I stood there for a second staring after him, annoyed as fuck.
I needed to take my own advice. I needed Ava out of my head and to continue to fuck the other women at my disposal. Instead, I had spent most of that shower sick to my stomach over another man smiling in her face, while I sat there feeling like I had a right to care. That territorial shit felt strange and too close to something I didn’t want any parts of. Ava had been doing that to me for too long now. I couldn’t even decide if she calmed something in me or drove me insane.
It was both.
Definitelyboth.
AVA REYNOLDS
The next day, I decided I had to tell Zahra before the amount of time I had been sitting on this secret became unforgivable.
The excitement from the baby shower and gender reveal had finally died down. The attention had been on her the way it was supposed to be, and now that all of that had settled, I felt a little better about putting some of it on me.
Yet, I still felt like I was stepping out of the little happy bubble I had wrapped around this pregnancy and walking straight into chaos. Even telling Zahra made it all feel more real, and deep down, I already knew she was going to make me tell Reek whether I was ready to or not.
Saint had already left for the day, so I took that as my opening. I wasn’t about to tell Zahra anything like this with him pacing around the house too.
When I got to their room, her TV was on, and she was lying across the bed on her side, watching The Testaments, with a pillow wedged between her legs and another behind her back. She looked big, tired, and uncomfortable. One hand rested on her stomach like she was trying to hold it up herself.
I paused in the doorway for a second, looking at her belly and wondering how big I was going to get.
Hopefully notthatdamn big.
“You good?” she asked without looking away from the TV.
“Yeah.” I walked in and climbed onto the bed beside her. “Move over, big ass.”
She sucked her teeth. “I’m pregnant, hoe.” She laughed and shifted enough for me to settle in beside her. I watched the screen for maybe twenty seconds before I said, “Pause it.”
That got her attention. Zahra turned and looked at me. Then she sat up a little, already reading the seriousness on my face.
“What’s wrong?” she questioned. “You moving to Thailand for good?”
I let out a breath and looked down at my hands. “No.”
“Then what?”
I took one more second, then just said it. “I’m pregnant.”
She stared at me. Then she blinked.
Finally, she sat all the way up. “You’rewhat?”
“Pregnant.”
Her hand flew to her mouth and she started rambling, “Oh my God! By who? Who is he? Why didn’t you tell me you were seeing somebody over there? Is he from Thailand? Or is he one of those Black guys from that group of Black residents you were hanging with that lived over there?”
I squeezed my eyes shut for half a second. “It’s Reek’s.”
When I opened my eyes, I saw that Zahra had frozen.
Then all the drama hit her face at once. “Reek?!” she yelled. “Reek as inourReek? Tariq?! Since when were you and Reek a thing?” Her whole body fell back against her decorative pillows. “Did he go to Thailand and nobody told me?”
“No, he did not go to Thailand.”
“Then when the hell did you get pregnant?”
“Right before I left,” I admitted. “I found out when I got to Thailand.”
