Chapter Thirty-Eight
THIRTY-EIGHT
Rocky
That motherfucker.
Everything in my vision is bloodred. I’ve shot past pissed. I’m volcanic, about to fucking explode. It takes a hard, furious blink just to push past anger to recheck several of the condom packets.
Yeah.
There are puncture holes in each one. I just came inside Phoebe wearing a defective condom. I might’ve been coming inside her this entire fucking summer using pinpricked condoms.
“How bad is it?” Phoebe asks, her constricted voice saying she already knows whatever is wrong is god-awful.
“He gave me a key to your bedroom.” I throw a foil packet back on the dresser with the others. “Night one, he gave me access to your bedroom, so it’d be easy for me to sleep with you all summer.”
“Wait. You’re talking about Varrick? As in my dad?”
I still can’t look at Phoebe. I grip the dresser in a lunge. My knuckles whiten, and I just inhale through my nose so I don’t scream. “He gave me a key—”
“I heard you, but he gave you that key to keep Trent out of my room.”
“That’s what he told me, and he got me, Phebs, because that one thing, I didn’t question. I believed him. Why the fuck did I believe him?” I straighten up and clutch the sides of my neck with two hands.
“Can we…can we just think about this for a second?” Phoebe sounds out of breath. I’m sure she is putting two and two together. The condoms. My rage.
“Sure.” I slide my hands off my neck. “I’m thinking about how he invited us here this summer so he could have easy access to our bedrooms. Our belongings.
I’m thinking about how many times he could’ve easily come in here while we were gone, while you were working at the club.
We kept our burners on us. We kept all our IDs, all our extra papers, in a storage unit out of town.
We didn’t consider…” Acid drips down my throat, and I take a searing breath.
“We didn’t consider needing to protect our fucking protection. ”
She’s dead silent behind me.
“You’re going to say I’m overreacting.” I smear a hand over my mouth.
“That there’s no way he’d try to get his own daughter pregnant.
What’s the motive? But this is exactly why I thought our parents even wanted us together in the first place.
So we would have a fucking baby. So they could get their little shill.
” It’s why I resisted being with Phoebe for so long.
I never wanted them to use us.
I always knew they could.
My blood won’t cool. I rake a hot hand through my hair.
“It’s not far-fetched to think Varrick would want the same, and it’s not a stretch to think he’d do worse to make it happen.
He has no real emotional ties to us. Everything he’s done is smoke and mirrors so we wouldn’t see what he really wants at the end of the summer. ”
“I need…” Phoebe trails off in a haunted daze.
I turn to her for the first time. She’s not blinking. Not moving. “Phoebe.” I head toward her, but she reanimates and bolts over to her purse on a tufted chair.
“I need to call Hailey.” She raises the phone in the air, trying to find a signal. Once she’s able to locate enough, she puts the phone on speaker, and my sister picks up after the second ring. “Hails, you back at Stonehaven yet?”
The line crackles. “Been here.”
“Can you check your condoms? See if any have been tampered with.”
“Ohh-kay, yeah.”
We hear rustling and then Jake comes on the line. “Is something wrong with your condoms?”
“Yeah.” I state one harsh word.
“Fuck,” Jake curses.
“Uh, no, no—mine are okay. They look fine. Don’t they, Olly?”
“Foil intact,” Oliver declares.
I rub my eyes.
“Thanks,” Phoebe says stiffly.
“Phoebe—” Hailey starts.
“We’ll talk more later. It’s a…situation.” Phoebe’s staring tensely at me. “But it’s becoming evident someone has been trying to get me pregnant. For who knows how long?”
I drop my arm, my brows knitting together in confusion. Why is that a question? It’s clear this started this summer. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Phoebe says slowly, “that I gave Hailey my box of condoms months ago. A box that I no longer needed because you’re picky about the brand and type, but they’d been mine, in my room—”
“Your room at the loft?” I question.
“Yeah, but look who ended up pregnant, Rocky.” Phoebe lifts her phone to her mouth. “Hails, were you using those condoms around the time you could’ve gotten pregnant?”
She takes a beat. “Yes.”
Fuck.
Hailey chimes back in. “B-but this implies that someone broke into the loft.”
“Can we confirm that, Jake?” I ask him. “Did you have hidden cameras anywhere?” I sincerely wish he spent months being an overly anal landlord to the point of intrusion.
“No, but Baubles & Bookends has security cameras. I’m sure facing their entrance, and the apartment door is in view. It’d probably capture him trying to get in.”
“The Wolfes own the bookstore,” I remind him. “We not only have a problem accessing the footage, but he also could’ve deleted it.”
“I know the store clerk. I can buy the footage,” Jake assures. “We’ll see if he thought that far ahead to delete it.”
I pray he did not.
“Phoebe,” Oliver pipes in. “Polar bear?”
She’s staring off at the wildflowers on the wall. “I think…platypus.”
“Hang in there. It’ll be okay,” he reassures. “Rocky, you’re staying with her?”
“I’m not going anywhere.” I grind my jaw, unable to look away from my girlfri—my wife. She’s my wife. I told her I wanted to marry her again tonight.
Phoebe hangs up after we all confirm we’ll keep in touch. She takes a ragged breath. “How long do you think my dad has known we’ve been together?”
“Your mom insinuated it was a while.”
Her face contorts in fury but also hurt. “It’s my fault Hailey is pregnant—”
“We don’t know that yet, and it would never be your fault. You didn’t know they were defective condoms. If you did, you never would’ve given them to her.” We’re both burning at such a hot temperature, I wait to near her.
Her features twist in more pain. “What if he did this to my mom, too? What if this is all happening all over again? Everything is repeating itself, and we can’t escape it.”
“I don’t believe that.”
She looks up at me like she wants to wield the same belief.
“If we are stuck in a cycle, Phebs, that means nothing is in our control, and I refuse to believe that. I refuse to believe we can’t get out. We’re getting out. You are not your mom. You’ve already proven that by giving up the role she won’t let go.”
Her eyes redden with emotion.
“Hailey isn’t Addison,” I say just as strongly. “She’s proven that by choosing to protect you and Oliver over the job. We’re going to dictate how this ends. We already have been. It’s not over.”
Phoebe nods, but her face breaks apart at a thought. “We can’t control if I’m pregnant or not.”
I rub a hand across my mouth, glancing at her body. These are conversations we’ve been avoiding. The future. Our future. Kids.
I feel like I’m being run over by a semi.
“Should I take Plan B?” she asks me.
“Is that what you want?” I ask her.
“Is that what you want?” she volleys back.
Jesus Christ. I scrub my face two times, then let my hands fall. “How about we start with a pregnancy test? I don’t know how long I’ve been fucking you with damaged condoms.”
She nods quickly. “Yeah…yeah.” She’s frozen in fear.
I go grab my wallet off the dresser. I flip open the leather and pull out a gold ring from the pocket.
I slip it on my wedding finger.
Coming back to Phoebe, I hold out that same hand.
She gets emotional seeing the ring, and I tell her, “I don’t need to be engaged to you.
I don’t even need to have another wedding to know you’re my wife, Phoebe Graves.
I’m devoted to you under any name, in any place, and whatever happens next, that will never change. ”
She takes a deeper breath, then clasps my hand tight. “Where are we going?”
“The 24-hour drugstore is open. We’re getting a pregnancy test.”