Inseparable

“I really want some of that wedding cake,” I said. “Thanks for putting that in my head. I’m going to orgasm in front of your grandma tomorrow when I take a bite of it.”

“Well, considering she died several years ago, that might be weird.” She giggled.

“Meh, I’ve seen crazier things,” I said, laughing.

“I like that even through all of this, sitting on the floor, pregnant, brokenhearted, and sipping sparkling grape juice, you still have a sense of humor,” she said, smiling. “I would be eating my weight in carbs and then crying myself into a food coma every night. It would be really ugly.”

“That would be terrible,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “I really don’t like bread right now.”

“Does Nathan know about the baby yet?”

“No,” I said. “No one but you and my doctor know that I am pregnant. I haven’t even told my father yet because I don’t want to tell him the father of the baby split. He will be so disappointed in me.”

“Tell him you don’t know who the father is.” Lindsey laughed. “Then stand back and watch his eyes pop out of his head.”

“Oh, God.” I cringed. “He would go super crazy on me, like worse than the time he caught me and Billy hiding out in the tree house. He walked right up when Billy scooped up my boob. It was mortifying, and I thought my father was going to stroke out right there.”

“Yuck,” Lindsey said. “I remember Billy. I saw him about two months ago. Time has not been kind to him or his hairline.”

“Oh, gross,” I said.

“As far as the baby is concerned, I really think that maybe you should tell him, whether he wants to listen to you or not,” she said. “I know this is all really hard for you, and you don’t know exactly what to do, but I can promise you that you will feel better having everything finalized and settled. You will have closure, and I think that is what you will need in order to move forward in your life.”

“Thank you, Dr. Phil.” I laughed. “There is one serious problem with all of that.”

“What?”

“How am I supposed to tell him anything if I can’t get close enough to him to even talk to him? If he rejects my calls and ignores my texts, what makes you think that he will stand still long enough for me to tell him I’m having his baby?” I crossed my arms and sat back. “And who knows what he will do after I tell him? He might freak out and start yelling at me, calling me names and losing his mind in a whiskey-haze rage.”

“Then I would club him with a chair and toss his body in the coat room.” Lindsey chuckled. “There will be enough men there to lift his body. Then, I can let the hobo’s outside pick his pockets.”

“How did we go from telling him about the baby to assaulting him and handing him over to the homeless? I think you need to put down the champagne.” I laughed.

“I think that if he decided to drown himself in liquor and yell at a pregnant girl that he abandoned because he can’t think for himself, then he deserves the hobo treatment,” she said, nodding her head.

“You are so feisty tonight.” I laughed. “What has gotten into you?”

“I’m just tired of seeing you hurt,” she said. “I want to see you happy again, like you were a couple of months ago. That was the Amanda I remembered growing up. Not this sickly, depressed girl that needs pep talks. Not that I mind giving them.”

“I know,” I sighed. “You are totally right. I just don’t know how to pull myself out of this. I am miserable all the time, and I think about Nathan ninety percent of the day. I don’t know how I let a man get to me that badly.”

“Well, I think the first step is letting him know you are pregnant,” she said. “I know he has been a douche, but he still deserves to know you are bringing a child into this world with his DNA.”

I knew she was right. I knew that Nathan deserved to know about the baby. I wasn’t purposefully keeping it from him, but he wouldn’t take my calls or my texts. I was too afraid to go to his office and face him, so I sat back and stayed miserable. What he did to me hurt me so much, and I didn’t know if I could take letting him abandon me all over again, knowing he was abandoning his child, too. I didn’t know if I could handle being degraded over something that I never did and never had any intentions of doing. My hormones were so out of whack that there was even a possibility that I could blow up on him, or just burst into tears, losing my dignity in his office chair.

I still didn’t understand how a man that said he felt so strongly for me could believe the lies he was told so easily. He didn’t come to my house to talk to me about it, to try to see it from my point of view. He came there to break up with me. He didn’t listen to anything I said because he had already made up his mind. Sarah had poisoned John, and then John poisoned Nathan. It just kept going down the line until it landed on my damn doorstep.

I would have never reacted that way. I would have talked to him and given him a chance to explain everything. The damage had been done, and it wasn’t just a scrape or a bump. He had completely blown our relationship to smithereens. I had no idea how you could even fix things after he sat there and told me I was a gold digger. You can’t want to spend your life with someone one minute and then berate them and call them a liar the next. He was supposed to be my best friend, the person I walked through my life with, but he turned into my enemy at the drop of a hat. It was really unnerving and made me want to stay as far away from him at the wedding as possible.

After Lindsey had drank her last glass of champagne, we retired, wanting to get a good night’s sleep before the wedding. We had an early morning with hair, makeup, and a champagne breakfast before ever heading over to the event. Lindsey went to bed in my spare room, and I climbed into my bed, laying there staring out the window into the darkness. I must have laid there for hours before falling asleep, running through the different things I would say if I came face to face with Nathan. I tossed and turned all night long, getting barely any sleep at all. A beautiful event was now a place I didn’t want to be at all.

Chapter 24

Nathan

It never failed that every time there was something important going on in my life, I was more than fashionably late to it. Jordan’s wedding was probably already starting, and I was just pulling up and parking the car. I couldn’t seem to get my act together for even one day, and I knew it was all because I had to see Amanda that day.

My nerves were through the roof, and my stomach was seasick from the alcohol I was trying to get out of my system.