CHAPTER 19 Liam Bradley #2
I knock on the door to Everleigh’s old bedroom, which I assume is the bridal suite. I luck out when Penny herself answers the door.
She’s wearing a wide smile, and she blurts, “Is it time?” before she sees me standing there with anxiety written all over my face. Her brows dip, and her smile fades. “Liam, what’s wrong?”
I nod toward the hallway, and she steps out, closing the door behind her.
“Is it Mav? You’re scaring me. What’s going on?”
I shake my head. “No, it’s not Mav. It’s…well, it’s me. I need to talk to you.”
Her brows pinch together more tightly. “Can it wait? We need to head down right—”
I shake my head, cutting her off. “Izzy just called me. She’s pregnant. I don’t know what to do.”
“Izzy?”
“The waitress from Boulevard Tavern. She said it’s mine.”
Understanding seems to dawn in her eyes.
“She said she’s going to give it up for adoption,” I say, and my voice breaks. My voice fucking breaks as I say the words, shocking me down to my very core.
“Oh, Liam,” she whispers. She glances around, sees we’re alone, and wraps her arms around me. I’m trembling, but I feel immediately comforted with her back in my arms.
“Do you…do you want to be with her?” she asks carefully.
I shake my head. “No. We were never more than two people who slept together a handful of times.”
She bites her lip as if she needs to feel pain elsewhere aside from her heart over the idea of me sleeping with someone else. “What are you going to do?”
I blow out a breath. “I don’t know.”
“I need to get back in there,” she says.
“I know. I just…I don’t know. I had to see you. Had to…”
“I know,” she says softly. She tilts her chin up, and she presses her lips softly to mine. “I’m right here, okay? I’m sorry I need to get in there. I want to talk this out with you. To be right here for you.”
“I know you do. I get it,” I mumble.
“Liam,” she says softly, and her voice is very nearly a command. “Hey. It’ll be okay. Whatever you decide. However I can support you. I’ve got a little experience when it comes to kids, you know.” She offers an ironic smile, and she’s right.
She does.
She has kids.
She knows what to do with kids. Not just getting down and acting like a dinosaur and building a climbing wall in the living room to make them feel comfortable in a new place, but like feeding them and changing diapers and raising them from babies into little humans.
I do not have the first clue about any of that.
Izzy said she was giving it up for adoption. Could I really let her do that?
The way my voice broke when I said the very words to Penny tells me that’s not what I want.
Obviously I need proof first. I also have…what did she say? Less than two months to wrap my head around this. But two months puts me at training camp.
I can’t do this alone. I can’t move to a new city with a baby and be a single dad when I have a career that puts me in a different city every other week for half the year.
Still, her words that this baby has my blood, it’s half me, it’s mine…it’s affecting me.
“You’d help me?” I ask. I beg.
“I’ll do what I can. I’m here for advice, tips, tricks. Whatever you need.”
“What if what I need is you?” I ask.
The door opens, and she dashes out of my arms. It’s one of the other bridesmaids. It’s not Everleigh, thank God. We might’ve just been caught.
I head back downstairs, and the wedding, of course, is a phenomenal event. It's Everleigh's wedding. Would anyone have expected anything else? But I can't be present in the moment with Izzy's phone call hanging over my head.
I can't escape to the dance floor with Penny to talk this over with her in front of my entire family, specifically her best friend, the bride. So as lovely as the event is, it also feels interminable as I wait for the evening to come to a close.
I'm distracted, and everyone keeps asking me what's wrong.
Eventually, I confess the truth to Dex when he approaches me with the fiftieth, “Dude, what’s going on with you?” of the night.
Maybe the reason I finally decide to come clean is because Dex is the one sibling of mine who can most relate to what I’m going through.
He had a baby dropped at his doorstep. It was a different scenario, though.
The baby was six months old when Dex got him.
The mother was out of the picture. Izzy will be, too. She doesn’t want this baby.
But if it’s mine? I think maybe I do.
“I got a call right before the wedding that a girl I slept with a few months ago is pregnant.”
“Oh, shit. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” I mutter. “What if it’s not even mine?”
“What if it is?”
A great question indeed.
Penny and I arrived separately because of her duties as maid of honor, and we leave separately, too. I get home before she does, but I saw her on her way out the door as I got into my car, so I wait in the parking garage for her so we can walk in together.
I was kind of assuming I'd drink to the point I’d have to go get my car sometime tomorrow, but the truth is I had one sip of champagne when we toasted earlier in the evening and cut myself off at that point.
I just wanted to be able to get the fuck out when I wanted to get the fuck out and not have to worry about waiting for a ride to come pick me up.
I think maybe Penny might have felt the same way because I never saw her drinking either, and we shared only one dance as friends, despite the urge to pull her close.
Her eyes stared into mine.
She was worried about me.
I’m worried about me, too.
It’s a lot of upheaval in a short amount of time, and now…this.
She pulls into the spot beside mine a few minutes later, and I get out of the truck to walk with her. She leans into me as I toss my arm around her shoulder.
“You doing okay?” she asks.
“Better now,” I admit now that she is next to me again.
“All right, take me back to the beginning,” she says as we walk through the parking garage toward the lobby of my building.
I blow out a breath. “Well, I've been trying to think back on that all night, and I guess the first time we slept together was maybe eight or nine months ago.”
She flinches.
“Then I had to go back to Pittsburgh. When I came home the following week, we did it again.
Then I was back in Pittsburgh for a while.
The last time we slept together was probably mid-October, I'm guessing.
And I would venture to say that's when it happened because I was on my bye week, and I remember that I came home for the whole week.”
“Okay, mid-October gives us some more information. So let me count.” She thinks for a minute and ticks off the months on her fingers. “That would put her due date around mid-July.”
I nod. “And that tracks too, because she said in less than two months the baby will be born. But that was the extent of the details she shared.”
“Did you ask any questions?” she asks.
She blindsided me two seconds before I walked into the Bradley Mansion that looks completely different than it did six fucking months ago because Ford and Tatum bought it to renovate it for Everleigh's wedding. My mom's dead. My dad's going to prison.
I don’t say any of that as I push the button to call the elevator down. “No, I didn't think to ask questions. And then she hung up on me.”
We step on, and she reaches over and grabs my hand after I wave my card in front of the panel and press the button for my floor. “Do you know for sure it’s yours?”
I blow out a breath. “If I take her at her word, then yes. She said she was with one other guy around the same time, and it wasn’t his. They ran some test, and she said I could take the same test to prove it.”
She nods. “That’s a good, smart start. That’ll take a bit of time, but then you’ll know for sure. Did she say anything else?”