by Amanda Heath
“You killed the fake plant, girl. Good job.”
When she finishes her water, she throws the little plastic cup at me. It hits me on the side of my head and I find that even funnier. “Stop laughing! It’s not funny one bit, Royal!”
“Don’t you just love it when she gets mad at him? All her fire comes out. I think she could take down an army of hell hounds when she’s pissed off,” Rachel remarks to Channing who’s holding in his laughter as well.
I grab Wesley up before she can do any more damage to me. Not that she actually did any damage. “You got sick in a fake plant Wes, laugh a little. It’s funny. Besides we all know you’re pregnant. Morning sickness comes with the territory.”
“Well, no matter what, it’s not funny or to be laughed at.” She looks over at Rach and smirks. “Besides, I remember when Rachel’s bladder let loose one night while we were at the grocery store. That was very funny.”
Rachel’s cheeks heat up. Though her embarrassment doesn’t last long. “See that reason right there is why I took a picture of you throwing up in that plant. If you keep bringing that up I’m posting it to Facebook, then the entire town of Meadows can laugh at you.”
Wesley leaves my arms and goes at Rachel with her pointer finger out. “I’ll tell everyone how many hot dogs you ate in one sitting at Six Flags while you were pregnant with Asher!”
Rachel gasps. “You bitch! You promised you would never repeat that number!”
Channing moves to stand beside me with a grin on his face. “This is highly entertaining. Too bad they’re both pregnant or we could challenge them to mud wrestling.”
I slap him on the back of the head while Wes and Rach continue to go at it. Seems they are both going to be a handful. “I’ll also tell Royal about the time you fucked Kellan Dean in his bed.”
“Okay, that’s just gross. And FYI, I can hear you Wes.” Now I feel like I’m going to be sick.
“I’ll tell Court about the time you got shitfaced drunk and used his skate ramp as a bed and a toilet.” Rachel looks like she won until Wesley jumps out at her and starts pulling her hair.
Channing and I sigh and go to move them apart. Wesley starts kicking and screaming at Rachel while Rachel just laughs because she got the last word in. Or the last word we would let her have. Once they start getting physical we separate them. Even when they’re both not pregnant. They don’t need that in their friendship. And in case you were wondering, they fight like this sometimes. Not all the time since they are best friends. In all honestly I think they like it.
Once everyone calms down we head towards the door only to come up short when Paisley Vaughn walks into the office.
Channing
I’ve always had a problem with talking to people. And looking at Paisley right now, I know I should have talked to her. It’s one of those things you think about right at the last minute. We haven’t discussed birth control and I know that first night, Royal’s wedding, I didn’t use a condom. I have been since then, but that doesn’t change that first night.
I always thought I’d have babies with Paisley. I had hoped we’d have a little girl that would look just like Paisley and hopefully a boy without red hair. I wanted to be married though and completely in love with her. Those two things I don’t have right now.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Rachel whispers next to Royal who has his mouth wide open. It was a complete shock to come into the doctor’s office and find that Wes is pregnant along with Rachel.
Now Paisley is here.
She looks so small standing there and old feelings come to the front of my mind. I have this urge to protect her even though she doesn’t deserve it. I used to stand in front of her, taking the hits life throws at you. I didn’t care then because I knew she loved me. I knew she loved me up until the day she left me at the altar.
And you can’t come back from that.
“Paisley Vaughn,” a nurse says from behind us, making Wesley jump. I only know because she’s standing so close to me.
I’m watching Paisley though. I can’t seem to stop looking at her. All that auburn hair down around her shoulders and her blue-green eyes guarded and scared. That fear gets to me. It tells me what she’s here to find out.
This must be how Pierce felt when Rachel announced she was pregnant with Asher and that the baby was his. Complete shock and no idea what to do. Paisley and I aren’t together. We fuck every night and I can’t even begin to explain that to you. I just know I have to be next to her at night or I get tight feelings in my chest and the urge to scream. It’s a calling I don’t want to answer but I have to.
Paisley takes a deep swallow and moves through my group of friends. Wesley reaches out and squeezes her arm but doesn’t say anything. Paisley gives her a trembling smile. Then she walks through the open door and disappears when it closes.
“Dude,” Royal says, smoothing a hand over his face and staring at the door Paisley went behind. “If she’s pregnant I’m having the water checked around here. Or I’m going to pass out disinfectant so no one else catches it.”
“No, we’ll have to share it with Ash,” Rachel whispers. I guess she’s still in shock because I haven’t heard her this quiet on any subject, ever.
I don’t want to stay here. I want to run out the door and never look back. I keep thinking if I had just opened my mouth, this wouldn’t be happening to me right now. Instead of running like I want to, I sit down on one of the chairs and I watch the door, waiting for her to reappear.
Royal, Wesley and Rachel sit down around me; I guess also waiting for her to return. I don’t know why, we all know what’s going to happen. It’s more than a coincidence that three of the women in my life showed up at the same time to the same doctor. It’s fucking fate.
The only problem is Paisley and I aren’t married like we should be. I’m twenty-three years old. I should know better than to fuck anyone without a condom. But this was Paisley and I was used to going bare back. She was on birth control when we were together.
The four of us sit in complete silence for thirty minutes. A nurse comes out the door and looks Royal and I over. Then she points at me. “You’re the father right? We need you to come back, please.”
I just stare at her. I knew what the answer would be I just didn’t prepare myself. I’m going to be someone’s father. I’ll have to share a kid with the woman I love and hate the most out of all the women in my life. I hate her more than my mother; simply for the fact Paisley knows how I am. She knew I would be crushed; yet she still chose not to talk to me. She just left. But I love the memory of the girl I met in high school. The one I thought had been sent to ruin my life but instead gave it purpose. Little did I know she would ruin my life eventually.
Wesley grabs my arm and attempts to pull me up. I swat her away and get up myself. I walk with the nurse behind the door that seems to be separating me from those I need, only to bring me to someone I don’t want to need or want.
I’m taken to a room near the back of the office and I hear her sobbing before the door even opens. When I get a look at her, my heart breaks. I might be cold and calculated but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel. Paisley is a contradiction for me. When I look at her I see love and hate, passion and coldness, scars and beauty. She’s wearing a little paper robe and she’s curled into a ball with her hands over her face.
“She’s been like this for ten minutes. I assume she didn’t like the news we gave her. I thought you might be able to get her calmed down,” the nurse tells me. Then she leaves and shuts the door behind me.
The crying is what does it. Opens that door I’ve been keeping closed. I’ve been pretending for the last month that she doesn’t matter. That her feelings don’t matter mainly because my feelings didn’t matter when she left me at the altar.
I cross the floor and stand right over her. I lift a hand and place it on her head. I smooth my fingers through her silky locks, much like I did last night while I was inside her. She looks up at me with clouds
in her eyes. She’s scared and so am I. I have no idea what to do here or how to handle any of this. But I’m going to try because if I know anything, my kid won’t have an absent father. I grew up without mine and thankfully I had Richard. He might not be my blood but he’s my father in every sense of the word. Yeah, it’s not his fault my father died, but even before that he wasn’t around. Maybe it was because Lily isn’t my mother. Maybe it’s a whole lot of reasons; I just know he never really gave a damn about me.
I refuse to be that way towards my own child.
“It’s going to be alright, baby,” I tell Paisley. I wipe some of the tears from under her eyes as I look down on her.
“Don’t call me that,” she states, even though she doesn’t tell me to stop touching her. “I hate when you call me that now. You use it as a weapon.”
I rub her arm up and down as I contemplate what she just said. It comes naturally to me to call her baby. All the other pet names I could come up with aren’t nice and people would probably take it the wrong way. But do I use it as a weapon now?
Probably.
“I’ll call you what I want. At least with you angry and sad, I know you’re feeling something.” All her tears have dried up now, so I move away from her and sit down in the doctor’s chair.
She sits up and holds the robe closed over her body. “I feel everything. And that’s really hard when you’re the fucking robot.”
I shrug my shoulders. “I am what you made me.”
And that’s when she looks at me with a look I haven’t seen in over a year. Her eyes go a little glary and her lip sneers up a bit. She wants to hit me. When we first got together, she thought about hitting me all the time. She never said anything but I knew her then, unlike now. This is the first time I’m seeing the old Paisley.
She drops the look after a minute and sighs. “What are we going to do now?”
“Whatever needs to be done. You won’t disappear again and we’ll be parents to our kid.” I refuse to promise her anything else. I don’t like to make promises I’m not sure I can keep.
“But we won’t be together.” It’s not a question and I’m happy for that. At least she knows that much.
I shake my head. “No, we won’t be together. You made it perfectly clear you didn’t want to be with me a year ago.”
I’m not watching her because I can’t bring myself to look at her right now. But when I hear her sobbing again I get up. She’s curled into a ball again but I pick her up and plant my ass on the table with her in my arms. It’s a foreign and familiar feeling. Even the past month while I’ve stayed the night with her, I’ve refused to cuddle after we fuck. I refuse to form another emotional attachment to her. This is different though.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, planting her face in my neck. I wait for more but that seems to be all I’m going to get.
I rub my hand up and down her back waiting for her tears to dry again. Then she does something that shocks me and makes me want to run screaming from the room. She lifts up in my arms and plants her forehead on mine. Up close those blue-green eyes pull me in and all I can see is her. All I can feel is her. “I didn’t leave you to hurt you. I just couldn’t show up in that dress in front of all those people. I knew though that you would never forgive me. Now I can’t tell you where my head was at. It just scared me to death to walk down that aisle.” Her hands come up into my hair and I want to close my eyes and sigh. “It had nothing to do with you, Channing. I’ve always been fucked in the head. You know this. I mean come on, it took me three times to even say yes to marrying you.”
She stops talking for a second and just looks at me. “You’ve always been the most beautiful man I’ve ever met. I just couldn’t grasp the fact you wanted me and that I could spend forever with you. I’ve always been a little scared of you but I still thought I could do it. I thought I could walk down that aisle and everything would be okay. But I showed up that day and all I could think about was what my parents went through, what Papaw went through. I couldn’t do that to you. I couldn’t do that to myself.”
I never understood it. The reasons why she left me. I always thought it was because I wasn’t good enough for her. But in fact, this whole time the answer has been staring me in the face. Paisley built a wall around herself when she was very young. And the only people who truly ever get behind that wall are Carly, BeeBee and I. It took me way longer than the other two but I did it. But she also built another one that only Paisley lives in.
“You should have talked to me.” I put my hands around her face and move her back a little. “You know you could have talked to me.”
She nods. “I knew inside, deep inside that I could always talk to you. But that day, that day I felt totally alone. I couldn’t bring myself to talk to you about anything. I couldn’t even look at you.”
That hurts. God does it hurt. I close my eyes to block out the pain but it’s still there. Festering inside of me just like every other hurt I feel from her. She’s my savior and my destroyer. I wanted answers to all the questions I would never ask but here I am in more pain than I started with.
I stand up and slowly drop Paisley’s feet to the floor. “We should probably get out of here. I’m sure they’ll need the room soon.”
Her eyes widen and she takes a step back. “I didn’t intend to hurt you with this Channing. I just wanted you to know. I’ve been keeping it inside for the past month. I thought you were ready to hear it.”
“Well, I’ll never be ready to hear any of that. You’d feel the same way. We both know what it feels like to not be good enough.” Then I move away from her and out of the room. I stride down the hallway and then out into the waiting room.
Her words echo around in my head and I can’t take the noise. I can’t take any of this and I just need to leave. Rachel and Wesley are gone when I get out but Royal sits in a chair, his head in his hands. He looks up at me with only an inch of the pain I feel. “I wish it wasn’t so, brother.”
“I wish it wasn’t so myself,” I say before walking out the front doors, Royal on my heels. We get into his car and drive away all before Paisley comes out of the building.
***
I’ve discovered over the past year that I’m a closet stoner. Outside in normal life, I’m fine. I don’t need it around my friends and family. But inside, when it’s just me, I need it more than anything. I need the weightless feeling and the peace it gives me.
I don’t destroy things when I’m stoned. I don’t want to hurt myself or anyone else. I can forget what it’s like to be me for a couple of hours. Though this time it didn’t help all that much. I keep seeing Paisley on that table, sad, alone and crying. She only wants peace and I can’t give it her. Hell, I can’t give it to myself.
I used to love everything she stood for. I didn’t have to hold her hand through life, I only had to stand beside her. That’s the thing about it though; she was never standing beside me. I always thought she was but, in fact, we stood worlds apart. I liked that I didn’t need to protect her, I just wanted to. I liked that we were different, yet exactly the same. I only ever wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.
I loved the fact she was a prude outside of bed, but in between the sheets she was free. She didn’t hold back when we were naked. We were equals there and we still are, but now we don’t have that connection. It died along with my heart when she left me.
I miss the way she used to watch Netflix on her Kindle while I wrote for hours. She never wanted to be away from me. I didn’t want to be away from her. And excuse me for wanting to make her an honest woman by giving her my last name.
I loved the fact she would hole up and ignore me when she was mad at me. I’d have to use poetry or a silly note to get her to forgive me.
I miss the way she would cook me anything I wanted and never complain. She would set out a beautiful tablecloth, candles and have glasses of wine ready for me when I got done writing. She never once complained about all the time I spent in my office.
I loved when she’d come in covered with grease and smelling like motor oil. She’d get so excited, she’d tell me in detail what she fixed that day. I know she still owns her garage over in Dallas because I used to drive by to see if her Camaro was there. Though I never stopped to get a look at her.
I set my joint down and turn to stare out of the window. I can’t stop thinking of the stuff that made me happy when I was with her. I can’t stop picturing us in those days. I want that back so bad and I know I can have it. I just can’t bring myself to forgive her. I just can’t do it. What happens down the road when I want to get married and she refuses? I can’t take any more of that rejection. But now I’m stuck with her for the rest of my life. We’re having a kid.
A baby.
There’s a knock on my bedroom door. I don’t bother to open it or say anything. It’s Pierce or even Royal. Rachel hasn’t come home yet, which isn’t surprising. You can’t make Rachel do anything and I think out of everyone in that situation, she needs the alone time the most. Pierce did kind of bring it upon himself. Not that he ever intended for Rachel to get hurt. He loves her more than life itself.
The door opens and in walks Paisley. In my fogged over brain I don’t comprehend that it’s really her. Like maybe I wished her into being or something. I even smile at the sight but she doesn’t return it.
“Really Channing? Getting stoned in the middle of the day?” She walks into my room and sets her purse down on the end table near the door. She closes the door and walks over to the bed where I’m sitting against the wall. “I would have thought you had more sense than that.”
“If you were me, you’d do it too,” I tell her, watching as she sinks into the bed and places her head against my shoulder. I even find the courage to put my arm around her back.
“I probably would.” She snuggles into me and her cold nose hits my neck making me cringe.
“What are you doing here?” I hear Asher run down the hallway followed by the sound of a small female, I’m assuming is BeeBee.
