All By Herself

by Tasha Blue

  “Thank you,” Jakob gushed. “I won’t let you down again. I promise.”

  “I’ll call you,” Anaya said.

  She shut the door and went about setting the flowers in a vase. She already knew that she was going to take Jakob back. Of course she was aware that there was the chance that nothing would change and they would be here again some months down the line, but there was always the chance that he would change. If Jakob could just be like the man he’d been at college, then she knew that she could be happy with him. Unfortunately, the occasions where he seemed like that man were few and far between.

  Still, Anaya gave Jakob a few days to stew while she thought about it. The whole situation was stressing her out, although perhaps she was just cranky due to PMS. A few days went by and Anaya called Jakob to tell him that it was back on. It was after a few more days had gone by and Anaya realized that her PMS hadn’t turned into a period that she began to panic. She stretched her mind back and realized that it had been two months since she’d last had her “time of month” and two months ago was marked by a very particular night with Owen.

  The first thing that Anaya did was to buy a bunch of pregnancy tests and do them all in her bathroom at home. It was around the fourth positive result that the reality began to sink in. All the same, she went to see her doctor to confirm and within just a couple of days she had gone from a nice, simple relationship with her on-again off-again boyfriend to a woman in a relationship with one man and carrying the child of another. There was no way that the child was Jakob’s as the pregnancy was two months along and they certainly hadn’t slept together since he’d come knocking at her door. This child was most definitely Owen’s.

  Anaya wasn’t sure what to do with that information when it hit her. She couldn’t believe that her encounter with Owen had ended in a pregnancy. Both of them had been so careful to make sure that their night together wouldn’t change the nature of their relationship or make things awkward, but Anaya was pretty sure that having a baby together would change the nature of their relationship a great deal.

  Jakob was the first to find out when he noticed a pile of pregnancy tests in her bathroom bin. The truth had come out then and Anaya had found herself crying with guilt as she told him even though she hadn’t cheated. At first Jakob had been furious.

  “You slept with that vet?” he demanded. “I always said that you were too close to him. No man and woman can be friends like that and not have deeper feelings for each other. Did you sleep with him when we were together?”

  Somehow Anaya manage to convince Jakob of the truth that she had Owen had never been together while she had been dating Jakob or any other time that that one night. Jakob had taken a long time to process the information, but had last sat down beside her on the sofa and come to a decision.

  “We’re meant to be together,” he said firmly. “We’ve got eight good years behind us and I’m not throwing that all away because you had one night with another man when we were on a break. I’ll stay with you and we’ll deal with the rest as it comes.”

  Anaya didn’t know whether to feel terrified or relieved when Jakob had told her that. She certainly didn’t want to be a single mother, but she wasn’t entirely sure that Jakob was the right man to raise this child, especially with his temper and the knowledge that the child wasn’t his. Then again, she couldn’t raise it with Owen. He was in another relationship now and he was happy. The two were in a real mess. Anaya could only take a few days to compose herself before telling Owen.

  She had no idea how her friend would take the news. Neither of them had spoken about their night together since the event and she knew that finding out she was pregnant would rock him pretty badly. She also knew that no matter what, Owen would stand by her because Owen was an honest and loyal man. It was such a shame that things had happened the way they had and not in any other way. If Anaya had met Owen as an adult rather than having grown up with him she was sure that they would have met, hit it off, and a surprise pregnancy wouldn’t risk a long and valuable friendship. Perhaps in another timeline they’d have had a romantic relationship and ended up together. As it was, Anaya was pretty sure that her relationship with Owen could never be the same, that her relationship with Jakob was about to hit a rough patch, and that life as she knew it was about to change forever.

  Chapter7

  Anaya invited Owen to her place to break the news to him. Jakob was away on business, so it was a good time to have him with her alone to tell him that she was carrying his child. He came over with a smile and DVD, completely oblivious to the fact that his life was about to be turned upside down. Anaya welcomed him in with a hug as she used to, made him a cup of tea and sat him down.

  “Are you all right?” Owen asked her. Her good friend was able to tell when she was not herself and Anaya had to stop herself from crying. She felt guilty for what had happened even though it had been a mutual act. The fact was, she had used Owen as a rebound and now there was going to be a child and just at a time when Owen had finally found a nice girl. Her life and his were about to get seriously complicated and all because she’d gone looking for comfort in the arms of a friend.

  “I’m pregnant,” she blurted. She had meant to break the new to him gently and give him some kind of warning before spilling the news, but the words had just come out before she could stop them and now Owen was frozen with a confused look on his face. He swallowed and then spoke out nervously to ask a question.

  “Mine or his?”

  “Yours.”

  Owen leant forward on his knees and put his head in his hands as he processed this information. He sat up and looked and Anaya and then asked again to double check.

  “Are you sure, Anaya?” he asked her gently. “I mean, it was straight after you broke up with Jakob. Wasn’t there... cross over?”

  “No. I’m sure,” Anaya told him. “I hadn’t been with Jakob for a couple of months before my birthday. He was at that conference in Switzerland, remember? You were the only person I was with in that whole block of time. It can only be yours.” She paused for a moment. “I’d understand if you wanted a DNA test.”

  “No, I mean, I don’t think you’d call me the father when you’re back with Jakob. That would complicate things a lot. If you’re sure, you’re sure,” he replied. “Have you told him?”

  “He wasn’t happy, but he said he’d stand by me,” Anaya answered.

  “So where do we go from here?” Owen asked uncertainly.

  “It’s up to you,” Anaya said softly. “I know this is a surprise and I know you’re with Lisa now and things are going well and I don’t want to mess things up for you. You can be as involved as you like, but if you want to step away, I wouldn’t blame you.”

  Owen turned to her and took both her hands in his warmly. He caught her eyes with a sincere, loyal gaze.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he vowed. “We both did what we did that night. We’ll both look after this baby.”

  “How are things going to work with Lisa and Jakob?” Anaya asked him. “This situation is just so... untimely.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Owen assured her. “Jakob said he’s going to stand by you and as for Lisa... Well, I’ll need some time to figure out how to break the news to her, but I’ll find a way. It’s not a great situation, but we’ll make the most of it. You always said you wanted kids before you were thirty.”

  Anaya laughed, even though the situation was terrifying. Tears had begun to spill from her eyes in relief that Owen had been so kind and understanding and she wiped them away with the back of her hand.

  “I thought you were going to hate me,” she confessed.

  “Why would I hate you?”

  “Because this is my fault,” Anaya told him. “I was upset about Jakob and I kissed you and I let this happen. I put our friendship on the line for a one night stand and now I’m risking it again with a pregnancy. I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Owen told her. “You may have ki
ssed me, but I kissed you back. I know that night was a mistake for you, but I wanted it to happen. I could have said no. I’m not going to let you feel responsible for this. We both did it. You may have been using me as a rebound, but I didn’t complain.”

  “Things are never going to be the same now, Owen,” Anaya sighed. “How can we be friends like we were when there’s going to be a child and we’ll never be able to be alone together again because Jakob will chase you out with a bat? Things are going to be so different.”

  “We’ll manage,” Owen said. “We’ll have a friendship affair.”

  “A friendship affair?”

  “Sure. Haven’t you heard of it? That’s when one friend accidentally gets his other friend pregnant and they have clandestine DVD nights together when their significant others aren’t around with strictly no intimate touching for the sake of the unborn child. It’s a classic situation.”

  Anaya laughed again. “How can you be joking right now?” she asked him.

  “Because otherwise I might pass out,” Owen told her. “This is some pretty big news and the situation is pretty uncomfortable. I think joking is about the only way through it.”

  The designer gripped her friend’s hand tightly. “Thank you, Owen,” she said sincerely. “I didn’t expect you to take this so well and be so kind. I’ve made things so difficult for you. I remember you telling me about your plans to have a conventional wife and two kids family and have a country house with a million dogs. I don’t know how these things work out when you have a child with another woman.”

  “Oh, they’ll work out,” Owen assured her. “I’m sure stranger things have happened and besides, if I was going to have an unplanned pregnancy with anyone, I’m glad it’s with my best friend.”

  “Always a silver lining, hey?” Anaya joked weakly. “Oh God. Jakob is going to be a nightmare about this.”

  “You don’t have to stay with him, you know,” Owen said seriously. “You don’t have to be worried that you’re going to be on your own, because you’re not. I’m going to take care of you.”

  “You’re with Lisa now,” Anaya reminded him gently. “You can’t be committing all your time to some pregnant woman on the other side of town. I know you’re not the kind of guy who is going to stiff me on the child support, but I don’t expect you to throw away a good thing with another girl because I got pregnant.”

  “You’re going to be the mother of my child,” Owen told her seriously. “That makes you my first priority.”

  “Well, I appreciate that, Owen, but I’ve watched you limp along through a bunch of first dates without ever getting into a real relationship and I’m not going to let you end up on your own again. We’ll figure out some way of making this work between the four of us.”

  “The four of us,” Owen repeated. “How traditional.”

  Owen tentatively reached to put an arm around his friend and Anaya rested her head against his shoulder in a way that she hadn’t in a long while and she looked up at him and smiled with affection.

  “You always have a way of making me feel like everything’s going to be okay even when everything’s a mess,” she told him.

  “Well, we’re in this one together however it ends,” he promised her. “We’re going to be all right.”

  Somehow, the things that Owen said always ended up being true. Anaya had been terrified about going through a pregnancy and having a child, but once the process began, she found herself coping with it much better than she had expected. Of course, Jakob was his usual self and even more irritable now that his girlfriend was pregnant with another man’s child, but he was also true to his word and stayed with her. Meanwhile, Owen did everything he could to make sure that she had everything she needed. He was with her at every sonogram and prenatal class even though she lied to Jakob about having gone alone. It was an uncomfortable situation balancing her attentions between two men in her life now that she had a baby on the way. She had chosen to stay with Jakob, which meant that she had to be a dutiful and loving girlfriend to him, but she was carrying Owen’s child which meant that she couldn’t shut him out.

  Consequently, she found herself splitting her time in more and more inconvenient ways. She’d meet Owen at the bottom of the road on the way to work so that Jakob didn’t see her talking with the man who’d got her pregnant and she spent her evenings with Jakob pretending that she wasn’t thinking about how it could have been if she and Owen had been more than just friends when they slept together.

  It was quite a lot of pressure to divide herself between them without making one or the other feel like he wasn’t important. She’d always had her qualms about her relationship with Jakob, but now more than ever she wondered if she was doing the right thing. Every time she tried to recall the reasons that they were together, fewer and fewer came to mind. At the moment she seemed to be with him even though it made her life more difficult and her unhappier. She supposed it was fear now more than anything that kept her with him. If she thought about what might happen if she let Jakob go and then Owen went on to have a fairytale wedding with Lisa and have his own kids with her and then left Anaya on her own as a single mother, it made her heart just about stop from terror. She knew that Owen would always be loyal to her and always provide for her and her child, but it wasn’t the same as having a man with you to hold your hand when things get tough and offer kind words of advice and support when things seemed hopeless.

  Owen had always been a voice on the end of the phone when things were tough and a shoulder to cry on when life got too much, but Anaya had to be realistic about the fact that she couldn’t expect him to continue to be her shoulder to cry on when he was somebody else’s husband and the father of somebody else’s children. In a way, it would have been easier if Owen were a man she’d married and divorced, because at least then the pair of them could be together alone without raising suspicion, because everyone would know that they wouldn’t have divorced if they hadn’t been wrong for each other. As it was, Anaya suspected that others were thinking that they wouldn’t have slept together if something hadn’t been right. She couldn’t simply shut of her affections for Owen as a friend simply because the situation had run out of their control. She couldn’t forget their happy childhood together or awkward teen years or long phone calls while they were apart at college. She couldn’t pretend that Owen was any less dear to her now than he had been for the last two decades of her life. Yet, to live comfortably with her current partner and to stop the arguments and paranoia she had to pretend that her night with Owen had just been a mistake and perhaps not the first time that she’d done something right with him.

  Life grew stranger daily as Anaya’s stomach swelled and her due date grew closer. The bigger she grew, the angrier Jakob seemed to get every time that he laid eyes on her and the more and more discreet she had to be about her time spent with Owen. She felt like she was doing something sneaky and criminal every time that she crept away to talk to Owen about baby names and preschools, but then as soon as she was in his company and he beamed with excitement and enthusiastically spoke to her about the future, all her fears would melt away and she would get swept up in the excitement of her fast approaching motherhood.

  The girls at work congratulated her on her pregnancy. All of them believed that Jakob was the father and it was only Hannah that Anaya trusted with the truth. They spoke about it in hushed voices over coffee behind the reception desk. For once it was Anaya bringing a juicy secret to the table and Hannah was captivated.

  “It’s Owen’s?” she gasped incredulously when Anaya confided in her. “Oh my God! How did that happen?”

  Anaya shrugged awkwardly and blushed. “It was my birthday. Jakob stood me up and I was upset. Owen came over, we were drinking and, well, one thing led to another.”

  “What happened to ‘he’s like a brother to me’?” Hannah asked her emphatically. “I suppose that’s out the window now. Do you still have feelings for Jakob? Do you have feelings now for Owen?”


  The receptionist buried her face in her hands and let out a small groan. She peeked out at Hannah from between her fingers and let out a long sigh.

  “I don’t know,” she confessed. “I’m with Jakob now and he knows about what happened with Owen. He says he’s going to stay by me, but I just feel like he’s angry with me all the time and Owen’s in this new relationship and seems really happy and the whole thing is just a mess.”

  “How can you be with Jakob when you’re carrying Owen’s child?” Hannah asked her in amazement. “That seems a bit messy.”

  “It is messy,” Anaya agreed. “I just don’t know what to do. Do I throw away everything I have with Jakob because the baby isn’t his and still be alone because Owen is with someone else? What if Owen dropped everything to be with me and raise the baby? It would all be a pretense and I’d have taken his chance to be really happy with a girl who he really cares about, so come and raise a child with me. I can’t throw his life off course like that because of one drunken night.”

  “But if Owen said he loved you, would you want to be with him?”

  “Owen doesn’t love me,” Anaya insisted. “Not like that, anyway. He’s just a very good man who would do the right thing even if he didn’t have feelings for me.”

  “I betting he has feelings for you,” Hannah said. “I mean, he’s got to! I don’t know any guy who treats a woman like he treats you unless he’s in love with her. Men who accidentally knock women up don’t just smile and say it’s fine. It seems to me like Owen is glad to have a reason to be near you.”

  “No. It’s not like that,” Anaya repeated. “He’s just putting on a brave face about it so that I don’t feel bad. I’m sure he’s terrified that he’s going to be a father.”

  “He cares about you, Anaya,” Hannah insisted. “I say forget Jakob and forget Owen’s girlfriend. You two should try to make it work together; you know, as a family.”

  “It’s not that easy.”