Chapter 30 #2
“No.” He rushed the word out. Was the car moving? Something was. The world, maybe. His soul, sinking to the depths of the
ocean.
“Okay. You wanna come home with me, then?”
He did a slow blink. Yes, the car was moving. So was his stomach, burrowing around inside his abdominal cavity like one of
those underground animals. Gophers? Moles? What were those things called again?
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said. “If not, speak now. Or forever hold your peace.”
His forehead got all crumply. What a weird thing to say, he decided, then congratulated himself on forming such a coherent thought. “I don’t care.”
“Okay, then.” Tansy laid a hand on his leg. “You can sleep it off at my house. My mom won’t be home. She never is.”
He glanced down. Her fingers looked wrong. Too short, a shade too pale, with bitten-down nails he didn’t recognize.
He wished for a different hand. He wished and wished, but it didn’t change, and that was the last thing he remembered, that
wrong hand touching him, giving his leg a squeeze.
In the morning, Nick woke with a raging headache and a vicious gurgle in his belly.
He turned his head. Where the hell was he? Someplace with floral wallpaper, dark evergreen carpet, and a fake-wood ceiling
fan with gold plastic trim. A pile of blankets straitjacketed him, making him prickle all over.
He pushed at the tangle. An arm flopped to the mattress, not his.
Oh, wait. Shit. Those weren’t blankets. That was a woman. A naked one.
He pinwheeled away, and . . . wait, why was he naked, too? Nope, better worry about that in a second. He scooted to the edge
of the bed, found a diminutive plastic trash can, and vomited into it.
Not much came up. Just a few mouthfuls of eye-watering yellow bile. He retched again, his stomach roiling.
When he finished, he looked back. The woman was awake now, sitting up. The blanket pooled around her waist. She made no attempt
to cover her nudity.
“Hi,” he croaked. Hot acid stung his tongue.
“Hey.”
“What . . . uh . . . What happened? Last night?”
She shrugged, her bare breasts swaying. They were large, much larger than Aubrey’s. “You came home with me. Then we fucked.”
He stared for an overlong moment. “We . . . No.”
She snorted. “Yeah. You don’t remember?”
He didn’t. Snippets paraded through his mind, cut-up flashes of last night. The bar. Walking, so much walking. A car rushing
out of the darkness.
He shot glances in all directions, searching for evidence to refute her claim. But he was definitely naked. And in bed with
this stranger. He grabbed the sheet to cover himself, not liking the way she watched him, like this was all somehow normal.
Oh, Jesus. Aubrey was going to kill him.
He winced. No, Aubrey wasn’t going to kill him. Which was far, far worse. He twisted around and threw up into the trash can again.
His bed companion didn’t move. Didn’t rub his back or offer him anything, just waited for him to finish. When he looked back,
she regarded him with mild blue eyes.
“You must feel like shit,” she said.
He waved away her assessment. “Did we use a condom? Last night?”
“Nope. You didn’t want to.”
He gritted his teeth. “Did I finish?”
“Oh, yeah. Loudly.”
Heat rushed into his face. His mind screamed, trapped inside a body that had frozen solid. Fuck, fuck, fuuuuuuuck.
No condom. He hadn’t used one with Aubrey, either, but she’d said the risk was nearly nonexistent, given the timing. And really,
the idea of impregnating her did nothing but set off a bevy of celebratory fireworks inside his head.
But this girl . . .
His mind churned, going a hundred miles an hour. His mouth said, stupidly, “What’s your name again?”
“Tansy.” She scowled. “For the third time.”
“Okay, Tansy. Are you on birth control?”
“No.”
He dropped his head into his hands. This was a nightmare. This was his honest-to-god, literal worst fucking nightmare, and
he couldn’t think. Still, Tansy didn’t deserve such a callous reaction. But he needed to get the hell out of this strange
bed before he started screaming.
He stumbled through an awkward exchange, scribbling his number down, then adding the one for the mill, just in case.
“You’ll, uh . . .” He fiddled with the zipper of his slacks, wondering where all the mud permeating the fabric had come from.
He’d just bought these. “. . . call me, if there’s anything to talk about?”
“Yep.” Tansy still hadn’t gotten dressed. He kept trying to look away, but either she didn’t care, or she enjoyed his discomfort.
He escaped as soon as he could, his head a tight ball of agony, the rest of him a hollow shell.
At home, he called into work and went straight to bed. Somehow, he survived the day.
To his dismay, he survived the next one, too. And the next. Three times, he went to Aubrey’s window after dark, only to stare
through the glass at her empty bed. Three times, his heart tore itself to pieces, a storm inside his ribs he carried all the
way home.
Two times, he tried to start a fistfight with his dad, wanting to lose himself in the oblivion of pain and straining muscles,
but twice, Noah walked away sneering, not even invested enough to hit him.
Once, Nick reread Aubrey’s letter, then decided throwing himself off the top of the quarry would’ve been less masochistic.
The call came a week later.
A grumbling foreman came and found Nick out in the yard. “Phone call for you. But tell your damned girlfriend to stop calling
here.”
For the barest edge of a moment, Nick’s heart lifted. But when he mashed the receiver to his ear and grated a hello, he knew
by the shape of the indrawn breath on the other end that it wasn’t Aubrey. That she would never call him again.
He closed his eyes. “Tell me.”
“I’m pregnant,” Tansy said.
Nick met Tansy downtown.
He bought her ice cream, though afterward, he felt stupid about it. But wasn’t that what you did for a pregnant woman? Try
to anticipate her cravings before she had them? Pamper her while she was busy growing your child in her belly?
She sat with him on a park bench in the square, haloed by afternoon light. She pushed the plastic spoon around her cup of
strawberry ice cream as if she didn’t know what to do with it.
“So,” she said. “I guess you probably want me to get rid of it.”
He curled his hands around the edge of the bench. A glance at her stomach showed nothing much, yet somewhere beneath the torn
jeans and laced-up combat boots, tucked into a secret corner of her body, a piece of him grew.
An entire future unfurled in his mind. He imagined sleepy kicks in a darkened womb, a first breath, a smile meant just for
him. And later, high-pitched giggles. Shakily written letters. A flashlight shining through the thin walls of a blanket fort.
Despite everything, despite how messed up this had gotten, the daydream planted something breathless in his chest. Something wondrous. Like a far-off star had lanced through the blackened abyss of his life.
“I don’t, actually,” he said. “Not unless that’s what you want.”
Tansy spooned ice cream into her mouth and watched him closely. “I’ve thought about it a lot, and no. It isn’t.”
“A lot?” He frowned. “Didn’t you just find out today?”
She expelled a quick breath. “Yeah. You know. The hours have felt like days.”
He nodded.
“The thing is,” she rushed out, “my mom got pregnant with me young. Like, really young. Fifteen. She tried to abort me. Had
the procedure and everything, which obviously didn’t take. I don’t know why she even told me that, it’s kind of a screwed-up
thing to say to your own kid. But the point is, she had me against her will, and she’s spent my whole life acting like it.
Like the fact that I’m even here is basically one giant mistake.”
“I know what that’s like,” he said hoarsely. “I’m pretty sure my dad wishes I didn’t exist.”
Tansy’s forehead pleated. “That sucks. And I never want this kid to feel like that. My mom could’ve done it so differently,
but she just . . . didn’t. I would, though. I will.”
Nick’s breathing shortened. Another spark flitted into existence, joining the light of that faraway star. “I respect that.
And, yeah. I’m not my dad. I’d do pretty much anything to not be him.”
She set the ice cream on the bench. “Most guys would run away from this, you know.”
“Most guys are assholes.”
“True.” She laughed. “God damn, is that true.”
“I’m probably an asshole, too,” Nick said, “but I’m not going to abandon you. You didn’t force me into bed with you. I made
a choice. Which means I’ll love this kid like that’s my only job in life, if you’ll let me.”
Her eyes sheened over. “Wow. She did say you were different. She wasn’t kidding.”
His muscles tightened until his bones threatened to pop out of alignment. No part of him wanted to ask who she was. “So, now what?”
“I don’t know,” Tansy said.
He cleared his throat. “Do we get married?”
Her face didn’t change. But her voice shook when she said, “I guess so.”
“Okay. Should I . . . propose?”
“If you want.”
He looked around. He had no ring, nothing to commemorate the decision with. Just a half-eaten, half-melted cup of strawberry
ice cream and a few scraggly dandelions that sprouted around the legs of the bench. But he could work with that. He plucked
one of the yellow flowers, then split the stem with a fingernail and threaded the bottom back through. He dropped to one knee
before Tansy and cinched the makeshift ring around her finger.
“Tansy, will you—”
“Nick?”
His world ground to a halt. That voice. Even shrill and disbelieving, it skimmed across his soul like music. Which didn’t
make any sense, because Aubrey couldn’t possibly be here. He was imagining things.
“Nick,” she cried again.
A rush of feeling clogged his throat. He looked up. His angel. She stood ten feet away, paler than winter.
A clenched hand trembled at her side. “What’re you doing?”
He stared, wondering why she’d come back from New York.
“I’ve been calling your house all day.” Pained rage leached from her voice. “Trying to find you, only your dad keeps hanging
up on me. And why exactly are you down on one knee right now?”
Nick looked to Tansy, then back to Aubrey, his heart doing a slow, confused pirouette straight into the ground. “Um. I’m . . . proposing.”
He’d never seen anyone get shot before, except in movies. This was like that, except worse. So much worse. His answer impacted
her like a bullet, jerking her back a step. One hand flew to her sternum and pressed so hard it shook. “You’re what?”
Tansy cleared her throat. “Yeah. I’m pregnant. It’s his.”
The following moment proved to be the longest of Nick’s life. The concrete sidewalk bit into his knee. A motorcycle roared
past, filling the air with static. Aubrey’s mouth worked while a glittering tear dove down her cheek. “Tell me that’s not
true.”
He grimaced. And said nothing.
“What the fuck?” she finally managed. “What the fuck, Nick? How could you?”
He stumbled to his feet. Her reaction made no sense. She’d left him. “You were gone.” He reached for her—stupid, stupid, so stupid, but he couldn’t control the way his mind screamed at
him to ease her pain, even if he didn’t understand its source. “You left me.”
“For two weeks!” Her shriek drew the eyes of passersby. “And only because I had the flu! Was it seriously too much to ask
for you to keep it in your pants for that long? After everything we said to each other? After everything we did? Did that
mean nothing to you?”
He froze. The flu? The flu? No, she’d gone off to New York without him. She’d—
Oh.
Fucking.
God.
Pieces snapped together in his mind, a nauseating whirl of understanding. She’d gotten the flu, which meant that New York . . .
She’d never even left.
Oh, fuck. He couldn’t breathe. He was going to pass out. He’d been lied to, and, like an idiot, he’d fallen for it. Completely. And now he’d cheated. He’d destroyed the best thing that had ever happened to him in the worst way he could possibly imagine.
And he was his father. Exactly him.
He lurched forward.
“Stay away from me,” Aubrey hissed, evading his grasp.
“Aubs, no, you have to listen. I thought—”
“No, you didn’t!” she shrieked, pain and anger billowing off her. “You didn’t think. If you had, you wouldn’t be planning
a shotgun wedding with Tansy Burroughs on a fucking park bench without even bothering to break up with me first.”
Every word slashed him open. Jesus Christ, he’d hurt the one person he would gladly die for, and now he wanted to take Aubrey’s
accusations and drive them deeper, stab himself in the fucking throat with the tears knifing down her pale cheeks.
“I’m so sorry,” he croaked. “I fucked up. Oh my god, I fucked up so bad. But your dad told me you left. He said you went to
New York. That it was over.”
“He did what?”
“Yeah.”
She recoiled, and then she was stumbling back, away from him, opening a distance he couldn’t bear.
He scrambled after her, but she didn’t have to go far. Her banged-up Subaru hung halfway in the road. She’d clearly jerked
it up onto the sidewalk in order to witness his proposal to another woman.
“Aubs, wait!” he shouted.
But she only slammed the door and gunned the engine, squealing away in a whirlwind of tires and acrid exhaust.
He watched her go, his soul peeling from him in long, bloody strips.
He’d cheated on her.
Cheated.
He was everything he despised.
Still, every molecule in his body quivered with the need to chase her. He would go to her window. If she wouldn’t talk to
him there, he’d walk to New York. He would grovel outside her dorm-room door, write letters in his own blood and push them
through the crack underneath until she had no choice but to relent.
Except when he glanced back, Tansy still sat on the park bench, the dandelion limp on her finger, pity in her eyes.
And he knew he couldn’t go anywhere, not now that a piece of him had taken root inside her.
No, he’d made his bed. Now he would have to lie in it.