The kind where your mascara is running and you're laughing at nothing and your hands are shaking and you're scared and excited and overwhelmed and a little bit thrilled and a lot bit terrified and you don't know which feeling to grab first so you just sit there and let them all happen at once.
I think about Declan's hands. His big, careful, patient hands that hold coffee mugs and my wrists and the steering wheel of his car and are going to hold a baby. A baby that is half me and half him. That's a person who's going to exist. Half my freckles and half his jaw and probably all of his stubbornness and all of my mouth and the world is genuinely not ready for that combination.
Oh god,says my brain.You're excited. You're actually excited about this.
I am. Under the terror and the shaking hands and the mascara situation, I am excited about this and that's the scariest part of all of it because excited means I want it and wanting it means it can hurt me.
I press my hands over my face. Breathe. Think about the version of myself who handles this quietly and alone. She's right there. It's how I survived my mom dying and my dad almost falling apart and building BrattyBaby from nothing. I could step into it right now and close the door and handle this by myself and nobody would know I was scared because nobody ever knows I'm scared because I'm very, very good at this.
No. I'm done. I'm done handling things alone. I have a man in the next room who counted the freckles on my shoulder at two in the morning and who told me he's willing to lose his best friend for me and who saysI've got youand means it every time. He doesn't get the managed version of this. He gets the messy, mascara-running, sitting-on-his-bathroom-floor version. He gets all of it.
I unlock the door.
The hallway is quiet. His office door is open. I can see him at his desk — laptop, phone, the posture of a man working through something methodical.
I stand in the doorway. I'm holding the test and my mascara is a disaster and I've been crying and laughing on his bathroom floor and I probably look like a woman who has recently received life-changing news on a heated tile surface, which is exactly what I am.
"Declan," I say.
He looks up.
His eyes move from my face to the test in my hand. Then back to my face. Less than a second. And his face does the thing it does when something matters — the underneath one, the one that has nothing to do with control.
I hold up the test.
"So," I say, and my voice is doing about four things at once. "I have some news."
20
Declan
She's standing in the doorway holding a pregnancy test and her mascara is all over her face and she's been crying and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life.
"So," she says, and her voice is doing four things at once. "I have some news."
I'm on my feet. I don't remember standing. I'm just standing now, looking at her, looking at the test in her hand, and my brain does the thing it's done for twenty years with new information: processes it immediately, completely, all at once.
She's pregnant.
She's pregnant. Billie is pregnant. The woman I have been watching and wanting and loving for longer than I'm going to say out loud is standing in my office doorway holding a test with two lines on it and she is carrying my child.
I cross the room.
She starts talking. "I know this is — I know the timing is — with the stalker and the tier and my dad and everything, I know this is probably the last—"
I take her face in my hands and I kiss her.
She stops talking. Her hands come up to my wrists, holding on, and the test is still in her fingers and I can feel the plastic of it against my skin and I don't care. I kiss her forehead and her cheeks and her mouth and the salt of her tears and the mess of her mascara and I am not thinking about Ronan or the stalker or the tier or the timing or any of it. I am thinking about one thing.
