by Elle Kennedy
“I was nauseated for a couple weeks. Then this morning the cramps were pretty bad.”
I was expecting the belly ultrasound like I’ve seen on TV, but then the doctor turns to me with a phallic-looking wand, and I realize this is a whole different kind of exam. Garrett stares at the floor uncomfortably. Not a milestone in our relationship either of us was prepared for, but I guess we should have thought about that before I got pregnant.
“Some bleeding and discomfort is normal,” the doctor says. “But let’s get a better look.”
A dozen horrible thoughts crash through my brain as I hold my breath. I hadn’t decided what my next step would be, mostly because I hadn’t worked up the nerve to tell Garrett. Having that choice ripped from my hands before I’d fully gotten my head around all of it feels unfair. Like I’ve been cheated. My heartbeat accelerates the longer the doctor scrutinizes whatever she’s seeing on the screen.
“So, when the body is preparing to carry a baby, it undergoes a number of changes,” she tells me, her gaze glued to the imaging scan. “The new rush of hormones can have a number of effects, one of which is changes in your cervix that make it softer. This can lead to bleeding in some cases. Sexual intercourse, for example, or a number of other athletic activities, can exacerbate this. Have you engaged in any strenuous activities in the past few days?”
I bite my lip sheepishly.
Garrett clears his throat. “Uh, yeah. We had some, ah, vigorous intercourse the other night. Like, multiple times.”
“Vigorous intercourse?” I echo, turning to sigh at him. “Really? Couldn’t find any better words?”
He lifts a brow. “I was going to say I gave you a good pounding, but I figured the doc wouldn’t want to hear that.”
I feel my cheeks heat up. “I’m sorry,” I tell the doctor. “Ignore him.”
She looks like she’s trying not to laugh. “Vigorous intercourse could do it,” she says, her gaze returning to the screen. “And like I said, some bleeding is not unusual. On its own, it’s nothing to worry about.”
“So that’s it?” I ask, confused. “There’s nothing wrong?”
“It all looks good from where I’m sitting. You seem to be about ten weeks along. Would you like to hear the heartbeat?”
And then suddenly we hear this wet, whooshing, underwater sound. Like the soundtrack of an alien space horror movie. I listen, dumbfounded, staring at the blob on the screen. How is that noise coming out of me?
Beside me, Garrett looks as stunned as I feel.
“I’d still suggest taking it easy for the next few days,” she advises. “Let your body rest and recover. Otherwise, I see nothing to suggest trauma. You’re not running a fever, and I have no reason to suspect an infection.”
I bite back a relieved laugh. “I feel kind of embarrassed now for coming to the ER. I guess I overreacted.”
“You did the right thing,” she assures me. “You know your body better than anyone. If something seems off, better to get checked out and make sure.”
The doctor takes a few minutes to answer some of my questions and prints out a picture that she hands to Garrett. Though it’s so early in the pregnancy, there isn’t much to see. He takes the scan without a word. Still silently fuming, I imagine.
Once she leaves us, I quickly clean myself up. Then, as I get dressed, I finally work up the nerve to ask Garrett the question hanging in the tension-thick air between us.
“What do you want to do about it?”
41
Garrett
Hannah pulls on her leggings with her back to me while I stare at this monochrome image in my hands. My kid. Inside there. Growing. No idea who he is or what’s waiting for him out here. Just this little gooey thing that’s about to change our lives forever.
“What do you want to do?” she repeats, slowly turning to face me. Her green eyes are lined with fatigue.
My head starts spinning. How the hell am I going to keep this kid alive? Who in their right mind would trust me with a living thing entirely dependent on me for its survival? Not to mention not royally screwing him up emotionally.
“Fine, I guess I’ll go first.”
As my mind races in a thousand directions, Hannah’s voice cuts in and out. I vaguely hear her saying something about me being gone during the season.
“I’m not thrilled about the idea of being home all alone, raising a baby by myself.”
Everything suddenly feels urgent. A loud clock ticking down to the enormity of this new reality. A baby. Our child. How do they just let people have these things? I failed the written portion of my first driver’s test, for fuck’s sake.
“It’s intimidating,” she’s saying. “I’m not sure if I’m ready to handle that, you know? Like it’s a lot. Especially without any family support…”
I start doing math in my head. Thinking about pre-season and doctor visits. Traveling to away games. The baby coming in the middle of the run-up to the playoffs. As panic starts churning in my gut, I wish I had a functional family to tell me how I’m supposed to do all this stuff. Someone to teach me.
“Okay then, apparently I’m talking to myself. Let’s go.”
My head snaps up, jolting me back to the present. Hannah’s standing at the door with her purse. I’m still clutching this picture in my hand, daunted.
Hannah is upset with me, and now I feel like a total dick for getting into a fight with her on the way over. My system just didn’t know how to process all that information at once, and I’m a little burnt out, if I’m honest.
“I’m sorry. I’m just…” I trail off.
“Let’s go,” she says again, turning away from me.
Although it’s early evening when we get home, Hannah says we can talk in the morning and goes right to bed. Rather than follow her, I sit at the kitchen table with a beer, staring at my kid. Wondering what he’d think of me. Or she. Could be a girl. But knowing my luck, it’s a boy. A son who’ll unearth all my daddy issues and make me doubt every parenting move I make, for fear of screwing him up. I sit there for hours, imagining all those ways I could mess up, and wake up an exhausted mess the next morning, having barely slept.
Hannah’s still withdrawn as we brush our teeth beside each other at the sink. I want to fix it, but when I shut the water and open my mouth to speak, she leaves the bathroom abruptly. While I’m making coffee in the kitchen, she just sits at the counter eating a piece of toast, watching me. The silence is making the back of my neck itch. Again, I’m about to speak, when her phone rings and she wanders into the den to answer it. I don’t catch much of the conversation over the bubbling of the coffeemaker. I peek around the corner to see her write a number down on a pad of paper.
“What was that?” I ask when she returns to the kitchen to finish her breakfast.
Hannah shrugs, not meeting my eyes. “Nothing.” She shoves the last piece of toast in her mouth, chewing quickly as she grabs her purse and keys from the side table across the room.
I feel a pang of alarm. “Where are you going?”
“I need to get some stuff from the studio if I’m going to work from home for the next few days.”
“You want me to drive you?” I offer.
“No.” She ducks into the hallway toward the door, answering over her shoulder. “I’m fine.”
Yeah, right. She’s far from fine. It’s like she can’t wait to get away from me. Granted, I was sort of an ass yesterday, but we’ve got a pretty serious conversation to have. I’d be happy to apologize if she’d stand still long enough to hear it.
After I eat some breakfast and put away the dishes, I give Logan a call. My best friend is hit-or-miss when it comes to giving advice, but God help me, I’m desperate.
“Hey, G,” he says. “Good timing. I just got back from the craziest lunch with Grace and her mom. Josie took us to a café near the Eiffel Tower where all the waitstaff were—not shitting you here—goddamn mimes. Can you imagine a worse nightmare scenario?”
“Hannah�
�s pregnant.”
That stuns him into silence.
“Wait, I just realized how that sounds,” I interject before he can reply. “I’m not using that as an example of a nightmare scenario. I just needed to say it and didn’t want to hear your stupid mime story anymore.”
“First of all, wow.”
“I know, right?” I rake my free hand through my hair. “She totally threw me a curveball yesterday.”
“I meant wow, my story wasn’t stupid.”
I can’t help but snort.
“Second of all,” he continues. “Wow.”
A full-blown laugh slips out. I know it’s not the time to be laughing, but I love my friends. They never fail to lift my spirits when I need their support.
“Is this wow about my news?”
“Yeah. I mean, holy shit, G. Congratulations. How far along is she?”
“Ten weeks. She had the first ultrasound yesterday. Actually, that’s sort of how I found out. She wasn’t feeling well and thought she was losing the baby. Had to rush her to the hospital.”
“Oh, damn. I’m sorry. She okay?”
“Yeah, better now. False alarm. But I had no idea.” Shame coats my throat. “I was in the middle of this god-awful joint interview with my father when Wellsy called, so I was already in a crap mood. Then she dropped all this on me at once, and I, uh…” The remorse is choking me now. I clear my throat. “I didn’t react well.”
His voice turns grave. “What’d you do?”
“Nothing. Well, I mean, we got into a shouting match in the car, and I may or may not have compared her to my father.”
Logan’s expletive thuds in my ear. “Not cool, dude. You can’t be yelling at pregnant ladies.”
“Yes, thank you. But I was caught off guard.”
I pace around the house, trying to walk off the nervous energy building in my muscles.
“You better do some serious groveling,” he advises me. “Bust out that credit card and get to work.”
“She’s pretty mad still. We were supposed to talk, but she basically blew me off this morning.”
“Well, yeah, dickhead. She’s been all alone in this, and then she’s freaking out, tells you, and you flip out on her and tell her she’s like your dad? Your dad, who was spawned from Satan’s rib? Jesus, bro. She’s feeling like shit right about now, and you made it so much worse.”
He’s right. I know. As he rails into me for my behavior, I wander into the den and notice the notepad Wellsy had written on. I don’t even mean to read it. I just happen to glance at it and the name catches my attention.
Reed Realty.
I freeze in place. What the hell does Hannah need a realtor for? And when did she even have a chance to contact one? She went straight to bed when we got home yesterday—
—at six o’clock in the evening, I realize. And I sat in the kitchen alone for hours, lost in my own damned head while my pregnant girlfriend was in the bedroom. Maybe she hadn’t gone to sleep, but stayed up for a while. Also stewing, thinking. And maybe she’d stewed and thought until she’d reached a decision.
To move out.
My blood runs cold with terror. She did just receive that big royalty check. She sure as hell doesn’t need me to support her and the baby. And after the way I lost it on her yesterday, maybe she doesn’t want my support.
Fuck.
My body growing weak, I cut Logan off midsentence. “Dude, I gotta go.”
42
Hannah
Our engineer, Max, is in the studio with Nice, finessing a track with him, when I get there to pick up my hard drive. The entourage are camped out on the leather sofa, watching some sci-fi show on a laptop. I mean to just grab the drive and go, but when I hear Nice riffing in the booth, I can’t help but get sucked in.
At the mic, Nice recites some lines he reads from his phone while Max cues up a new mix of the bridge.
“What do you think?” he asks, calling me into the booth with him. “Came to me last night while we were watching Farscape. You ever see that show? It’s a trip.”
“I like that slant rhyme,” I say. “But what if we moved it to the second verse and moved that first bit to the new bridge?”
Max ducks out for a minute while we dig into these lyrics. As always, Nice and I become absorbed in the process, until I notice a figure waving at us through the glass. At first I think it’s Max, but then I blink and realize it’s Garrett.
My boyfriend stands at the board, silently mouthing words I can’t discern.
“Garrett?” I blurt out. “What in the hell?”
He meets my eyes when he hears my voice come through the monitors on his side.
“You have to cue up the talkback,” I tell him, before realizing he has no idea what I’m talking about. “The red button next to the microphone. On the board.”
He glances door, frantically bewildered at the dozens of buttons and faders, until Gumby sidles up and points to it for him.
“Thank you,” I tell Gumby.
The big man leans down to the mic. “I got you, girl. You know this guy?”
“He’s my boyfriend.” I scowl at the window. “And he’s supposed to be at home.”
A sheepish Garrett takes over the mic. He’s wearing faded jeans, a black Under Armour T-shirt, and a Bruins cap, looking every inch the athlete and standing out among the hip-hop entourage behind him. “I came to say I’m sorry.”
Nice questions me with a look. My face gets warm as a result. This is beyond unprofessional, given that it’s his dime paying for the studio time. Well, his record label. But whatever.
I swallow my embarrassment and glance back at Garrett. “Can we do this at home? I was just on my way out, anyway—”
“Don’t leave.”
I blink again. “The studio?”
Rather than clarify, he keeps barreling forward. “I’m sorry I didn’t react better to the news. I know I was asshole. But we can work this out.” His husky voice cracks a little. “Give me another chance, Wellsy.”
“Ain’t you got flowers or nothing?” Gumby chides him in the background, shaking his head. “You gotta at least bring flowers. I got a flower guy if you need the hookup.”
Nice straightens to his full height, keeping a firm grip on my elbow. “This guy doing you wrong, Hannah?”
My cheeks are scorching now. “It’s fine. Don’t worry.” I address Garrett in an insistent tone. “We’ll talk about it later, Garrett. Please.” I’m growing uncomfortable with airing all of this at work.
Nice directs his suspicious eyes at Garrett. “What’d you do, man?” he demands, affecting a tough-guy voice that sounds much older than the kid standing next to me.
“I made probably the biggest mistake of my life,” Garrett says, now with the full attention of Nice’s entourage. “Hannah, please. Let me try. Don’t move out.”
“Move out?” The conversation takes a hard left turn and leaves me behind. “What are you talking about?”
The misery on his face is unmistakable. “I saw the number you wrote down from the call earlier. It was for a realtor.”
I release a sigh when the riddle starts to make sense. Then I narrow my eyes as indignation sparks. “Wait a minute, you thought I was moving out? You seriously have that little faith in me? I was calling the realtor for my parents, you dumbass!”
Nice snickers.
“I wanted to see about paying off their mortgage, so they could sell their house and get out of that town,” I finish in a huff. “I thought maybe we could use my royalty check to make it happen.”
Relief floods his expression. “You’re not leaving me?”
“Of course not,” I growl. Despite myself, I start to laugh. “Is that why you came all the way over here?”
“What the hell else was I gonna do? Let you walk away without saying a word?”
I bite back a smile. It’s sort of sweet, Garrett rushing over here to stop me from leaving. Seeing the panic in his eyes when he thought he was losing me.
My heart clenches tight when I realize he was still prepared to fight for us, even with the bombshell I dropped in his lap.
“This guy cheat on you?” Nice asks.
“No.” The smile surfaces. “I’m having his baby.”
“Oh shit!” Gumby shouts from the control room. He throws an arm over Garrett’s shoulder and hugs him. “Congrats, bro.”
“Are we?” Garrett asks, entirely focused on me. “Having this baby?”
I shrug, playing it off cool. “I mean, if you’re into it.”
“Yes,” he says, without hesitation. “Babe, I spent all night staring at that sonogram and sometime around three in the morning, it dawned on me—I can’t imagine not raising this kid with you. I know the season and traveling will make things more difficult, but we’ll get you whatever help you need. Hell, we’ll move your parents out here and buy them the house across the street if that’s what you want. Anything.”
“Yo, that’s decent right there,” Nice says, nodding his approval at Garrett. “Mad respect.”
My smile is so wide, it’s liable to crack my face in half. He is decent. The best, actually. And I realize that if I’d found a way to tell him sooner, it wouldn’t have come as such a shock to the system. Suddenly, seeing that he understands my concerns, makes the whole thing feel less daunting, like whatever challenges confront us, we can figure them out together.
Heart overflowing with emotion, I walk out of the booth and into the control room, where Garrett greets me with a tight hug.
“I am so fucking sorry,” he mumbles, burying his face in my hair. “I said some pretty awful shit last night.”
“You did,” I agree.
He pulls back, gazing down at me with pure remorse. “I need you to know—you’re nothing like my father. I think the only reason I said that was because I’d just come from the interview and he was still on my mind. I snapped at you because I was angry with him and you were right there. But I should have never, ever said that. I’m sorry.”
I nod slowly. “I know you are. And it’s okay. I also know you didn’t mean it.”
