Chapter 28
twenty-eight
GRAY
Getting a hug from her mom felt so good after six weeks of not feeling her arms wrapped around her back. Gray wasn’t a child, but there was nothing like walking into the familiar safety of your parent’s embrace.
Her mom kept her promise and took her for a full breakfast. Now they were lounging in a hammock, side by side under her dad’s outdoor kitchen’s pergola, sipping unsweetened Lipton’s iced tea.
Her dad was working on a late lunch feast with her brother. It was comforting to be surrounded by her family. She’d needed the healing of being far away from everyone, but her family had always centered her.
Gray mused, “I shouldn’t be so hungry, but dang, Dad, that smells good. I swear, Mom, when I get home, I’m going on a cleanse.”
Her mom turned on her side and wrapped her arm around Gray’s waist, snuggling against her back. Gray felt her stomach rumble and hoped the gas turning over in her stomach didn’t slip. Her brother would tease her for ten years if she farted on their mom.
Had they not been so close, Gray would have missed her mother stiffening into a statue, but she felt it clearly and was about to ask if she was okay when her mom caught her eye and shook her head no.
She whispered, “If I had to pass gas, I would have moved. Geesh.”
“I know. Drop it.”
Unsettled by her mother’s tense mood all of a sudden, Gray started to say, “But—” except her mom cut her off.
“Later, Gray, please.”
That evening, Gray excused herself to go to her room and pack. She was flying back to Dublin first thing. She wasn’t the best packer, so when her mom knocked on the frame of the open door, it was to find Gray bouncing her ass on the stuffed suitcase trying to get the zipper to close.
“Jesus, Gray,” her mom sighed, getting on her knees to help with the zipper. “You are so neat and tidy in every other aspect of your life. Why can’t some of those organizational skills spill over into packing?”
“If there’s a master class on packing, sign me up,” Gray quipped. “I’m not above learning a new skill."
Her mom stood and went over to close the bedroom door before turning and leaning against it. The sad look on her face had the hair on the back of Gray’s neck standing.
“You’re freaking me out. What the hell is going on with you?”
Her mom lifted her oversized t-shirt from her jeans and pulled out a box, which was weird as all hell, but when she said, “Baby, I think you might be pregnant. I ran uptown and bought you a test,” Gray felt time stop.
She looked at the box, looked at her mother’s worried face, and then back to the box. She grappled with getting off the suitcase and pressed shaky hands to her bed until she sat heavily on the comforter.
“What is this? Why would you say something like that? I told you I’ve put on a few pounds. Jesus, Mom, I hardly think that necessitated buying a…a pregnancy test. Plus, I haven’t had sex since…since him.”
Her mom sat next to her on the bed and laid the test between them. “When I had my arm around you earlier in the hammock, I felt something nudge me.”
“I was gassy! For the love of God!”
“I know it’s a lot to take in, but when I was pregnant with you, I was exactly the same. I gained a few pounds. I thought it was water retention, or that I was eating too much, or some dire gastrointestinal disease.
“I was almost five months pregnant when I got the news. I’ve thought about this all afternoon. Do you remember when you got that horrible flu, and you came home to recover? The diarrhea, the vomiting—”
“I certainly don’t need reminding. Nightmare.”
“You would have puked up your birth control pills for at least three days. You went to Colorado right after you recovered.”
Those words settled as comfortably as a pinless grenade. “But,” Gray paused, placing a hand on her stomach, “I’m not pregnant. No way. I think I would know.”
“Have you had a period during the placebo pill weeks?”
Gray blanched, trying to remember. “The first month or two after Colorado, I did have slight spotting, but I’ve never had heavy periods,” she defended.
“The last two months, I assumed it was my stress changing things,” she ended lamely.
“One thing at a time. Take the test.”
In a state of shock, Gray grabbed the test box and trudged to her bathroom. She read the instructions, peed on the stick, and then carefully placed it on the counter while she righted her clothes and washed her hands.
If she was pregnant, she clenched her eyes tight in denial, but if she were, the test advertised that it would tell you how many weeks along she was.
Let it be negative. Let it be Negative. Let it be negative.
Positive. “Fuck.” Very positive.
“Mom. Come here, please.”
She must have been waiting on the other side because the door opened before she finished asking.
“Oh fuck,” her mom whispered, as she looked at the test.
“Yeah. Pretty much. And look at the weeks. I’m practically halfway done. How could I not have known?” Gray wailed. Fat, ugly tears started to drip down her cheeks.
Her mom hugged her tight, letting Gray soak her shoulder, and grabbed several tissues from the box and gently placed them by her hand.
Gray pulled away and dried her face and blew her nose. She sat on the counter, still staring at the test in disbelief.
“It must have happened our first time. How in the hell am I this unlucky?”
“I have a feeling you’ll change your mind on that pretty quickly.” Her mom placed a hand over Gray’s mostly flat stomach. “You have a son or a daughter in there that’s going to think you are their sun, moon, and stars, and you’ll think the same of your child.”
That was sobering. Gray took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. She could do this. She would do this. She had no choice.
“Now what? I’ve school, and if that test is accurate, this little one will come before I graduate.”
“That’s easy,” her mom waved off the worry.
“You sit down with your instructors and explain the situation, and ask them if they would mind giving you the rest of the year’s big projects early, and then you work your butt off.
You’ve done online school before, so if needs must, I imagine they will work with your new mommy schedule. ”
“Oh, God. And Ciar?”
“That,” she hesitated, “is not so simple. I think you should fly to London instead of flying home tomorrow. Corner him until he tells you what in the hell is going on, and once he does, because that man loves you, you surprise him with the baby news.”
“That sounds terrifying.”
“It does, doesn’t it? Better you than me.”
“Asshole,” Gray laughed, tapping her foot against her mom’s thigh. “Dad and Lochlann?”
Her mom took both of her daughter’s hands. “We tell them now. Together. I won’t keep something like this from your father, and it would hurt Loch’s feelings terribly if he were left out of such a huge family event.
“Your dad will love you no differently than he does right now. Of that you can be assured. The hardest part will be convincing him not to go to London and strangle Ciar before you have a chance to speak to him.”
“I feel like I could vomit.”
“Come on then, better to get it over with, and then we can change your flight.”
It turned out to be an hour of torturous waiting. Her mom decided to hide all the car keys so the boys “can’t rush off like chickens with their heads cut off.” Then she decided to call in her dad’s best friend, Coll, his sister, Aunt Cat, and their son, and Lochlann’s best friend, Laith.
Her mom wouldn’t tell them why and made them promise that what they were about to find out couldn’t leave the house—Gray would want to tell her friends first. Her mom felt that Coll and Laith would help keep their boys in line, and Catriona would bust her brother’s balls if he got unruly.
Now here they were, standing awkwardly around the kitchen’s massive island.
The men were shifting restlessly, shrugging, and exchanging confused looks.
The moment her Aunt Cat walked in, her eyes went to Gray’s middle, and a small smile played across her lips, quickly extinguished before anyone else could see.
Not much could get past Cat. She was Blair’s mother after all.
Gray knew she couldn’t stay quiet much longer, and with a last look at her mother, who nodded in encouragement, she said, “I’m pregnant.”