On The Ropes (Tapped Out 3)
I’d just…wait. Surely if there was one in there, eventually it would make its presence known. In the meantime, I would stick my head in the sand and pretend it didn’t exist because I didn’t want my life to change.
I didn’t want to be having a baby with the man who had skewered my heart.
Somehow I found myself at The Cage, without any conscious knowledge of how I got there. I knew Giovanni worked at the Boys and Girls Club on Tuesday nights, and I also knew that Fox would be training tonight, since he’d had an earlier shift at the bar. I needed to talk to someone, and he was my best choice.
I’d been tempted to call Jenna, but I didn’t want her to freak out on me. Jenna was as level-headed as they came most of the time, except in a crisis. Then she went postal in two point one seconds flat.
I could do that all on my own, thanks.
On the way across the room to where Fox was doing pull-ups on a bar on the wall, I worked out different scenarios for how I could feel him out without telling him about my exact situation. Not that I had an exact situation to tell. As of right now, as far as I knew, I was unpregnant. Blissfully so. Until I saw that telltale word on a stick, I had nothing to be concerned about.
And since I never intended to buy a pregnancy test, ever, I was golden.
I stopped beside him and smiled back automatically at his grin.
“Hey squirt. Whatcha doin’ here? Mia’s not arou—”
“What would you do if Mia told you she was pregnant?”
Yeah, okay, so that wasn’t one of the scenarios I’d played out in my head. Probably a good thing, because from the way he reacted—dropping down from the bar as if his hands had run out of strength, then promptly clasping his knees like he couldn’t catch his breath—my casual-pregnancy-talk technique could use some work.
Just like my dirty talking one, evidently.
“What did you say?” he panted.
I was already turning away. I needed to take a walk. Right out of the city. Maybe I’d walk to Mexico. That’d keep me busy for a while, right?
“Carly. Jesus, Car, wait up.” Fox grabbed my shoulder and I stopped, mainly because his spinning me around made my head whirl too.
You didn’t eat lunch.
Or breakfast.
Actually, I wasn’t sure when I’d last eaten a full meal. I’d been living on snacks the last couple of days, other than the sandwich I’d picked at with Kirk last night. Even that I’d barely nibbled.
/> “Let’s go sit down in my office.” Fox mopped at his brow with a towel, and I realized he looked as shaky as I felt. “It’s private in there. And we can have privacy to…talk privately.”
I frowned. “That’s a whole lot of privacy, bub.”
“I think that’s a smart idea, don’t you?” He gave a distracted, annoyed glance at all the other people working out before pulling me toward the exit.
“No, I think you’re busy. This isn’t a good time.”
“Who cares if it’s a good time? It’s happening. Oh, God, it’s happening.”
“What?” I followed him through the door and let him tug me up the hall, though I wasn’t real keen on having a sit-down with him right now. He was acting more than a little wacked out.
I hoped he hadn’t resorted to steroids for his fight with Gio. Maybe he wanted to win badly enough to take the risk.
“Drugs are bad,” I told him. “Seriously bad news.”
At his office door, he glanced back at me, lines forming between his brows. “What did you—”
The door flew open, and the person on the other side was not Mia. It was Vanity, the chick who’d spent a while last spring playing tongue twister with the father of my nonexistent baby.
“Oh hell no,” she snarled, her gaze drifting from Fox to me and back again. He still had his hand on my wrist, which was almost my hand if you were blind and stupid. “So this is why he’s fucking that cuntcake now? Because you’ve taken up with her sister? Foxy, you have no taste.” She shoved him back out of the doorway. “Less than none.”
All at once, I had a pretty good idea who the knife impaler was, and it wasn’t the woman who I was still sort of half-assedly trying to obtain the location of, amidst the many other things on my overflowing plate.