On The Ropes (Tapped Out 3)
“You can’t tell anyone. You have to promise me. It’s really important.”
Possibly life or death. And that was no exaggeration.
“Clarify anyone. Because if this involves secret-keeping from my better half, I may have to step off the bus here.”
“Your better half scares me shitless, but yeah, I’ll tell her too.” I sucked in a breath and huffed it out. “So, ah, I may be just a little bit…um, knocked up. Possibly.”
He sat back and linked his hands in his lap.
“Well?” I demanded, scanning his expressionless face. “Say something.”
He opened his mouth, started to speak, then fell silent and shook his head.
“Really, don’t babble on so. It’s so tiring.” I shoved my hands through my hair and moved back to the window. I pressed my hand to the glass, just to feel the coolness against my burning skin. “I’m so scared, Fox,” I whispered.
He came up behind me and took my shoulders in his hands, holding me that way until I could drag in enough air to say the rest. “I’m not sure yet. I haven’t taken a test.”
“Then that’s the first thing we need to do.”
The way he made it we when it was truly just me made me shut my eyes in gratitude. The world was shitty in so many ways, but there were still good people in it. Still good men, and my sister had found one of the best.
“I don’t think I can.”
“Sure you can.” He swiveled me around to face him. “You buy one of those box deals, pee on the stick and you’re done. Even I know that much.”
It felt good, normal, to roll my eyes at him. “Don’t mean the actual process, Foxy, I mean I’m not ready to know.”
“So you’d rather worry needlessly without finding out for sure?”
I frowned. “Stop being so logical. You’re giving me a headache.”
He smiled and looped his arm around me, guiding me to the door. “We’ll just go to the drugstore and then go back to the apartment where you can do your business.”
“And? If it says I am, then what?”
“Then we’ll wait for your sister to get out of work, and the three of us will sit down and figure things out. Like a family.”
The tears were back, even worse than before. “God, if I’m not knocked up, I think my tear ducts are broken.”
“No shame in crying. That’s how you know it really matters.”
All the way to the drugstore and back home to take the test, I thought about what he’d said. Could I feel something for a child I hadn’t planned and hadn’t even considered being a possibility a few hours ago? Or was I just crying for myself, and the dreams I feared were about to shatter?
More lost dreams. I was racking them up.
Biting my nails, I studied the test lying innocuously on the sink.
Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look. If you don’t look, you won’t know.
I could just toss it out and go watch TV like it was any other night. Nothing had to change. I could keep sleeping on the floor in the bedroom while Mrs. Knox looked for a new apartment, and I could still keep up my two jobs until the one at the club ended in a little over a week and a half. I could keep fighting with my sister about drinking all the milk, and using her hair ties and not putting them back.
Oh, God, I wasn’t ready to be a mother. I wasn’t even ready to be an adult myself. Obviously, judging from the clusterfuck of bad choices I’d made over the last six months.
“Carly Ann, if you don’t look at that test, I’m coming in there myself,” Fox called through the door, surprising a laugh out of me.
And somehow I was able to reach for the stick with a steady hand. To read the results, and then calmly wrap up the test in about six plastic bags, so it could be buried in the trash and never unearthed again.
Calmly, I washed my hands and my face and went out to face the music. Except there wasn’t any. The hallway was silent, and as soon as my gaze connected with Fox’s, he knew.