Us: A If I Break (Her) Story

by Portia Moore

  Kam’s face goes hard at that, his eyes flinty as he faces me down, but he takes a deep breath. “It probably doesn’t matter, but you should know that I didn’t know about you or Alana, or any of what you had until recently.”

  “What we had?” My voice is harsh, cutting, slicing through the air between us. “We had a marriage. We had a life together. You don’t have any idea what we had.”

  “I have the same with Megan,” Kam says coldly. “And Alana is gone.”

  “She’s not gone,” I snap, and I see Kam shift his weight, his expression clearly saying that his patience is hanging on by a loose thread.

  “We’re engaged,” he continues in that same icy, no-argument tone. “Megan and I are getting married, and she’s pregnant with my baby.”

  I shake my head, refusing to listen. It’s all things I’ve heard before that I tried to tell myself that kept me from being right where I am in this moment. But now I have reason to think otherwise, and no one, not this arrogant rich dude or anyone else, is going to keep me from my wife and my child if it’s the truth.

  Kam isn’t letting up, though. “Look, maybe you loved her,” he says, his tone shifting to placating. “Maybe you still love her, hell, why wouldn’t you? She’s a one-of-a-kind girl. I get it. But I’m not going to let you upset Megan or stress her out. I understand you’re mad, but I’m not going to let any harm come to her or our baby.”

  I shake my head again in disbelief. I can’t believe that I’m getting a lecture from this spoiled jackass about protecting Megan, about not ruining their relationship, after he shattered mine beyond recognition. “Is it?” I snap angrily, immediately hating myself for echoing Cal’s same words.

  Kam stops short, his expression visibly confused. “Is it what?” he asks, his lecture abruptly cut off.

  “Yours,” I hiss. “Your kid, your baby. She’s three months along, right? Isn’t that just before or right around when you came back?” I sneer, feeling momentarily victorious that he might feel even a shred of the doubt or pain that I’ve lived with for so long.

  Kam’s face goes blank, unreadable, the righteous indignation in his expression slipping away as he tries to make sense of what I’m saying. And then he flushes red, anger roaring back as he glares at me furiously. “Are you telling me you slept with my fiancée?” he shouts, striding towards me angrily. I square up, preparing myself for the fight that’s been a long time coming, pre-ordained since the minute Kam found his way into my girl’s bed…and then Megan’s voice pierces the air between us, stopping us both in our tracks.

  “What are you doing here?” she shrieks, and I look over to see her standing in the doorway, silhouetted from the light behind her. She looks as if she’s just seen her worst nightmare, her face pale and stunned, but she’s still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t matter if she’s Megan or Alana, the sex goddess or the Midwestern sweetheart, the woman I married or the woman I only knew as a friend. She’s the same woman to me, the love of my life, and I want nothing more than to go to her and take her away, to remind her of everything we had, everything we could have been to each other. All of my emotions collide with each other—anger at what’s happened, at her for leaving me, at her for falling in love with another man, the aching, addictive love for her that I can’t seem to disengage myself from or stop feeling, and disappointment that I can’t go to her, I can’t do any of the things I want to, because she looks terrified and disappointed and none of it is directed at Kam, it’s all directed at me.

  All of the anger in me starts to dissipate, draining away until I just feel like a hollow shell, like I did after Alana left me, and I realized that she wasn’t coming back. It’s like losing her all over again.

  “We need to talk,” I tell her, and I can hear the hollow ring to my voice, the pain in it.

  “We don’t have anything to talk about.” Her voice is trembling but icy cold, firm.

  “Did you sleep with him, Megan?” Kam’s voice cuts through the air, dividing us, pulling her attention back to him. He’s shouting, but his voice is weak, and I know that tone, it’s the one where the only thing keeping you upright, keeping you going, is rage. But underneath it, weighing it down, is nothing but pain. Despair so suffocating that you feel like you’re going to die, that there’s no coming back from it.

  When I look back at Megan I can see that she’s feeling it too, and it makes me feel nauseous, so sick that I want to vomit. This isn’t what I meant to do. This isn’t what I wanted to make her feel.

  Megan opens her mouth as if to speak, but no sound comes out. She just stares at us both, trembling in the doorway.

  “You slept with him,” Kam says softly, as if confirming something to himself. His voice is weak and low, as if the words hurt when they came out of his mouth. I’d almost feel bad for him, but I’ve been feeling that pain for a long time now, knowing that Megan—and Alana—has been in another man’s bed. Kam’s just getting the first taste of it now.

  “It wasn’t me,” she whispers desperately, coming down the steps towards us, heading straight for Kam as if to embrace him. He backs away from her like she’s poisonous, his look cold and full of disgust as he puts his hands up to ward her off, and the look on her face is devastating. I start to move towards them. I don’t know how the hell he’s going to react, but if he makes the wrong move, if he lays one finger on her, I’m going to end him.

  “Kam,” Megan says, her voice begging, pleading for him to listen, and it’s breaking my heart to hear it. It makes me want to throw up all over again—she doesn’t even see me, she’s got nothing for me. I’m somehow invading a private moment between them, and it makes me sick to see it playing out in front of me.

  Kam pivots on his heel and starts to stalk away, Megan starting after him, but the moment he shouts back: “Don’t fucking follow me!” she freezes in place, watching him as he strides to the parking lot and gets into his car, the tires squealing as he drives away. She’s frozen to the spot, and I’m almost afraid to speak to her. But as angry and hurt as she might be now, I’ve been living this all this time.

  “Is it true?” I whisper from behind her. “Is it true that the baby might be mine?”

  Megan whips around at that, an evil glare like I’ve never seen on her face, not even on Alana’s in her angriest moment. She stalks towards me, coming up so close that for a second I think that she’s going to either kiss me or slap me, and in the lamplight I can see that there are tears streaming down her pale face.

  “I never, ever want to see you again,” she whispers in the harshest voice I’ve ever heard, so cold that it turns the blood in my veins to ice. “If you’re not gone from here in five minutes,” she continues, her eyes fixed on mine, “I’m calling the police.”

  I don’t know who’s standing in front of me, Megan or Alana or someone else entirely, but I don’t have time to figure it out before she’s gone, back up the stairs and into the house.

  The sound of the door slamming behind her is the only thing that tells me I’m not in a nightmare.

  18

  Kam

  I drive until I can’t anymore, until I’m shaking so hard with anger and heartache that I have to pull over and stop in the parking lot by the Chicago lakefront. I can’t stop thinking about everything that just happened with Ian, how in a matter of minutes my world has started to crumble around me. I’ve seen him in the flesh now, this other person who is involved in all this. He’s more real to me now than he ever was from just the pictures. Some part of me wanted to believe, against all evidence and common sense, that he didn’t actually exist. That he was just something made up, some figment of Alana’s crazy mind.

  But I got what I’d said I wanted. I’ve gotten the truth—some version of it, at least—and now I know Megan was hiding it from me. It makes sense now why she was so upset after the ultrasound—she slept with Ian just before or right after I came to Chicago, and when the tech told her how far along she was, the time frame must have lined
up in her head. She said that it wasn’t her—that it was Alana, of course—but at this point, I’m having a hard time distinguishing one from the other. And even if it was Alana’s personality, Alana’s mind driving it to happen, it was still her body, Megan’s body that Ian kissed, touched, fucked, all the while I was giving up everything to come here and be with her, to support her.

  It doesn’t matter. One of them—both of them?—is carrying my child…or Ian’s. I don’t know Alana, I’ve never seen her in person or talked to her, so the only one I can direct my pain and anger at is Megan. She might be carrying another man’s child while accepting my proposal, getting engaged to me, and she knew. She knew what Alana did. I could see it in her eyes when I accused her, the fear and guilt. She hid it from me like she’s hidden so many other things, the marriage to Ian and the life she had with him as Alana, and I have no idea if I can trust her now. I don’t even know if I can look at her…but still, she might be carrying my child.

  And regardless of how angry I am right now, I still love her. She has my heart, even though it feels right now as if she’s squeezing the life out of it. And what makes it worse is I’ve seen now in vivid color, face to face, that she has this other guy’s heart too. I recognized in Ian’s eyes the same things that I feel, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if there’s the slightest chance that the baby is his, he’s never going to give up. He’s not going to let go. Hell, if he loves Alana as much as he seems to, he might not give up even if the baby isn’t his.

  I press the heels of my hands against my eyes, trying to think. I’m alone in this. I can’t tell my family or seek their help or advice. They’ve forgiven Megan for what happened before and accepted her back into the fold, but if they know that she lied to me, that the baby she’s carrying might not even be mine…they’d never look at her the same way again.

  And what if the baby isn’t mine? What happens then? What if it is Ian’s? Can I go through an entire pregnancy at Megan’s side while she carries a baby that belongs to someone else? Can I watch her grow and change, her stomach swelling with a constant reminder that she fucked another man while saying she was in love with me, that it’s his seed growing inside of her, that it’s his baby that she’s going to whisper to and labor for and love? Can I deal with co-parenting with a man that I hate to the marrow of his bones, who shattered my illusions that I was the first man to be with Megan, the only man who’d ever been inside of her, felt her, tasted her, made her moan and cum? Can I spend eighteen years coexisting with a man who’s still in love with her, who won’t ever stop?

  Do I walk away, or do I go back to her? I can see my phone glowing in the dim light, blinking with several missed calls from Megan. Do I leave until I know for sure? Can I walk away from this? Or do I go back to her? I have to make a decision. I have to choose to be all in or not, whether or not it’s my child…if I marry her, the baby will be mine legally, my child to raise. I have to decide if the biology matters, if I can love the baby regardless if it’s my blood, if I can look at it and not always see the living proof of the lies that have started to come between us.

  I slam my fist against the steering wheel, shouting into the empty car, panting hard as I face the truth—I can’t walk away from Megan. It doesn’t matter what she’s done. If it was her or Alana, it doesn’t matter if the baby is mine or not. I love her, and I’ll love the baby because of that, not in spite of it, because regardless of who the father is, it’s still half her.

  The only thing left to concern me is the unknown variable in all of this—Alana. I’ve seen what she’s left in her wake, the path of destruction that she’s capable of causing. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t met her…I know she’s real, just as real as Ian, and I see now what pretending that he didn’t exist brought about. She can destroy everything if she chooses to, she could break apart what’s left of my relationship with Megan.

  If I’m going to be with Megan, I have to be sure that Alana can be controlled. I have to find out if Megan can and will contain her…or if Megan is going to allow them—her and Ian—to beat her in the end.

  Megan

  I’m more distraught than I’ve ever been, in all of this up to now. I felt sick when I saw what was happening outside, like I was going to throw up as I watched my two worlds colliding, the two men that I’ve tried so hard to keep apart together at last. I heard them before I ever saw them, and I wanted to believe that it was a bad dream.

  I’d fallen asleep after my confrontation with Cal and Lauren, waiting for Kam to get back home, and I wanted to think that it was a nightmare, a product of all the stress and grief I’d endured throughout the day. I wanted so badly for it to not be true, but I knew it was happening before I even opened the door. Everything inside of me felt chaotic, unhinged, all of my emotions crashing together and weighing me down. I wanted to comfort Ian and embrace Kam all at once, to soothe them, fix the pain that they were both clearly in…and at the same time, run away from them, from their anger and hurt and suspicious glares. It was all too much at once, crowding in and overwhelming me, and I’d never felt Alana as clearly as I did in that moment, her presence threatening to overtake me, to break through and come back out. But I could feel that she was still afraid, too, that something was holding her back, and I’d bet anything that it was the baby who did it.

  Or maybe it was that she enjoyed seeing Kam hurt, seeing the hatred and disgust in his expression when he realized that I—that she—had slept with Ian, and she wanted to let it keep going, to let him keep having to look at me and see me in Ian’s bed.

  Hurt, the way you hurt Ian, you selfish fucking bitch!

  I hear her voice in my head, intruding on my thoughts, and I clap my hands over my face, wanting to curl into a ball and hide, wanting to get up and run away. But I can’t run from myself. I don’t know what to do now—I was so angry, furious at Alana, but I took it out on Ian, he was there and an easy target. I’ll never forget how he looked at me as long as I live, as if he didn’t even recognize me, as if in that moment I wasn’t Megan or Alana but someone else entirely. I could see everything on his face—anger and pain and disbelief, pain more than anything that I hid the possibility from him, that I pushed him away even though I knew he might have reason to want to stay.

  I need something to drink. I’ve been crying so hard and for so long that I’m dehydrated, and I peel myself off of the floor, getting up to go to the kitchen and get a water bottle. I’m tempted to call Helen, the only person who might be able to give me real advice, but I’m so angry with her. Someone told Cal about the possibility of Ian being the father, that I wasn’t a hundred percent sure that it was Kam, and Helen is the only person I can think of who could have done that. Lauren most likely persuaded Cal to either tell Ian outright or hint at it. Blue gave him the proof…there’s no one left that I can trust. Everyone that I thought loved me or who I thought was my friend has lied to me or betrayed me. The only person who hasn’t is Kam, and after this, he hates me…how could he not? I saw the look on his face when he left.

  The door to the apartment opens, and I turn sharply around to see Kam walking in, and I freeze in place, my heart pounding in my chest. He looks as miserable as I feel, but he’s still one of the most beautiful men I’ve ever seen, different in every way from Ian, like night and day. His dark hair is messy, falling over his face, and he’s pale, but he looks determined, and I brace myself as he walks into the house. I’m afraid to move, afraid that if I so much as twitch that he’ll turn around and leave, that maybe he’ll never come back. I try to prepare myself for the possibility that he might anyway, that maybe he just came to get his things or to yell at me again, to tear into me and let me know exactly how badly I’ve hurt him.

  He stops and looks at me, taking me in as if he’s seeing me for the first time. I hate it, my skin crawling as his eyes skate over me from forehead to toes and up again, because I don’t want him to see me differently, as I am now, someone who hid things from him and lied to him and bro
ught pain and confusion and chaos to his life. He stares at me hard for several seconds, and then finally I see his shoulders slump, his eyes turning sad, and I think that I can see tears in them. I’ve never seen Kam cry, and it sends a jolt of pain through me, my chest aching.

  He doesn’t say anything, only walks away from me and goes into the living room to sit on the couch. I follow him after a moment, sitting across from him and trying to get him to meet my eyes. “I’m glad you came back,” I whisper. “I didn’t think you would.”

  There’s only silence in the room. “Please say something,” I beg, biting my lip hard.

  He’s quiet for a few more moments before speaking, still not looking at me. “Is it possible that the baby you’re carrying is Ian’s?” he asks finally, his voice sad and hurt.

  I want more than anything to tell him no, of course it’s his, how could it be anything else…but I can’t bring myself to lie to him, to fudge the truth any more than I already have.

  “Yes,” I tell him, my voice breaking as I start to cry again, and I see his jaw clench as he nods.

  “It only happened once,” I tell him in a rush, my words tripping over each other. “I know it’s a possibility that it could be Ian’s, but I know it’s our baby, yours and mine, I can feel it.”

  “What happens if it’s not mine?” he asks, and he raises his head, looking directly at me for the first time since he sat down.

  I pause, thinking about that for a long time as the silence hangs heavily between us. “I don’t know,” I whisper. “I didn’t even consider the possibility.” I hesitate, the lump in my throat growing, threatening to choke me. “I’m more concerned about Alana than anything else if that’s the outcome, what she’ll do.”

  To my surprise, Kam reaches out and takes my hand. It shocks me, I didn’t expect tenderness or care from him after what happened, and as he looks into my eyes, he quietly says the words that I wasn’t sure I’d ever hear from him again. “I love you,” he says firmly. “Nothing you’ve done could stop me loving you, but I can’t live with the threat of you…Alana,” he corrects himself, “destroying everything that we’ve worked so hard for, after all we’ve been through together.”