Page 80 of Temporarily in Love

I shook my head.

Nope, still hadn’t done that yet. After I talked with my dad about buying the bar, I spoke to my financial advisor about it. He didn’t think it was a sound investment if I wanted to make money, but if it was something I wanted to do for my family, he understood why. I still needed to think about all this if Dad was giving me a passive-aggressive ultimatum.

I changed the subject and ate breakfast with my parents. Afterward, I did the dishes and then went upstairs to get dressed. I was planning on going to the bar today to help and see how things were running. If I decided to buy the bar, I’d be a hands-on owner. Brian would still do day-to-day work, but I wanted to be involved in the big picture.

Had I already made my decision? My thoughts told me I had, but I was still uncertain.

My phone vibrated with my alarm to take my birth control. I turned it off and pulled my wallet out of my purse. When I opened my pill pack, something hit me. My period was two days late.

Shit, my period was two days late.

That wasn’t normal for me. Sometimes it could be delayed due to stress, but the pill made me regular. Maybe I missed a day, or it came earlier, but never this late.

I took my pill and checked my period tracker app. I should have gotten it already. Sometimes you could miss a period on the birth control I was on, but that hadn’t been the case for me. I tried not to think about it. Maybe I’d get it later today.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I went to the bar and waited a couple tables since Siobhan had a doctor’s appointment she couldn’t miss. She had confided in me that she and her husband were trying to have a baby, and were doing IVF. Then I was thinking about babies again. Maybe Declan was right. We shouldn’t have been so careless.

Panic rose up inside me. During a lull in tables, I texted my sister. She was still at work at the high school. School had let out already, but she still had a lot of work to do before her day was over.

ME: I need to talk to you.

KELS: What’s up?

ME: I’m LATE.

KELS: [Shocked face emoji]

KELS: I’m leaving now. Tell Dad I asked for help with something.

The shift had flipped over, so I quit taking tables and was mostly supervising now. I didn’t need to tell Dad I was leaving, but I didn’t want him to worry. I hung up my apron and went into the office.

“Hey,” I said to him.

“Hey, honey, what’s up?”

“I gotta head to Kelsey’s for something. Can you cash me out?”

Dad didn’t even question what Kelsey needed. He cashed me out, and I left in a rush. Nerves bound up inside me the whole drive to Kelsey’s house.

There was no way I was pregnant from this weekend already, but that hadn’t been the first time we didn’t use a condom. Even though I was on the pill, it wasn’t one hundred percent effective. I was old enough to know that, but with my age, I didn’t think it was a huge worry. It still might be too early for me to be pregnant. But if I was, I knew it was Declan’s, because Chad and I hadn’t had sex in months before we broke up.

Kelsey opened the door with her girls clinging to her legs. I laughed, and she gave me a raised eyebrow like, ‘this is what you’re in for.’ The thing was, I wasn’t scared about the possibility that I was carrying Declan’s baby. No, instead, my brain was picturing us together with one. I envisioned a life together of me staying in Drakesville. A life where I chose Declan.

“In my bathroom, there’s a drawer full of them,” Kelsey said and nodded to the stairs.

“Thanks,” I said and rushed upstairs to her en suite bathroom in her bedroom.

I opened the bottom drawer in the bathroom and found a pregnancy test. I took it out and read the instructions, and did what it said. I capped the end when I was done and sat there waiting. It was agony waiting to find out if the test was going to blink ‘Pregnant’ or ‘Not Pregnant.’

I tapped my foot and sat on the closed lid of the toilet seat. After what felt like an eternity, my phone alarm beeped. I looked at the test, and it blinked back at me with the words ‘Not Pregnant.’

I chewed on my lip as I thought. For some reason, I wasn’t happy with that result. Which was strange. I should be ecstatic that the result was negative. I didn’t want an unplanned pregnancy.

I pressed a hand against my stomach and pictured it growing with a child inside. I imagined Declan’s hands on my belly as he assured me everything would be okay. I saw him talking sweetly to my stomach, telling our child how he couldn’t wait to meet them. Something squeezed my heart at that future.

I eyed another pregnancy test in the open drawer and pulled it out. I needed to know for sure I wasn’t pregnant. I took the other test and felt tears prick my eyes when the second one read ‘Not Pregnant’ too.