28. Gage
CHAPTER 28
Gage
One month later…
S till halfway between sleep and wakefulness, I frown with my eyes closed when I realize there's no sweet weight lying over my chest and no soft, silky warmth pressed against my skin.
I yawn, trailing one hand over the left side of the mattress, only to find it cold. I'm alone in bed.
My eyes come open in the silent, milky light of dawn that’s barely filtering into the bedroom.
I sit up and look around.
A quick scan of the room tells me that Piper is not here.
The T-shirt she pilfered from my drawer yesterday to sleep in after we were done making love is lying on the floor on my side of the bed, exactly where I let it fall in the middle of the night when I woke up hard and wanting my woman so bad I turned to her yet again, waking her up with my kisses and sinking myself deep into her slowly, lazily rocking us both to an intense orgasm.
I notice that her frilly little light purple robe is no longer hanging over the back of the chair on her side of the bed, where I’m sure she dropped it yesterday.
I strain my ears to hear the click-clack of her fingers on the keyboard that would tell me she’s up because she got struck by inspiration and perhaps she decided to go write in the living room instead of working in bed with me like she usually does, maybe because she wanted a snack or needed to sit in an actual office chair to give her back a break, but there’s only silence.
Bathroom break, then.
I slide back down on my pillow, waiting for her to return, and trying valiantly to ignore the stirring of my morning wood.
I stare at the ceiling, thinking about all the things that have changed in my life in the past month, all the ways in which my fiancée —fuck, I love that I can call her that now and that soon I will be calling her something even more precious to me— has made everything better and healed places in my heart I didn’t even know had been hurt. But she’s done that and so much more.
I’ve never been this happy, never felt loved and understood so deeply by anyone, not even family members, no matter how close I am to all of them and how much I do love and respect them.
What I have with my baby doll is different. The connection between us runs so deep that, sometimes, I can no longer tell where she begins and I end.
I had no idea being in love would be like this.
I sigh, looking at the door again when I see she’s not coming back.
Then I sit up again. The en-suite bathroom. The door is wide open.
Why wouldn’t she use it? She always does.
Why would she even be in the guest bathroom to begin with?
I stand up from the bed, fully naked and ignoring my hard, bouncing cock.
My skin is pulling tight since I'm covered from balls to tip in her drying juices since we were too sleepy and exhausted to clean up when we fell asleep, but I’ll take care of it later.
I open a drawer and slip on a pair of boxers just to keep my erection contained, even if I'm badly in need of a shower right now.
I leave the bedroom behind, thinking that even if it is early since we’re both already up, we can totally shower together and have some fun.
“Baby, where are you?”
No answer.
I reach the guest bathroom and hesitate in front of the closed door. I hear water running in the sink and knock.
“Piper? Everything okay?”
I hear a sniffle and a little low ‘Yes’ muffled by the door but still clear enough for me to hear the tears hiding in it…
My woman’s voice is so mournful my cock starts to immediately deflate as my heart jumps in my throat.
What the fuck?!
“Sweetheart, what’s the matter? Can I come in?”
She doesn’t answer me but does open the door a little.
I push it the rest of the way and come up short when I see her standing in her little robe, long blonde hair falling like double curtains over her face. Her round oversized glasses are speckled with drops, and there's a tear slowly making its way down one of her cheeks.
She looks so small, so defeated that I feel my entire body go rigid as my brain goes into protective mode, I feel like I could level down the whole city if someone hurt my baby in some way.
Now that I think about it, she was acting a bit strange yesterday, distracted and thoughtful, like something was on her mind.
Still, when I asked her about it, she said it was nothing, just something to do with her figuring out a problematic plot point, but it's clear that there's something going on here, and it's not something to do with her new book.
She looks fucking crushed, for fuck’s sake!
Heads are going to fucking roll if I find out someone’s been messing with her! No one fucks with my baby!
I walk into the bathroom and pull her into my chest. Her little arms partially come around my waist as I kiss the top of her head.
“Piper, please tell me what’s wrong. I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.”
She lets her arms drop away from me and takes a step back before I can once more ask her what’s wrong.
She raises one arm between us, and the glint off of the diamond ring I placed on her finger draws my eye. That’s when I see that she’s holding something clutched in her left fist, some type of plastic tube-thingy.
“What’s that?” I ask just as she wordlessly passes it to me.
I look down at the white and light blue plastic stick, then up at her contrite face, and then back down.
I swallow hard when I see that there’s a little window in the stick, one of those litmus-type ones.
There’s one little pink line on it.
A pregnancy test.
I’ve never held one of these things in my hand, let alone seen one in real life in my thirty-two years on earth.
Before Piper, I never acted irresponsibly when it came to intercourse.
I always suited up and made extra sure all preventative measures available to humankind were in place, so to speak.
She’s the first woman I’ve ever wanted to feel around me with nothing standing between us.
She’s not on anything, and my pull-out game has been pretty much nonexistent since the very start, so saying that we’ve been lax with precautions would be the understatement of the millennium.
I study the little pink line and feel my heart pick up speed, a mixture of feelings I don’t even know how to begin to sift through, exploding in my heart and in my head.
She starts to cry harder, and my eyes snap back to her little tear-stained face.
I slide the stick onto the sink border and pull her into my arms.
“Baby, calm down… why are you crying like this…? Sure, it’s a bit soon, but… we’ll figure it out. Please stop crying! You know what seeing your tears does to me! I can barely tolerate the happy ones or the insane ones of when you watch a sad movie, but real tears? I can’t handle them. Come on… please, hush now…”
I’m babbling.
Me, the badass CEO that gets grown men pissing themselves in the boardroom, and here I am, babbling everything and anything that comes to mind because I can’t stand to see my little doll cry like this.
Her unhappiness is tearing at my heart.
She only cries harder, and so I hold her that much closer to me, kissing all over her cheeks, chin, lips, and even over her closed eyelids as I stroke her back up and down.
“Piper, please. Talk to me… help me understand! Why are you taking it like this?”
It’s insane, and I know it, but it hurts me that she’s getting so panicked about having my baby that she’s sobbing.
We have low-key talked about having children someday and about how much we both want a big family, and she said yes to marriage, so why the tears?
She shakes her head and tries to talk, only to end up crying harder.
I pick her up and go sit on the lip of the giant bathtub, holding her in my lap as she cries her little heart out.
God, I feel so helpless!
I hate that she’s so sad and that I can’t seem to find the right words to reassure her.
I kiss her temple, making shushing sounds as I hug her to me.
“Baby, please… I love you! I love you so much! You know that. This doesn’t change anything… we can deal with this… I’ll always be at your side whatever you want to do, I– if you don’t want our baby…”
“No! It’s not that… I’m not… Gage, I’m not pregnant… there’s no baby,” she sobs into my neck.
Okay, even more confused now.
“But, then… why are you…?”
Then it comes to me.
All at once and, a shaky sigh leaves my lips as I pull her slightly away from my chest so I can look at her face.
“Yesterday you were so distracted… you thought…”
She nods.
I go on. “And then you took the test and…”
She nods again, throwing her arms around my neck.
“I’m sorry! I know that I’m acting all crazy… and that we’ve been together for such a brief period of time and maybe… maybe it’s better that I’m not– but… but I thought…”
I hold her loosely around the waist. “Slow down, love. Help me out here, okay? Take it from the top, will you?”
She huffs little puffs of hot air against my skin and then nods into the crook of my neck before starting to talk again.
“My period was late… all of a sudden, it came to me that we never really talked about precautions, and we haven’t been careful at all. I don’t know how I didn’t think of the risk… I feel so stupid…”
I give her middle a squeeze. “Don’t call yourself that… I was the experienced one, and I didn’t act responsibly at all either… the way you make me feel… when we’re together like that, it just fucks with my program entirely and wipes my mind clear of any rational thought.”
She lets go of a tear-filled sigh, sniffling a bit. “Ditto…”
We each keep silent for a minute, and then I prod her to go on again, moving one knee under her butt. “What happened then?”
“Well, I panicked because my period is very regular, normally. I didn’t know what you would think… I kept telling myself that there have been a lot of changes in my life, and so maybe my period was late because of that rather than… I was sure it would be nothing but a false alarm… that’s why I didn’t tell you about it… I figured I would tell you later when I knew for sure that it was nothing… so I got the test while you were dealing with your office interior decorator… then I just… I decided I would take it this morning… and all of yesterday, I thought about it, about the off-chance that there could be a baby… you know, a baby that we made… a life that we created together… and… and sure, it was scary, and I felt kinda panicky at the thought but also… I started to…”
Piper trails off, and I kiss her lips softly once, my thumbs drying her tears off her cheeks.
I’m holding my breath, unable to say a thing as I wait for her to resume speaking.
“I started to feel a bit excited about it, Gage,” she finally says in a rush.
I kiss her little head as I crush her to me even harder, desperately trying to calm her down.
“Oh, love…”
“I know it’s too soon, and it would have been unplanned and-and… crazy, but I love you so much! And the idea of having a baby… with you… it was… I don’t know… it went from scary to lovely little by little… and then I… I…”
I gulp down air, finishing for her, my eyes stinging with unshed tears. “And then you took the test this morning, and it really was a false alarm, after all… so there’s no baby.”
She nods against my chest, and I feel the wetness of her tears on my skin. “Yes… and-and I should have felt relieved! I know I should have because our relationship is so new, and there’s time for babies in the future when we… when we’re both ready, and we both want them and plan for them, but…”
I sigh, caressing up and down both of her arms to try and soothe her. “You’re disappointed.”
“I’m insane! That’s what I am… and yes, I’m disappointed. It’s just that my imagination got the better of me, and I could… you know… I could really see us with our baby… and it would have been difficult, challenging and… and…”
“And wonderful,” I whisper, smiling into her warm cheek as I hold her even closer to me.
“Yes… wonderful and insane, let’s not forget that part.”
I take a breath and slowly exhale. “You keep saying it’s insane, love, but is it really? I’m not talking about external perspectives here. I’m talking about us. To us. Is it really crazy if we both know we want to be together forever… if we love each other as much as we do… if we’re about to get married?”
She pulls away a bit to look at me. “Maybe not… but still, a programmed baby is better than an accidental one if one can choose, right?”
I kiss her temple. “How long have you been standing in front of this sink with this stick in hand, love?”
She sighs. “One hour, give or take…”
“And you’ve been telling yourself all the reasons why you should have felt relief at the test being negative, right?”
“Hmm, hmm… but it doesn’t seem to work…”
“What if I told you it was painful to think, even for a moment, that you didn’t want our baby? What if I told you I’m feeling more than a little bit disappointed that there’s no baby at all, just as much as you do?”
“Really?”
She gives me a little tremulous smile, her hair ruffled and plastered to her temples, her eyes swollen from crying and shining with new forming tears, her cheeks all flushed, and her cute little nose all red. And, still, she’s looking like an unmatched vision of beauty to me.
I nod, kissing her forehead. “Really…”
“So, what does that mean for us that we’re both disappointed?” she asks.
I shrug. “I guess it means that we’re ready, and we’ll just keep doing what we’ve been doing and see what happens.”
“And if a baby happens?”
“Then it happens. It’ll be the best-programmed accidental baby ever born ‘cause it will be ours,” I murmur softly as I brush strands of hair away from her wet cheeks and tilt her face upward so I can kiss her mouth.
She breaks the kiss first. “Gage?”
“What?”
“I love you.”
I smile at her. “I love you, too.”
“Good, ‘cause I totally slobbered all over your chest, and I don’t think it’s all tears…”
“Gross, babe!” I make a face to make her laugh, and she giggles through her tears, shaking her head at my ass.
I stand up, still holding her in my arms, her legs winding around my waist.
“Come on, let’s go clean up a bit, and then we can start working on this baby thing…”
She sighs. “Don’t think it would work right now… my period is late, but I’m feeling crabby and emotional enough to know it’s not going to be long now…”
I shrug as I turn on the multi-head shower.
“So we practice. What do you think, little doll?”
“Absolutely! Practice makes perfect, after all.”
She gives me a brilliant smile as I slide her down my front and a little bit away from my chest so I can start to work on undoing the tie of her robe. We both gasp as my fast-swelling cock punches the fabric of my boxer briefs, jerking hard against her core while I keep her pressed to my erection with the hand I have on her ass.
Her hands move eagerly between us to help me get naked and she immediately start to stroke my cock to full hardness, making me groan into her mouth as my tongue seeks hers out.
The robe falls away from her shoulders, landing in a pile of silk at our feet and leaving her gloriously nude in my arms as we kiss, stepping into the shower and into our future.