With a sigh, I figured that I was just going to have to talk to them in person when I got to work. That thought alone was the only thing that encouraged me to get out of bed. I was determined to get them both together in the office so that we could all talk like the rational adults we were supposed to be.
I forced myself through my morning routine, showering, dressing, eating a bagel, and getting to the office, determined to accomplish my task. Yet when I got to work that morning, I quickly learned that I was in for a rude awakening.
Joanna never showed up.
Tobias did though.
“Tobias!” I said, seeing him walk down the hall to his office. But he didn’t even bother to turn around, as if he was deaf to my voice.
“Come on, Tobias. Don’t be like that. Let’s talk about this,” I said, but still got no response. “Really? Are you honestly going to give me the silent treatment? Aren’t we too old for this, man? Tobias! Tobias! I’m your best friend in the world, and you’re going to treat me like this?”
“Were,” he said quietly, although he still wouldn’t look at me. “You were my best friend in the world. I don’t know who the hell you are now. My best friend wouldn’t treat my sister like one of his sleazy conquests, in the middle of our firm’s gala, no less.”
“I’m not treating her like a conquest! Come on, now! You should know that I have too much respect for Joanna to do something like that.”
“Oh yeah? I bet you respected the hell out of her in that closet.”
“Look, we were being stupid. I know that. But I swear, it’s not what you think.”
“Get the hell out of my way, Anderson. Go do your work and just get out of my sight.” With that, he turned and I knew that I had essentially been dismissed. I watched him storm off and disappear behind his office door with a slam.
“Shit,” I muttered, turning around and seeing several employees passing by, giving me scolding glances as if they’d never heard an expletive before. “What the hell are you guys looking at?” I said, agitated. “Are you done with your reports?”
“Ah…N-no,” one of the stuttered. “They’re not due until the end of the week though, right?”
“Doesn’t mean you have to wait that long to finish,” I fussed. “So stop looking at me and get to work.”
“Y-yes, Mr. Anderson.”
I watched them hurry away, feeling mildly guilty for bullying them for no reason. But I couldn’t help myself. When I felt bad, I tended to act bad. It was a habit that I had yet managed to get control over.
I glanced back to the door Tobias had disappeared behind, tempted to bang on it until he opened up and heard me out.
I tried to recall the last time Tobias had been seriously mad at me. It had seemed like a lifetime ago. We’d been fresh out of high school at the time. He had let me use his car for a date. I had stayed out longer than normal with for that particular date, and hadn’t returned Tobias’s car for two whole days. I’d been careless, taking my date on joyrides, stopping here and there to drink and make out.
In the end, I’d left it far from the pristine condition Tobias had initially lent it to me in.
“Where the hell have you been?” Tobias yelled when I finally returned with his car. “And what the hell happened?” His gaze had raked over his car, seeing that it certainly looked worse for wear on the outside. That was nothing compared to what it had looked like on the inside though. Unfortunately, it was like I had been wearing beer goggles the whole time that had left my vision distorted; I hadn’t been able to see the damages I’d done to his beloved car until that very instant, right as he was pointing it out.
It was like watching in slow motion as he approached his car, his keen vision seeing every speck of dirt, every scratch, every smudge… He opened the door to the reek of the wine coolers my date had spilled all over the cloth seats. I still remembered the way he had closed his eyes, keeping them shut for a moment as if hoping that when he reopened them, his car would be restored to new.
“Anderson, so help me god… You did not mess up my car like this. You. Did. Not.”
I had stood there, sputtering and trying to figure out what to say. Wishing I had a magic wand to repair the car Tobias had worked so hard to acquire.
“Anderson!” Tobias had yelled, demanding an answer.
I flinched, not having a single idea what to say for myself. “It’s nothing, man. Don’t worry about it. I’ll fix it…I’ll clean it and it’ll be good as new before you know it,” I had said, trying to act as if it was no big deal.
“You damn straight you will, you jackass,” Tobias had growled. He didn’t speak to me for two days after that, and those had been two of the longest days of my life. I had managed to scrape up every penny I owned to fix his car.
Things were different this time though. Joanna wasn’t a car that I could just run through a wash and repair to restore to new. And as much as Tobias had loved his first car, he loved his sister more. It was going to take a lot more to make it up to him. And if I didn’t figure out how to do it soon, I was at risk of losing my best friend forever.
My stomach twisted painfully at the thought.
Knowing I was highly unlikely to get another word out of Tobias for the day, I left from standing in front of his closed office door and headed to my own office.
When I reached my office, thoughts of Joanna returned.
It dawned on me that if I could at least get her back on my side, perhaps we could win over Tobias’s blessing together.
First though, I needed to get her to accept my calls.
I closed and locked my office door, went to the phone, and dialed Joanna’s number, my fingers automatically finding the right digits. I was very much a product of my generation, and therefore hardly knew anyone’s phone number by heart, thanks to my constant usage of speed-dial. But considering how many times I had called Joanna over the past two days, I had learned her number by heart. It may have just been my imagination, but I thought I could even distinguish between the sounds of the rings; when I listened to the rings of calls she wasn’t going to answer, there was a hollow tone to them that other rings didn’t have.
“Come on, Jo, pick up,” I pleaded, but already knowing it was useless after the fourth ring. The phone chirped, delivering me to her voicemail for the billionth time. I had a feeling that I was just a couple messages away from completely filling up her inbox.
“Joanna, please. Just call me back. We can work this out. I’ll talk to Tobias. He’ll get over it. He has to. I’m not going to just give up because he caught us. Come on, Joanna! Answer me! Just pick up—” but I was cut off by the beep, which had also happened to me for the billionth time.
I leaned back in my seat, wondering again how I had managed to get myself into such an unfortunate predicament. In one night, I had lost my best friend and the girl of my dreams. It just didn’t make sense.
I sat in my seat, so disappointed with myself that I started getting a pounding headache. I rested my head on my desk, tired, angry, frustrated, and sickened all at once.
I wasn’t sure how much time passed, but I eventually realized I couldn’t spend the entire day hiding in my office in despair, especially while there was still a lot of work to be done. After all, I had just harassed a couple of employees. What message would I be sending if I spent an entire day being useless and unproductive?
Furthermore, I didn’t need another reason for Tobias to be upset with me, that was for sure.
An uncomfortable feeling washed over me again, knowing that too many people already thought I had only landed my role at the firm for being Tobias’s best friend. I had never cared much about the rumors, believing them to be nonsense. Now, however, if I lost my best friend status, how could I be certain that my job wouldn’t be the next thing to get lost?
I wanted to believe that I was important to the firm, but I couldn’t be naïve enough to think that Joanna couldn’t easily take over my job if necessary. And where would that leave me?
Out of a best friend. Out of a woman. Out of work…
At the end of the day, I wasn’t irreplaceable.
I shuddered, and turned on my computer. The times of taking anything for granted was far behind me now.
Trying to ignore my pounding headache, I began to pull up the latest numbers. Yet they only sent a pang through my chest, for I knew that they would be a lot easier to make sense of if Joanna beside me, checking over them also. We’d made a good team.
“Dammit,” I said and sighed.
CHAPTER 22
Joanna
I knew Anderson had been trying to call me, but I just couldn’t muster the energy to speak with him. After leaving the gala, I’d turned off my phone and went straight back to Tobias’s, hating that I didn’t have anywhere else to go. When I got back to Tobias’s big empty mansion, it was almost too much for me to bear, thinking back to the utter disappointment and disgust that had been on his face when he’d caught me with Anderson.
I shuddered just thinking about it, for never in my life had my brother looked at me that way. It was a look that I hoped to never to receive from him ever again.
I had contemplated packing my things and staying at a hotel, but before I had a chance to act on it, my stomach heaved with nausea again.
I spent the rest of the night and the following morning vomiting. I could only presume the fancy food provided at the gala hadn’t agreed with me at all. Clinging to the toilet bowl, I wished I had just opted to stay home that night entirely. Perhaps the whole Lauren fiasco had been foreshadowing that the night had been doomed.
It had been late when Tobias made it home from the event. I had just cleaned myself up from another bout of vomiting when I heard him tinkering around in the kitchen. I halfway wanted to hide from him indefinitely, but doing so made me feel too much like a child, as if I was refusing to come out of my room after upsetting my parents. So I forced myself to go downstairs to greet him.
When I reached the kitchen, he was facing the refrigerator, throwing back a drink of some kind.
“How did your speech go?” I asked, my voice cutting through the icy silence permeating the house.
Tobias turned around, slammed his cup onto the kitchen counter, and walked passed me without saying a word.
I started to feel sick all over again, but felt grateful that he hadn’t kicked me out of his house, at least…
Taking the hint that he didn’t want to talk, I headed back to my room, where I remained for the rest of the night, fighting intense bouts of nausea every time I thought of Tobias and Anderson and what I could possibly do to remedy our situation.
* * *
The night of the gala, I went to bed, hoping and praying that I would feel better when I woke the following morning. But the sickness persisted, and even got worse in the morning. I had wanted to ask Tobias about the dinner that had been served and whether he was feeling all right afterwards. But he continued avoiding me like the plague and was out of the house before I could even think about trying to have a heart-to-heart conversation with him about what had happened.
Anderson continued to call and text me, but I resisted responding to him. As much as I hated ignoring him, I felt that talking to him would only make things worse. I needed to get things right with my brother first, because deep down, I agreed that Anderson and I had been disrespectful to him in hiding our relationship.
Plus, I didn’t think I could even carry out a long conversation with the way my nausea had me constantly running to the toilet.
When Monday rolled around, I woke up feeling just as sick. Tobias still hadn’t bothered to speak with me, not even caring that I wouldn’t be going to work that day. While I understood his disappointment, a part of me was growing increasingly annoyed. I was his little sister, for crying out loud. He could have at least checked to make sure I wasn’t dying, because I certainly felt like I was…
My mood souring by the second, I was grateful when my nausea started to ease by that afternoon. I was positively starving by then, particularly since it felt like I had been throwing up everything I’d ever eaten in my entire life.
Still in my pajamas, I went to the kitchen and rummaged through the refrigerator and the cabinets, thinking that I should probably eat some chicken noodle soup and crackers, with ginger-ale. But I noticed I had a sweet tooth. When I spotted a tub of vanilla ice cream in the freezer, my mouth practically started to salivate.
Don’t be stupid. You don’t need ice-cream while you’re recovering from food poisoning, a voice in my head warned.
But my craving for the ice cream was too strong and ultimately won the battle.
Moments later, I found myself curled on the couch in front of the TV, in danger of finishing off the whole tub. I hadn’t eaten ice cream in years, having lost my taste for it sometime ago. Yet now, it tasted amazing.
As I began scraping the bottom of the container, I tried to recall the last time I’d eaten ice cream. My mind drew a blank for a while, but then I finally remembered…
It had been during my senior year of high school after I broke up with William Towly…
The break up had been bad, primarily because I’d been so young and naïve. Will had been my first love and first loves were hard to get over. He had asked me to the homecoming dance at the beginning of the year, even after Tobias had threatened to give him a black eye to match his suit. Immediately, I’d felt that any guy not frightened away by my overprotective big brother was a keeper. My little teenaged heart had presumed that me and Will were going to be together forever. He was handsome, smart, charming, funny, and had a bit of a bad-boy edge to go along with it that had left me smitten right from the start.
We dated for almost the whole school year, right up to prom season. I had fully anticipated going to prom with him until I caught him red-handed, kissing another girl. Katie Joseph. A pretty cheerleader who half the guys in the school had a crush on.
My heart had shattered into a million pieces, and I soon realized that Will had simply been using me. Throughout our time together, he had mentioned more than a time or two exactly how far he wanted to go with me… And I had been under the impression that he would indeed be my first, whenever was ready and could work up the nerve to go through with it. But I supposed I’d been taking too long, and since he wasn’t as serious about me as I was about him, he just decided to move on to someone prettier and more willing. He hadn’t even had the decency to officially end things with me. He just stopped speaking to me cold-turkey with no explanation.
After spotting him with Katie, I’d gone home and eaten a whole tub of ice cream, half in response to my broken heart, and half in response to the fact that my period had started that day and I was just a hormonal wreck.
Never wanting to feel that way again, I swore off ice cream afterwards because the cold and sweet taste of it would always remind me of that miserable day.
Just like it currently was. It was too late to do anything about it now though, for I had devoured the whole tub.
Too late…
The word ‘late’ began to bounce around on in my head, making me uncomfortable for some reason.
I began reflecting on that day of heartache with Will again, how that heartache, the cramps, and the PMS had created the perfect storm that had me crying for the rest of the night. It was almost like how I currently felt, minus the PMS part…
The tub of ice cream slipped from my hands. I watched it roll across Tobias’s pristine floor, a steady panic growing inside of me as I realized that I’d been staying here for over a month and hadn’t had my period yet.
I hadn’t had a period since Anderson and I started…
No, a voice said sternly in my head. It’s just stress. Stress is making your period late. That’s all it is…
I so desperately wanted to believe this was the case, but another voice in my head chimed in.
How do you know though? Your period has always been like clockwork. You’ve never missed it before…
<
br /> Was that nausea or morning sickness?
Climbing to my feet on shaky legs, I clambered up the stairs to my room, pulling a jogging suit on over my pajamas and then dashing out of the house, heading for the first Walgreens that I passed.
My whole body felt overheated as I walked through the aisles, looking at row upon row of pregnancy tests, overwhelmed regarding which one to get. My anxiety increasing by the second, I closed my eyes and grabbed the first three my hands landed on, and then headed to the checkout line.
A teenaged boy worked the checkout line. “Good afternoon, ma’am,” he said, pleasantly enough, and then raised his eyebrows in embarrassment as I slid the three pregnancy tests toward him. He quickly scanned and bagged them. I shoved the money at him without bothering to get my change back.
The whole time, my mind spun with panic. By the time I got back to the house, I was practically numb. I headed upstairs to my room, went to the bathroom, and sat on the cold floor for a moment, terrified.
I stared at the three pregnancy tests, suddenly afraid to open them…
Afraid to take them…
Knowing my whole life could potentially be changed forever.
You need to know though…the voice in my head reasoned.
My hands trembling, I tore open the first box.
Sure, I’d thought about having children before. What girl didn’t? I just thought that whenever it came time for me to seriously think about having children, I would be married to the love of my life and it would be a decision we’d make together. A few years ago, I had always envisioned that discussion happening with Zander. But when things started falling to the wayside with him, so did my dreams of having a family. It had taken me a while to get the strength to leave him, but I had decided long ago that he would never be the father of my children. I’d at least had sense enough to know that making him a father would have been the worst thing I could have possibly done.
February Burning: A Firefighter Secret Baby Romance Page 31
