Deceiving Lies (Forgiving Lies 2)

picture. Two dark circles in the middle of a gray screen, and a little peanut shape in each circle. “This? These . . . they’re . . . oh my God.”

She laughed through her tears and pulled the pile from my hands to set it on the nightstand. Crawling on the bed to straddle my lap, she cupped my face in her hands and brought her forehead down to mine.

“This isn’t a joke? This is for real? You’re—we’re . . . we’re having twins? You’re pregnant?” She’d barely had time to nod before I crushed my mouth to hers and kissed her like I needed her in order to breathe. “I love you . . . fuck, Rachel. I love you so damn much.”

“I know, I know, I love you too,” she said when I released her mouth again.

“When did this happen? How long have you known? How far along are you? Are you—are you okay? I know you didn’t want this, but you seem so—”

She placed the tips of her fingers on my lips to stop my questions, and a knowing smile lit up her face again. I grabbed her wrist, kissed her fingers, and dropped her hand so I could run my knuckles over her stomach.

“I’m barely over nine weeks now, I just found out a week ago. With how everything happened after I came back, I wasn’t paying attention, so I hadn’t even noticed I’d missed a period. But I hadn’t gotten back on my birth control from being gone, and when I tried, my doctor wanted to see me first. I saw her last Friday, and she asked about how long I’d been off it, why I’d been off it, and if you and I had been together since then. When she asked when my last cycle was, I couldn’t remember one after the time when I’d been kidnapped, so she did a test to check before she put me on birth control again. It came back positive, and since I’d known it’d been a while from my last cycle, she did an ultrasound to measure the baby. And then there ended up being two . . .”

Tears started falling rapidly down Rachel’s cheeks, but never once did her smile leave her face.

“She figured I was around eight weeks, and I picked up the journal Trent had bought me on my way to meet Candice and Maddie. It took a while, but I finally figured out the dates of when everything was, and after checking I’m guessing it happened the night of the Fourth of July. My doctor had been right, I was a little over eight weeks that day.”

I shook my head and laughed softly as I glanced down at her flat stomach. “I still can’t believe this. And you’re okay? You seem happy.”

“Being kidnapped and not knowing if I would ever see you again changed the way I thought about a lot of things. Including having children. It still would have been ideal if we could’ve had some time of just being us before all this happened, but I’m not scared of being a mom anymore. I’m not scared of going through all of this without my mom. We have so many people that are there for us, and I know they’ll help.” She kissed my lips softly and smiled against them. “And having you still look at me like you wanted to rip my clothes off in front of everyone when I was holding Shea the other night helped.”

“Well, what can I say? You look good with a baby.”

Rachel laughed loudly. “We’ll see if you still feel that way when I’m the size of a whale.”

“I will,” I assured her.

“What about you? Are you okay? You still want this, now that it’s going to be a reality?”

“More than anything,” I told her as I pressed my lips to hers again.

Leaning back until I was lying on the bed, I rolled us over and hovered over her body. She dragged her hands through my hair and giggled when I bent low and kissed her stomach over and over.

“What does it feel like?”

“Nothing,” she said on a laugh as her fingertips continued to trail across my head.

“You haven’t really been sick, have you? I remember that day last week, but I can’t think of anything else.” I felt shitty for not noticing, if she had been. I should have picked up on this, shouldn’t I?

“Not really. There’s been times here and there, but from the horror stories I’ve heard, I don’t have it bad at all.”

I nodded and kissed her stomach again before reaching over to the nightstand. Grabbing the ultrasound picture, I laid it down on the bottom of her stomach and hopped off the bed, looking for my pants. After I found them, and took my phone out of the pocket, I walked back over to Rachel and opened up the camera app.

“What are you doing?”

“Letting everyone know about my present.”

That soft smile was back, before her eyes went wide in horror. “No! I’m in my bra and underwear!”

“Calm down, Sour Patch. I’m not about to let anyone see the rest of you. You’re mine, not theirs.”

All that you could see in the picture was her torso and the ultrasound picture. As soon as she gave me the okay, I set up a text to go to Mason, Candice, Maddie, Eli, and all our parents. Above the picture I typed out: MY WEDDING PRESENT, and underneath, I did a twist on Rachel’s words from the envelope: BABY RYAN 1 AND BABY RYAN 2 WILL BE HERE IN MARCH.

Once the message went through, I turned both our phones on silent and put them in my bag.

“What are you doing? You know they’re all going to call us.”

“Exactly,” I said as I climbed on top of her again and moved the ultrasound picture to a safe place. “But right now it’s our wedding night, and I’m not done celebrating with just you.”