Second Chance Baby

by Natasha L. Black

  “I would never do that,” she said.

  “I know that,” Tom said.

  “Then why did you bring it up?” I asked.

  “It’s just a precaution,” he said again. “Just a way for me to cover everybody.”

  “You mean, to cover your own asses,” Ava said. “This has nothing to do with protecting me. This is about making sure I don’t run off again, then decide I’m going to sue the bar for sexual harassment.”

  “Don’t sign that,” I said. I took the papers from her hand and put them back on the table, sliding them back toward Tom. “We’re not going to sign it. This is absolutely ridiculous. I told you nothing is going to change the fact that I’m in love with Ava and we’re going to be together. You can’t intimidate me into rethinking my relationship with her by some absurd bullshit legal documents.”

  “Mason, Ava, listen to me. I fully support the two of you being together,” Tom said.

  I blinked at him. “What?”

  “You two were always meant to be together. And I’m happy for you. As long as you can keep it out of the way of work. I just want to make sure things are going to be okay for all of us, including you Ava. I don’t want anything interfering with the success of the bar.”

  Ava and I exchanged glances. I nodded, and she nodded in return.

  I reached for the papers, and Tom handed them over to me. He withdrew a pen from his pocket and gave it to Ava. We both signed the papers, and I handed them back to him.

  “Here,” I said. “All signed and secure.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I know I might seem harsh about this situation, but I want both of you to know I love you and I’m glad you’re back together. Really. I watched you go through everything, and as painful as I know it was, at least you can see it as a positive now.”

  “What do you mean?” Ava asked.

  “I just mean because of how everything worked out, you two can come back together now without the complications of having a kid to juggle on top of everything else,” Tom said.

  I nodded in agreement. “It’s a good place for us to be. We have time in the future for all that. Right now, I’m happy to just get to really enjoy everything like it’s the first time.”

  I meant it as an encouragement, a sign of optimism, but I was getting weird vibes from Ava. She hadn’t added anything to the conversation, and she felt tense and uncomfortable beside me. I chalked it up to still being upset about Tom and the agreement he drew up.

  After lunch, we went back by Ava’s house so she could get ready for work. On the way to the bar, she was still quiet.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “It’s nothing,” she said.

  “It seems like something. Are you still upset about Tom? Don’t let him bother you. You know that’s just how he is. You should understand. You’re business minded too. He just wants to make sure to protect the best interests of the bar.”

  “I told you nothing’s wrong,” she said. “It’s not Tom. It’s not anything. I’m just… tired.”

  She sounded confident it wasn’t Tom that was bothering her, and I believed her. Besides, she really did look tired. Exhausted, as a matter of fact. Like everything was just kind of drained from her.

  “It’s been a while since you got sick. You should have been over it by now. Do you think you should go see a doctor?” I asked.

  Ava shook her head. “No. That’s not necessary. I looked it up, and food poisoning can last for a week or more. Apparently, I just got a really bad bout.”

  I wasn’t so sure that was actually her problem. This seemed like more than just the lingering effects of food poisoning. I had been through about it to myself once, and while I remember being pretty violently ill for a while, I didn’t feel so completely tired after.

  But I had to trust her. Why would she lie to me?

  “Is there anything I can do to help you?” I asked. “Can you think of anything that might make you feel better?”

  “Not really,” she said. “I think just keeping up with the resting and getting enough fluids is what’s going to patch me back up.”

  “Have you been getting your appetite back at all? You really didn’t eat much at lunch. Maybe that could be part of it. You’re not getting enough nutrients to get your energy back.”

  “That’s probably it,” she said. “Come on. Let’s just go to work.”

  31

  Ava

  It had been a little more than a week since I found out about the baby, and I was still trying to figure everything out. Mason was worried about me. He kept asking how I was feeling and had suggested two more times that I get in touch with the doctor. Every time he said it, I wondered if he was still suspicious. Maybe he had already come to the conclusion himself and just wasn’t saying anything.

  But that wasn’t like Mason. He was more up-front than that. More honest. Apparently, unlike me. Him being so worried about me had made it more difficult to convince him not to stay at my apartment with me every night. He wanted to drive me to work, then drive me back home and stay with me to make sure I was doing alright.

  His reaction to Tom’s comment about the complications of having a kid stuck in my craw and I just couldn’t bring myself to tell him. I needed to figure out what I wanted and what I was going to do before I let him know. Not letting him stay at my place every night to watch over me meant I was driving myself into work the afternoon I found Stephanie sitting in the parking lot outside the bar. I groaned and braced myself before getting out of the car. I had been dodging her for a few days.

  She kept calling to check in on me, but I knew what she was actually calling about was to find out how Mason had reacted to the baby news. Considering I hadn’t told him about it yet, I didn’t have an answer to that question. And to be completely honest, I didn’t want to have to deal with the drama that was about to come. When I finally did tell him, I knew it was going to be a pretty tough conversation.

  I wanted to put that to the side for now. That was something future Ava could deal with. But if I answered Stephanie’s phone calls, or let her come over, or went out to lunch with her, it would be sitting right in my lap. No longer would it be the dominion of future Ava. The whole situation would be very much about the here and now. It would make it all the more real.

  I wasn’t ready for that. Most of the questions I had been grappling with since the moment I found out I was pregnant we’re gone. If I was going to be completely open and truthful with myself, I would have to admit those questions barely even existed to begin with.

  But there was still the lingering hesitation, the fear about talking to Mason. Finding Stephanie sitting in the parking lot told me I was very rapidly running out of time.

  I got out of the car, and she walked toward me with her arms crossed over her chest.

  “Hey, look at that, you still exist,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You’re sorry?” She sounded incredulous. “You’ve been ignoring me. I called you twelve times yesterday alone. Do you know how worried I’ve been about you?”

  “You didn’t have to worry about me. You know where to find me—you could have come to check on me if you really needed to.”

  She threw her arms out to the side, encompassing the entire building of the bar. “Here I am.”

  I didn’t walk away from my car. This wasn’t the conversation I wanted to carry with me inside. I had parked behind the building in the small gravel parking lot I could only snag a spot in if I got there early enough. But it was the same parking lot Mason had started using as his auxiliary thinking and parking spot. I wanted to keep the conversation as contained as possible so he wouldn’t hear it if he happened to wander out.

  “So, have you told him yet?” she asked.

  “No,” I said sheepishly. “Not yet.”

  Stephanie let out a sigh. “Why not? Do you still not know what you’re going to do?”

  “No,” I said. “I know. Honestly, I never didn�
��t know. I was always going to have this baby. There was no way I wouldn’t. If I even thought that there might be another option, it was totally from the shock and fear of first finding out. I was never serious. This is my baby.”

  “Then what? This is Mason’s baby, too. Why haven’t you told him about it?” she asked.

  I drew in a breath, continuing the fight I had been keeping up for the last week to control all the emotions coursing through me. My throat ached, and I tried to swallow them down. So far, I’d been able to pretty well, but now they were getting the best of me.

  “I’ve been so scared,” I finally admitted.

  Tears started streaming down my cheeks, and for a few seconds I attempted to stop them, making a valiant effort to protect my makeup. I quickly realized my efforts were futile. I had long since discovered the magnificence of waterproof mascara, so my carefully constructed bartender eyes were safe. But my foundation was done for.

  “Scared of what?” Stephanie asked suddenly softly. “What do you think he’s going to do?”

  “I don’t know what,” I said. “That’s why I’m so scared. And I’m scared that something’s going to go wrong. That I’m finally going to build up the courage to tell him I’m pregnant, and deal with everything that’s going to come out of that. Then I’ll miscarry again. It’s all I can think about.”

  “You need to stop thinking about it,” Stephanie said.

  “I can’t,” I insisted. “It’s on my mind all the time. The last time I was pregnant, the thought didn’t even occur to me. Not a single moment did I even consider that I wouldn’t have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby. It was just a given. I was in shape, took care of myself. I didn’t drink or smoke or do drugs. Nothing. There wasn’t anything that should have caused that.”

  “Ava, you didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t cause that miscarriage. Sometimes it just happens. We don’t know why. But it wasn’t your fault.”

  “I know that. But the point is, I never would have thought that could have happened. So now, it’s all I can think is going to happen. I’m literally counting down the days until the second trimester when the risk is so much lower. I want to wait until then to tell him,” I said.

  “Why?” Stephanie asked. “Why would you wait that long? That’s another, what, six weeks?”

  “Like I said, it’s safer. I know things can still happen during the second trimester, but the risk is lower. It’s not as common. If I wait until that long, I’ll feel like things are going to be okay this time.”

  “You can’t do that,” Stephanie said.

  “What do you mean I can’t do that? Why not?”

  “You can’t just carry Mason’s baby around for months without telling him. It’s a really bad idea. I know you’re scared. I know you don’t want to go through that pain again, and you don’t want to put him through it. But you have to tell him. He deserves to know.”

  Before I even had a chance to say anything, I noticed someone was walking up to me from one side. I turned and saw Miranda, the new bartender. I hadn’t even realized she was there, and I wondered how much of the conversation she heard. Maybe none of it. She probably just showed up and was heading into work.

  But rather than going inside, she came right up to me.

  “Hey, Ava,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  I shook my head and managed a tremulous, teary smile. “I’m fine. I’m just having a bad day.”

  Miranda reached out and rubbed my arm “I’m here to talk if you need to. I’ll be right there behind the bar. Anytime.”

  I nodded. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”

  Miranda returned my nod and headed inside. I turned to Stephanie.

  “I need to get into work. Thank you for coming out here and trying to talk sense into me,” I said.

  “Of course,” she said, pulling me in for a hug. “What are best friends for? I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Stephanie went back to her car, and I waited, waving, while she drove away. Thinking about everything she and I had said, I headed into the bar. As soon as I stepped out of the back and into the main part of the building, I saw Miranda standing behind the bar talking to Mason.

  My heart felt like it stopped in my chest. I hadn’t even known he was there yet. He looked over at me, and before I could say anything, he stormed past me and out the back door. Miranda rushed toward me with a look of horror on her face.

  “What the hell did you do?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I thought maybe I could help you out,” she said.

  I was furious, but something in her face told me the new bartender wasn’t actually trying to stab me in the back. In some twisted, misled way, she was trying to make things easier for me.

  Ignoring her, I ran after Mason. As I got out back, I saw Mason behind the wheel of a car I didn’t recognize, pulling out of a parking spot. He wouldn’t stop even as I yelled after him.

  32

  Mason

  I barely even knew the new bartender’s name. Ava told it to me, of course. She’d introduced me to her. At least twice. And yet, the name just went through my brain like a sieve.

  Who the fuck cared? Right then, all that mattered to me about her was that she was telling me Ava was pregnant and terrified she was going to lose the baby. I was hearing that my child was growing inside the woman I loved, but not from her. Which also meant I was finding out she had lied straight to my face.

  At some point after that, I ended up in my truck driving down the road. My mind went blank. I was on complete autopilot, only thinking about what I’d heard and the music blaring through the speakers. Somewhere at the very edge of my awareness, I knew my phone was ringing, but I had no intention of answering it.

  There was nobody I wanted to talk to. Nobody I wanted to hear a single word from. And I didn’t trust myself to talk to anybody, especially Ava.

  So, I drove. And drove. And drove. I had no idea where I was going or even how long I had been driving. It wasn’t until it had been dark for a long time and I realized I had been on I-5 for a while that I realized where I was going. And just as the sun was coming up, I got to San Francisco.

  I didn’t know why I ended up driving there, or even how I got there. The twelve-hour drive seemed to happen far more quickly. I stopped only once, and the rest of the time was focused squarely on the open road ahead of me.

  When I got to California, I went straight to Tom’s house. I stopped in front of it, letting out a breath it felt like I’d been holding since I’d left Oregon. I took out my phone and called my brother.

  “I’m sitting outside your house,” I said when he answered.

  “You could have let me know you were coming. I would have come and picked you up at the airport,” Tom said.

  “I wasn’t at the airport,” I said. “I drove here.”

  “You drove to San Francisco from Oregon?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He paused only for a second. “I’ll be out in just a minute.”

  He came out to the car like he was expecting me to have luggage he could help carry. Of course, I didn’t. All I had with me was the aftermath of my one stop at an all-night convenience store where I stocked up on every snack food I could find along with several bottles of soda and two massive cups of coffee.

  I gathered up all the trash and climbed out of the truck. My body felt tense and sore from sitting in the same position for so long. He walked out toward me, looked in the truck, then put his arm around me and led me inside. He didn’t ask a single question. There was no judgment, no looks.

  Instead, he led me through his impressive home to a back corner that contained a spare bedroom, a dedicated bathroom, and a tiny office. It was almost like its own small apartment attached to the rest of Tom’s house. Seeing this underscored the stark contrast between the way he lived and the way the rest of us did.

  What was the most interesting about me noticing that was that I also realized
I wasn’t envious of him. His place was really nice. And it was obvious he was comfortable. More than comfortable. But I already felt homesick. This definitely wasn’t somewhere I would want to spend too much time.

  It was, however, the perfect place for me to hide out for a while. Tom dropped me off in the extra room and walked out. He came back a few minutes later with a stack of towels and a set of pajamas.

  “You look exhausted,” he said. “Why don’t you go in there and take a shower, then get some sleep.”

  “I’m sorry to just show up like this,” I said.

  “Not a problem,” he said. “You’re my brother. You’re always welcome here. I’m going to catch another hour or so of sleep, then I have to get ready for work. Are you going to be okay here by yourself today?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “Good. Take a shower. Good night,” he said.

  The door closed behind him, and I went into the massive bathroom. I started a hot shower, then closed the drain so the tub would fill and I could sink down into the water and relax my tense muscles. The tightness started to release, and as it did, the exhaustion crept in.

  It wasn’t until right then that I realized how tired I actually was. The hot water felt so good, I wanted to just stay there in the bath for the next several hours, but I didn’t trust myself to not fall asleep. After all the effort I put into getting here, it would be anticlimactic to drown myself in a bath.

  To avoid the humiliation of being splashed across the news the next day, I dragged myself out of the tub and put on the cotton lounge pants and undershirt Tom had brought me. By the time I got to the bed, I felt like I couldn’t even hold myself up anymore. I dropped down onto it, pulled the blankets over my head, and fell into a deep, blank sleep.

  I slept most of the day, and when I woke up, I found a note from Tom telling me to make myself at home. A set of clothes were sitting on the dresser along with a spare toothbrush and tube of toothpaste. Either he was always prepared for unexpected guests to show up, or he was taking recent world developments very seriously and prepping for the apocalypse on a very small scale.