Chapter Forty-One Emma
Light slowly floods my vision as I fight with all the strength left in my body to open my eyes.
A dull ache echoes in my head, but it’s not the only sound that fills my ears. Muffled voices sound all around me from blurry shapes on either side of me, making the pressure in my head intensify even more.
“How do you know she’s pregnant? Did she tell you? Or are you assuming?” Andrew’s voice breaks through the garbled mess of noise in my mind.
The woozy, disconnected sensation that enveloped me quickly disappears as I register his words. Panic hits me like a sucker punch, my heart rate spiking.
They know that I’m pregnant!
Where the hell even am I?
I manage to open my eyes most of the way, the blurry light around me steadily sharpening until I can make out a hospital room and medical equipment. I shift my fingers, feeling a monitor on my forefinger and cool bedsheets under my fingertips.
The last thing that I remember is talking to Ryan in my apartment. After that, it’s just complete darkness.
“She told us!” Josh’s voice comes from my left.
“Why the hell would she tell you and not us?” Ethan’s voice sounds to my right.
“Because we needed to fucking know,” Ryan grits out from my left. “Now, is she okay?”
“Her vitals are fine! And so is the baby,” Andrew snaps at Ryan. “Now, answer our questions!”
“Let’s just take a damn breath,” Max says in a firm voice. “We just want to make sure that she and the baby are okay. We can have this conversation later at a more appropriate time.”
“I think it’s inappropriate that you know more about my sister and her pregnancy than her own family!” Ethan bites out. “So, how about you explain why that’s the situation?”
“Because the baby is one of ours!” Josh blurts out.
My heart jolts to a stop, leaving me breathless as I manage to shift my eyes over to my brothers, who stare at the guys like they just spoke in a different language.
“What the fuck did you say?” Ethan questions as his eyes narrow.
Josh holds his hands up to motion for Ethan to calm down. “It happened unexpectedly. We didn’t plan for anything to happen.”
“Did you take advantage of her?” Andrew asks as he balls his hands up into fists, his face starting to redden.
“Are you fucking serious?” Ryan growls, starting to move toward the foot of the bed to get closer to my brothers.
Max grabs Ryan by the arm and drags him back into place. “Stop! We’re not getting in a damn fist fight in a hospital!”
“You heard me! She worked for you! You could’ve demanded sex for her to keep her job!” Andrew tells them.
“You really think we would do something like that?” Josh asks him, sounding genuinely hurt. “We’ve always cared about Emma.”
That sets off Ethan.
“I bet you guys did, you bastards,” Ethan growls as he starts to step toward the end of the bed.
I manage to gather the strength to reach out and touch Ethan’s arm, making him stop in place. My mouth feels so dry that it’s hard to speak. All that I can do is give him a pleading look.
“Em, are you okay?” Ryan asks as he steps closer to my side, his hand reaching for mine.
“Don’t touch her! Back up!” Andrew snaps at him. “I don’t want the three of you anywhere near her. Look what happened!”
“We care about her,” Max assures them. “And we care about the baby. We don’t care who the dad is. We’re all going to be involved.”
Ethan scoffs and motions to me. “Does this look like she’s being cared for? She passed out from exhaustion and overexertion!”
“She was stressed about telling you two the truth! She couldn’t sleep over it!” Ryan grits out. “I tried getting her to relax. I tried getting her to sit down and take it easy, but she was worried about you two!”
“Stop!” I try to shout, but it comes out too soft. I force my hand up again, my palm trembling. “Please—stop fighting.”
“Don’t turn around and blame us!” Andrew tells him. “This is your fault. All of you. We’ve made it clear to all of our friends that she’s off limits!”
“Why?” Josh replies as he throws his hands up in frustration. “Because it’ll make things awkward? Because you don’t want to think about what we’re doing behind closed doors?”
I grimace at his words, knowing that’ll add fuel to the fire that’s blazing hotter by the second. I need to jump in, but it feels like my body is weighed down by a truck right now. I can’t even find the strength to lift my head to sit up.
“Fuck you,” Ethan says. “She should find someone good for her on her own. Someone who hasn’t had an influence on her while growing up. It’s not like you guys are angels.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Ryan scoffs. “You’ve done worse shit than us. Stop making excuses. You just don’t want to think about your best friends being with your little sister.”
I let out a weak groan and lightly swat at Andrew’s arm, trying to get his attention over their fighting and shouting.
Andrew grabs my hand and looks down at me. “I’ll get them to leave. They shouldn’t be here.”
I frown and shake my head. “Stop… please…”
“She doesn’t want us to leave,” Max tells Andrew. “If you’d just listen to her!”
“Be quiet!” Ethan snaps.
“The baby… are they okay?” I whisper to Andrew as worried tears well up in my eyes. So much is going on right now, but I can’t tell if the baby is okay or not. I don’t know if I fell on my stomach or did something wrong.
I don’t know anything right now other than my life feels like it’s falling apart.
“The baby is okay. We checked,” Andrew promises me.
Relieved tears fill my eyes as I nod. Before I can beg them to stop fighting and talk to one another, their voices overpower me again, leaving me silent and hurting. This is turning out way worse than I ever imagined it could be.
“We can’t trust you to take care of her and the baby,” Ethan tells the guys. “You’ve managed to let her run herself into the damn ground!”
I shake my head, wishing he would look at me. It’s not the guys’ fault. I was the one who hid so much of my stress from them, and it caught up to me.
This is my fault.
“What’s going on? Is she okay? Is my baby okay?” Mom’s voice sounds from the doorway.
Hearing the fear in her voice makes me want to sob, but part of me wishes that my parents weren’t here right now. Not when everything is crumbling to pieces.
“She’s okay, Mom,” Andrew replies as Mom and Dad rush to my right side to check on me. “The baby is okay too.”
Mom’s eyes widen. “Baby? What baby?”
“She’s pregnant,” Ethan says before motioning to the guys with a furious look on his face. “It’s one of theirs.”
My stomach twists with anxiety as he blurts out the shocking news to my parents without an ounce of grace. He’s so furious that he doesn’t even care what he says.
They’re past the point of being civil. It feels like war in this hospital room, and I’m stuck in the middle of the battlefield.
Dad’s jaw drops. “Excuse me?”
“This is a very long story that needs to be told over a calm conversation,” Max replies as he lifts his hands innocently.
“Calm conversation,” Andrew laughs without a hint of humor in his voice. “You all had sex with my sister and knocked her up, and you don’t even know who the dad is. That’s chaos!”
Mom places her hand over her mouth in shock.
“How did this happen? What in the world?” Dad says as he shakes his head in bewilderment.
Tears leak from the corners of my eyes as I stare at all of them, feeling like I’m being torn in two as the ones I love the most rip at each other’s throats. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It can’t be like this.
I need my family, and I need the guys that I love.
I don’t want to choose, but more and more, it sounds like they’re about to make me.
“Hey! My patient needs to rest! Take the fighting outside!” an older nurse snaps at everyone as she storms into the room. She points her finger toward the door and gives everyone a firm glare. “You can come back when you get yourself together.”
“Come on,” Andrew grits out before leaving the room with Ethan.
Ryan shakes his head bitterly and follows them with Max right behind him.
Josh brushes his hand against mine. “We’ll be back.”
I swallow hard, my heart aching so much that it physically hurts.
“We’ll be right outside, honey,” Mom tells me before kissing me on the top of my head. “Right outside.”
I barely manage a nod as I watch my parents step out of the room with everyone else. As the door shuts, their muffled voices sound out in the hallway, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. I doubt it’s anything kind or understanding.
The nurse walks over to my bedside and checks my vitals before patting my hand. “I’m going to give you a few minutes alone, okay? Just hit that button if you need anything.”
“Thank you,” I manage to whisper as my teary eyes meet hers.
The nurse gives me a sympathetic look before stepping out of the room and shutting the door behind her.
As soon as I’m alone, the floodgates open, and a broken sob leaves me. Tears stream down my cheeks as I stare up at the ceiling, feeling as if I’ve been run over by a truck.
I had this fantasy in my head that we would have a tense but calm conversation about everything and that things would somehow turn out fine. Sure, things might be awkward for a little while, but we would fall into a new kind of normal, and things would be okay.
Everyone would be happy.
Instead, today became a complete disaster, and I don’t know if we can bounce back from this. My brothers looked like they were ready to admit the guys as new patients, and there would’ve been nothing that I could do to stop them.
With a weak sniffle, I slowly move my hand over to rest on my stomach. I’m so happy that my baby is okay, but the thought of them growing up in a fragmented family breaks my heart. It’s not what I want.
But we don’t always get what we want.
Not every fantasy becomes reality, and not everything works out as planned.
Now that the truth has been revealed, there’s no going back. There’s only dealing with the damage that has been done and fixing what’s broken, but I don’t even know if that’ll be possible.
Some things can’t ever be fixed. No matter how badly I want them to be.