by J. Lynn
A cramp hit, catching me off guard. My hand flew to my stomach as the pain lanced through me.
Nick was immediately kneeling in front of me. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I gritted out.
“What can I do?” He touched my arm.
“Nothing. Just . . .” The pain let up, and pulled away as I stood. “I just need to relax for a little bit.”
His hands opened at his sides. “Is there anything I can get for you?”
I shook my head. “No. I just wanted to let you know. That’s all.”
“That’s all?” He jerked back as if he’d been pushed, and I wanted to look away. I wanted to hide, because this . . . all of this felt like my fault. “Stephanie, I don’t know what to say.”
Tell me that you still want to be here.
Tell me that you still see a future for us.
Tell me that you love me.
“There’s nothing to say,” I whispered, looking away.
“You’re wrong,” he said, and hope sparked deep in my chest. “We lost a baby—”
“I wasn’t even thirteen weeks,” I said, because it was easier not to think about it outside of that. “The doctor said it might’ve stopped developing weeks ago.”
“Weeks ago?” he murmured, wincing.
“All I’m trying to say is that at least it happened now and not weeks from now, not when . . .” Not when I was showing or when it would be so much harder to accept and understand this.
Except it was hard to accept and understand. I didn’t get it. I didn’t know why this happened, and I wasn’t just disappointed, I was crushed, and I—
“I should’ve been there, Stephanie. Not just so that I could be there for you, but also so that I could be there. And nothing to say? There’s a lot to say about all of this. I don’t know the words right now. I don’t even know what to think, but . . . Fuck.” He smoothed his hand over his face. His arm shook. “Why didn’t you call me, Stephanie?”
I blinked. “I . . .”
“You know what? This isn’t the time for this conversation.”
My stomach twisted. “Why not?”
He shot me a disbelieving look. “You don’t need to deal with anything else.”
Here it comes, I thought. “I’m okay,” I told him, straightening my shoulders. “What conversation do you want to have?”
“You’re okay?”
“Yes.”
His eyes flared. “You cannot be okay. You just lost the baby, Stephanie. I mean, come the fuck on. You’re human. You’re not—”
“I’m okay.” My heart was pounding. “What do you want to talk about?”
Shaking his head, he started to walk toward the table—to his helmet. He was leaving, and panic took root in the pit of my stomach. I stepped in front of him. “Why won’t you tell me what you want to say?”
“Why?” The hollows of his cheeks flushed. “Because I’m trying to be a decent human being right now, Stephanie. I’m not trying to dump more shit on your head when you don’t need it right now. I’m—”
“What?” I snapped, frustration and confusion swirling in me until it turned into bitter-edged anger. “You’re what?”
“I’m pissed! I’m fucking disappointed,” he shot back, and I flinched. “How could you deal with that by yourself?” He stepped toward me, his hands closing at his sides. “How could you not think that I would’ve—I would’ve fucking dropped everything to be there. I mean, did you even think of me when this was happening? Did it even cross your damn mind that I would want to be there for you? For myself?”
My mouth opened but there were no words. “I . . . didn’t think when I started having the pains. I drove myself to the hospital and I—”
“I get that. Okay? I can understand that part, but you wait until today to ask me to come over via fucking text message, are you kidding— Okay.” He drew himself up straight, drawing in a deep breath as his entire body tensed. “I’m doing this right now. You don’t need this,” he said, stepping around me. “I don’t need to do this right now. Okay? I need to clear my head. You need to clear your head.”
I folded my arms across my waist. “I’m sorry.”
Nick spun on me. “Stop apologizing, Stephanie. What happened isn’t your fault.” He reached out, but my body had a mind of its own. It recoiled from his words, because how could this not be my fault? His hands touched air, and the skin around his lips whitened. “What the—”
“Please just leave,” I whispered. “Please. Just go.”
“Steph—”
“Please.” My control stretched, thinning, and then it just . . . it just snapped. “Why are you still here?”
Nick stopped moving. He might have stopped breathing, and for a long, tense moment there was nothing but silence. I closed my eyes, hearing the helmet scrapping off the table, and a heartbeat later the front door slammed shut.
Chapter 28
Nick had walked out, not on me, I would discover, but had simply left the apartment. He’d called Roxy and remained in the parking lot until she showed up some fifteen minutes later.
I knew this because when she knocked on my door, I heard his motorcycle roar to life.
Roxy stepped in before I had a chance to say one word. “I know what’s happened, and Nick doesn’t want you to be by yourself right now. You shouldn’t be by yourself right now.”
“I’m—”
“Yeah. You’re fine. He said you kept saying that.” Roxy shrugged off her jacket. “You might as well go ahead and close that door, because I’m not leaving.”
There was a huge part of me that wanted to tell her to leave, but I was suddenly too tired to argue. Exhausted to the bone, I closed the door and then walked past her, to the couch. Sitting down, I picked up the quilt and dragged it over me, tucking it under my chin.
Roxy draped her coat over the back of the kitchen chair and made her way over. She didn’t speak as she sat on the other side of the couch, and I didn’t look at her. I stared at the TV screen, not really seeing it.
“I want to hug you right now,” she said, and the muscles all along my spine stiffened. “But you look like you might punch me if I did.”
I shook my head slowly. I wasn’t sure if I was agreeing or not.
She exhaled softly. “I don’t know what to say, Steph, other than I’m so, so sorry.”
Closing my eyes against the burn, I gripped the edges of the blanket. My stomach cramped and it was painful, but in a way, it was no match to the complete and utter devastation I felt. “I don’t get it,” I said after a moment.
“Get what?” she asked quietly.
I really didn’t know where I was going with any of this, but my tongue was moving and words were becoming attached to the pain bubbling up inside me. “I don’t get why it hurts so much. It’s not like I was even that far along, you know? I haven’t even told my boss yet. Maybe I shouldn’t have told anyone. I mean, I was just entering my second trimester.” A sharp slice of pain cut through me. “Actually, I probably wasn’t even close. The doctor at the hospital said that the ba—said that it probably stopped developing a week or more ago.”
And now that I’d said it out loud, things started to make sense. The exhaustion that I felt. The loss of whatever weight I had gained. “There had been signs,” I told her. I was starting to see white spots behind my closed eyelids. “Signs that I was losing . . . it, and I didn’t pay attention to them. I thought they were normal.”
“How would you know? You couldn’t,” Roxy argued. “And I know that miscarrying is common, Steph. It happens, and no one is to blame for it.”
No one was to blame? I wasn’t so sure. Maybe I hadn’t taken the pregnancy seriously. I know I missed taking the prenatal vitamins once. My diet could’ve been way healthier. And what if the baby hadn’t stopped developin
g, and if I paid attention to the pain last night instead of going to bed, could this miscarriage have been prevented?
The racing thoughts made me feel sick. I felt like . . . like I deserved this. Like some kind of punishment had been handed down. I’d messed up and I didn’t even know what I’d done.
Roxy scooted closer, placing her hand on my shoulder. “This isn’t your fault.”
I opened my tired eyes.
“These things happen,” she continued, her voice barely above a whisper. “I know that sounds lame right now and doesn’t help anything, but these things do happen, Steph, and no one is to blame.”
My gaze fell to the Christmas tree and my thoughts immediately drifted to the day I picked out the tree with Nick. How we’d roamed into the baby section and looked at all—
I cut those thoughts off as I inhaled sharply, but I couldn’t look away from the tree. God, was that really only two weeks ago? Was the baby even still alive then?
Roxy squeezed my shoulder. “What can I do for you?”
“Nothing,” I whispered.
“Do you think you can eat?” she asked, and I shook my head. “What about something to drink? Or something for pain?” When I didn’t say anything, she dropped her hand. “I’m not leaving you, so you should make use of me being here.”
I pressed my lips together. “There’s nothing I need right now.”
A moment passed. “I don’t think that’s true. You need Nick right now.”
Sucking in a sharp breath, I stiffened.
“And he needs you right now,” she added.
I shook my head again. “He . . . he doesn’t need me.”
“He sounded like he was about ten seconds away from losing his shit.” Her eyes met mine when I looked at her. “Maybe you don’t need to hear that right now, but I’ve never really seen Nick upset. Ever. And he was really upset.”
“I don’t want him to be upset.” My voice was hoarse. “The last thing I wanted is for him to get hurt again. He’s lost . . .” I trailed off, partly because I didn’t want to share his personal business and because Katie’s words rushed back to haunt me.
You’re going to break his heart.
My lips slowly parted. Holy shit. Katie and her super stripping psychic power had been on point. I had thought it was crazy for, well, obvious reasons, and because this whole time I wasn’t convinced that I had the power to break Nick’s heart. But I did. It was the baby, I realized—losing the baby. It sounded crazy, but Katie had been right.
“What happened with Nick?” Roxy asked gently.
I drew in a shaky breath. “I . . . I broke his heart.”
Thursday afternoon blurred into the night.
At some point I migrated from the couch to my bedroom, and as I lay in bed, I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep. My mind turned over everything I had done and hadn’t done since I found out I was pregnant, searching tirelessly for that one misstep I took.
Roxy didn’t leave, but she gave me space, only coming into the bedroom when enough hours had past for her to pester me into eating the chicken soup that I had no idea how she obtained, because I didn’t have any in the house, but that soup reminded me of Nick.
And that made the hurt so much fresher.
I thought I heard Reece’s voice Thursday night, and then later I thought I heard Calla. At first I assumed I was imagining it, but then I realized dimly that Calla was home now. The semester at Shepherd was over. I prayed that she wouldn’t come into the room, and she didn’t.
All night long I lay awake and didn’t cry. There was a vast emptiness that consumed my thoughts. I couldn’t turn any of it off like I had in the emergency room Wednesday night. I just wanted it to be over—the physical pain and the deeper, sharper, and more hurtful pain.
Sometime in the quiet early morning hours, I came to the realization that I had wanted this baby far more than I ever recognized. It was like that cheesy saying, “You don’t know what you have until it’s gone,” and that was so damn true. The burning in my throat and eyes increased.
I curled up, tucking my legs in. It wasn’t fair. None of this was fair, and I hadn’t hurt this badly since those two uniformed marines showed up at our front door when I was fifteen.
In the back of my head I knew I needed to pull myself out of this. I needed to get up, brush myself off, and I needed to get on with life. That’s what I always did, and I would have to do it again, but I hadn’t just lost the baby.
I’d lost a future.
Roxy attempted to get me to eat breakfast Friday morning, and I thought she looked as bad as I felt when she left the bedroom, her brown hair falling out of the topknot. I wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to stay. She had a life she needed to get back to. I would be fine.
I was always fine.
A few minutes before eleven in the morning, I heard the door open and I was expecting to see Roxy, but it was Katie who walked into my bedroom, closing the door behind her, and I almost didn’t recognize her.
Face cleared of all traces of makeup and her long blond hair pulled up in a high ponytail, she was wearing the plainest outfit I’d ever seen her in. Blue jeans and a white wool sweater. I’d never seen her so . . . low key.
Katie made her way to the bed and sat on the edge, her blue eyes bright without any of the eye shadow or dark liner. “Roxy had to run home.”
My throat was dry as I spoke. “You didn’t have to come. I’m just . . . taking it easy.”
“Kind of hard to take it easy after losing a baby.”
I sucked in a shallow breath. Apparently her normal bluntness was not missing. I didn’t know what to say to that.
“You must be feeling ill,” she added, hooking one knee over the other. “I know that when someone miscarries, they feel pretty shitty for a couple of days. Not just mentally. Roxy said you haven’t eaten breakfast.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said after a moment.
She folded her hands in her lap. “You should probably try to eat something.”
I didn’t respond as I squirmed under the blankets. A muggy, suffocating feeling draped over me. I was embarrassed by the attention—by the fact my friends thought I needed a babysitter right now when all I needed was . . .
I didn’t let myself finish that thought.
“I’m fine,” I told her from my prone position on the bed. There was a good chance my cheek was plastered to the pillow.
One eyebrow rose. “I warned you.”
My breathing slowed.
Katie shook her head slowly, sadly. “I just had this feeling, you know? I knew you were going to break his heart and you’re doing it.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. Was God smiting me or something? I really didn’t need this right now.
“But I never thought you’d be this . . . stupid.”
My eyes flew open. “Excuse me?”
“I mean, you’re this confident, intelligent, and sexy woman. You could have men on their knees if you wanted them there. And you’re fucking dumb as a bag rocks right now.” She looked down at me. “Roxy told me you all but kicked Nick out of your apartment . . . after telling him you lost the baby. You know, the baby you two created together.”
Something hot and uncomfortable stirred in my gut. “I know how we made the baby, Katie. Thanks. And I know I broke his heart by losing the baby, so I really don’t need the reminder right now.”
Katie ignored my tone and continued. “She also said he mentioned that you didn’t even tell him until after you got back from the hospital. What the fuck, girl?”
My mouth dropped open as guilt moved like black smoke through me.
“You know, I get that you have these fears and concerns about how Nick really feels about you, but you have to be dumb as a motherfucker not to see the truth.”
“Okay,” I said after a second. �
�That’s like the second or third time you’ve called me dumb, and I really don’t like that or have the patience for this conversation right now.”
“Too bad,” she replied, eyes sharpening. “Because there’s something you’re not getting.”
I rolled onto my back, clenching my jaw. “I think I get it.”
“No. You don’t.” She waited until my gaze found hers. “But you will.”
Exhaling loudly, I struggled to keep a grasp on my patience. “I’m really tired. I think I need to—”
“Talk about how unfair it is that you lost the baby? Or how much it hurts?” she answered for me. “We can talk about it.”
“I don’t need to talk about that.”
She raised both brows. “That’s not true. You’re not okay. Talking is important. Get the anger and emotion out.” She paused. “Or when you’re feeling better, get on the pole. That’s one hell of a workout and a great way to get the anger out.”
Dumbfounded, all I could do was stare. “Are you psychic and a counselor?”
“Aren’t they one in the same?”
“What even . . . ?” I lifted my hand, pressing it to my forehead. “I can’t deal with this right now.”
“No one expects you to deal. This is something tragic, girl. Happens all the time, to people all across the world. Doesn’t mean it sucks any less. And it doesn’t mean your pain is any less. You’re not okay.”
The air got stuck in my throat. “I am okay.”
Katie shook her head. “Nope.”
My eyes narrowed. “Yeah, I am.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
I sat up, staring at her. “What in the hell? I said I’m okay. I’m okay, for fuck’s sake.”
She folded slender arms across her waist. “You can tell me that all you want, but I know better. Everyone knows better.”
“Everyone knows . . .” I shook my head, painfully aware of the limp strands of hair smacking my cheeks. In that moment, I don’t think there was anyone I hated more than Katie. “I can’t deal with this right now,” I repeated, my hand curling into a fist.
Katie tilted her head to the side. “Of course not. Who would be able to deal with this right now?”
