Chapter Fourteen
Sally
It was coming again. A slow, cold, creeping feeling, like a zombie crawling out of the grave. I had been sick for a couple of days. I did know if I had the flu or something even worse. It only happened in the morning and I conferred with the calendar to make sure I hadn’t missed my period. I had. By a quite a bit. I had been so busy with work I hadn’t really noticed.
I knew the condom broke and we hadn’t exactly been careful once I had told Mike I was on the pill. It was pretty obvious what was going on, whether I wanted to admit it or not, even to myself. I doubted Mike would have been over the moon to find out I was pregnant, especially since, for all I knew he saw what we had, before it all blew apart, as a fling. I really hoped, against all logic, that I was wrong and I wasn’t pregnant, thought I couldn’t help but imagine what our baby might look like. Neither of us were bad looking. Mike was quite beautiful actually and I thought our kid would be gorgeous. I didn’t think the pill would have failed but that really would be just my fucking luck. Getting pregnant by a guy who was duped back to his super-villain of an ex-girlfriend.
If he actually did. Gia seemed really surprised that Mike would get back with Jessa and from what I had pieced together about their past, I knew that Jessa could be a manipulative bitch who was very good at getting what she wanted, no matter what anyone else might want. The more I thought about it the more it seemed reasonable that Mike would have been tricked to going back to Jessa, if he did at all. Other than the video I had never seen them together and the video was from the source that she owned and could have been doctored to give a particular impression. No, there was no real evidence they were together at all and actually some fairly compelling evidence that they didn’t at all and Jessa was lying just to fuck with us.
The lighting always got me. No matter how many times I went into a drug store, particularly one of the big box one, I had to blink or a few seconds before I could see clearly. I knew that particular store pretty well having been there before. It never failed to surprise me how may different brands and styles of pregnancy tests there were. Condoms made sense. There were all kinds of considerations there. The function of a pregnancy test seemed a bit too straight forward to really account for such variety, particularly it terms of price range, which was almost comically large. Getting what I deemed to be the simplest one, which also turned out to be one of the cheapest, based on a philosophical consideration more than an economic one, I went to the cashier and rang through, not really feeling the need to load up on a bunch of unneeded crap to try and disguise the purchase. There was nothing wrong with buying a pregnancy test and I shouldn’t have to feel any shame about it.
Not feeling any need to beat around the bush, I took the test as soon as I got home. Better to know and be able to prepare than the alternative. As I waited, I put on a kettle for some tea. No matter what the result, I was pretty sure I would need something to calm my nerves.
I knew that Americans were meant to drink coffee but I also didn’t give a shit. I was really never one to keep with the status quo, besides which my dad was from Yorkshire originally and had brought his tea drinking habit with him to our shining shores. My mother never really got it but I loved the ritual of it. I would watch him set up the tea tray as the water boiled, setting out everything just so.
He advised me on the best biscuits for which types of tea and which of the liquids, milk or tea, to put in first. He was dead set against the addition of sugar to a nice cup of tea, or ‘cuppa’ as he used to call it. Another on the list of dictums I disregarded during my twenty-three years of life.
The egg timer dinged and it was time to check the test. There were times when clarity was a curse more than a blessing. There was no two ways about it. I was pregnant and it was Mike’s. While I knew it was questionable I decided not to tell him. At least not right then. I wasn’t planning to tell anyone, not even Gia. I needed time to think. To consider things. The information was still pretty new to even me and I needed time to digest. The situation made even more complex by the fact that I had been in a similar situation with Gia recently when I was the first person she told that she was pregnant with Amber. She was conflicted about telling Reece and I had counseled her to tell him.