My eyes dipped away from hers; instead, I stared down at my hands. Chelsea had seen me at my worst, but I’d grown tired of being the needy friend—the one who always seemed to fall apart. My chest broke out in a fresh batch of red, itchy splotches, and I itched to rush back to my room, but Chelsea wouldn’t let me. She placed her hands on top of my own. “Nothing to be embarrassed about, Kins. We wanted to help. Besides…” She nodded over toward Mark. “This guy is a great cook, and I’ll take any excuse to have one of his legendary breakfasts.”
I glanced between the two of them, and my cheeks flushed. Despite knowing Mark for years, I didn’t know he could cook. In fact, I knew little about my best friend’s husband other than the fact that they shared a bar, and he had a low tolerance for realitytelevision. Add it to the list of reasons I’d been a crappy friend over the past few years.
Chelsea smiled at me, some sort of understanding I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but the look disappeared as Mark came over and joined us, dropping delicious-smelling plates in front of us. While we set the table, Mark and Chelsea talked, regaling me with stories from the previous night at the bar. I took slow, apprehensive bites of my breakfast, waiting for my stomach to riot again. Instead, it let out a happy rumble as I chewed on the sausage, so I dared to eat more. Thank God they’d come over, because after breakfast, I was full for the first time in days.
“Thank you,” I muttered. “I needed this more than I knew.”
“We’ve got your back,” Chelsea said and then glanced over at Mark. “Hey, babe, I left that bag of medicine in the trunk of my car. Mind running out to grab it for me?”
“Sure,” he answered, placing the plates in the sink before hustling out the door.
As soon as it closed behind him, Chelsea reached out and took my hand. “Please don’t be mad, but I also grabbed you some pregnancy tests.”
“What?” I snapped, wrenching my hand away from her. “I-it’s just a stomach bug, Chelsea. I amnotpregnant.”
“Are you sure?” she said.
“Yes!”
She stared at me for a long moment and then shook her head. “Shit, okay. I’m reading too much into things. But you remember what my sister was like when she was pregnant?”Faintly.“We were talking this morning, about her rough first trimester, and it made me think of you. She was so sick, she hardly ate, and that zapped the last of her energy.”
“Doesn’t mean that’s happening to me.” Indignation washed over me as I stood, my body much stronger than earlier. As I turned on the water and began washing the dishes, my handsshook, almost unable to hold the plates. Pregnant. What a joke. Rule number one of pregnancy? It was a side effect of having sex, something I hadn’t entertained at all in a long time. Except for?—
“Oh, fuck.”
TWELVE
“I’m sorry, what did you just say?”
All the color drained from my face as the on-call doctor stared at me, annoyed impatience coloring his expression. He’d barely been in the room for a minute, already prattling on about the dozen patients waiting for test results. But that was before he uttered the three words I refused to believe.
“You’re pregnant, Miss Woods,” he repeated and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “From the look of things, you’re already approaching your second trimester. Almost twelve weeks, if you reported your last menstrual cycle accurately.”
Pregnant.
Everything in my body had gone numb, and my mind refused to process his words, no matter how many times he repeated them. My eyes blinked, my breaths went in and out of my lungs, but there was nothing happening behind the scenes. My brain was a wide, open field, only the word ‘pregnant’ in the clouds above it.
“Kins?” Chelsea’s voice broke through a little of the mist. She squeezed my hand a little tighter, not having let go sincethe doctor walked into the room. “Did you hear what Dr. Arnav said?”
I nodded, and Chelsea wrapped her arm around my shoulders, steadying me when all my instincts screamed at me to run. I held on to her, just as I’d borrowed her strength all morning.
“You had no idea?” Chelsea asked. “Did you miss your period?”
“Yes, but that’s not exactly strange for me.” I grimaced up at the doctor. “My cycle’s never been regular. It could be three weeks, could be six months. Depends on my stress level.” Which, for the last three months, had been at an all-time high.
Dr. Arnav nodded. “I’d follow up with your OBGYN when you leave, but we can do a scan to get a quick measure. Check the heartbeat for you.”
I frowned down at my stomach, trying to recall health classes from middle school and where my uterus was located. Everything seemed the same. The same pouch I’d had my entire adult life, the same bulge over the hem of my leggings—a little more bloated, but I’d blamed my stomach bug.
Not the freaking embryo growing inside it.
“I’ll grab the machine and the ultrasound tech, and then we’ll get you home.” Dr. Arnav stepped closer to me, and my eyes snapped up to meet his worried scowl. “Is there someone else you’d like to call before we do the scan?”
Oh, God. Did he mean the father? Oh,fuckno. The idea of telling Jace snapped me out of my stupor, and I climbed off the table. As Dr. Arnav and Shannon tried to calm me down, I reached out and snatched the file off the counter. “This is some kind of joke. It’s not me. I am not pregnant.”
Dr. Arnav’s eyes darted to the door, as if willing someone to come into the room. He tried to take the file back, but I held tight, scanning the numbers as if they’d make any sense to me,hoping—no,praying—for some sort of mistake. But there, at the top, was my full name, the test results below it for the world to see.
Pregnancy Test—POSITIVE
