Chapter 25
Gabe
Something’s wrong.
Joss was already asleep by the time I made it to bed after the party. The next morning was a whirlwind, two hours of Minnesota goodbyes that resulted in a pile of leftovers and a case of ginger beer I had to cram into our luggage. Joss was quiet on the drive to the airport, but there was a fresh coat of snow covering every surface. It’s hypnotic. Soft and quiet. I can see why she’d be focused on the world outside.
We barely made our flight. Joss took the window seat and curled up in a ball to stare out at the clouds, giving her back to me, but I’ve never flown with her before. We all have our quirks. I’ve had teammates near to brawling because of overhead lights.
It bothered me. I shouldn’t have let it, but we’ve spent more time together the past two days than we’ve gotten a chance to before or will again until the season ends, and it felt like she was putting as much space between us as possible.
My breaking point is when we’re back in my truck, cruising up from Wilmington to Camden, and I reach over the console to take her hand. Yet again, she’s staring out the window, yet again, all I see is her shoulder when I look her way, and when I touch her hand, she pulls it away, tucking it into her lap.
“You feeling okay, ma’am?” I ask, figuring it’s the safest question to ask. She’s been sick a lot. Nothing of concern to her doctor, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to take care of her however I can. “You’ve been quiet today.”
“Just tired,” she says, but there’s a prickle in her voice.
Outside of when she first took that test, she’s been in high spirits, but I know not to expect that every day. All those physical things lead to grouchy days. Hormones lead to grouchy days.
“We’ll be home soon,” I murmur, moving my hand to her lower back, rubbing her there. She’s hunched over a lot with quilting, no matter how often she corrects her posture. Her back is in constant need of a rub.
I swear I feel her skin crawl under my touch, but I shake my head, assuming I’m imagining it or she had an involuntary shiver.
“You wanna come over to my place?” I ask.
“I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“Okay. We can hang out at your place then. I’ll cook us—”
“It’s a lot of work. You should drop me off.”
She just took a lot of days off, and she’s the type to work every single day, if only for an hour or two. She’s a workaholic, but I don’t think it’s bad for her. It makes her happy. Calms her. It’s not surprising if she feels behind. It’s not even surprising that she doesn’t want me around to distract her.
But the way she says it is short and flat, her words coming out on a single breath with no break or inflection. It’s dark enough that I can see her reflection in the window when I glance over, and her brow is tight, her lips pinched into a scowl.
I take a second to think about what I want to say. I’m glad I take it because I’d be using nasty tones if I didn’t, accusing her of lying or holding back when I know her well enough to know that if she’s upset, she’s internalizing it, likely blaming herself for whatever it is. It doesn’t take long before I realize that she’s scared to tell me what’s bothering her.
“It’s okay if you don’t like my family.”
That finally has her looking at me. “Your family is great,” she says, but even that feels like an attack.
“Did Leah say something? She can get really inappropriate at times. I’m not going to defend her if you didn’t like her.”
“I like her. I like your family. They were great.”
“Look, something’s bothering you. And I don’t want to drop you off if we haven’t resolved it. I don’t like us not being on the same page.”
“They told me about the doll. Suzie?”
Blood rushes to my cheeks. I swear my mother destroyed every picture of me without Suzie doll just to make sure I look as weird as possible to everyone who steps into my parents’ house. Phoebe says no, I just never let go of that doll, I even washed her and changed her clothes, but that’s insane. “I wasn’t a weirdo, I swear. And it’s not like I had the doll forever.”
Even though my teammates through middle school and high school never let me live it down after one of them saw it in my room. I claimed it was my sisters’, but they didn’t believe me.
“You liked babies.”
A fact, but another one that hits wrong. Dread settles like coal in my stomach even though it shouldn’t. Isn’t this better? I’m going to be a good dad. There’s no way Joss missed how frustrated Abigail was with Dwayne. She won’t have to worry a second about that.
But the way she says it doesn’t sound very happy.
“I did, yeah. My sisters would have driven me crazy if I didn’t.”
There’s another lull in the conversation. Joss brings her hand to her mouth and nibbles on her nail. It’s such a normal thing, but not for Joss. She’s not a frivolous person by any means, but her nails are impeccable, her salon appointments twice monthly, one of the few times she leaves her property. Cameras are constantly zoomed in on her hands, after all, and although she gets subtle designs on her nails, they’re always intricate and perfectly shined and shaped. She absolutely does not chew on her nails.
When I try once again to take her hand, her head spins around to pin me with a glare and then return to that window. “Phoebe found your profile on a dating site.”
Blood heats my cheeks. “Well, that’s embarrassing.”
“It was from two years ago, when you were in Indiana.”
“Yeah, we were politely asked to not be on dating sites when we came to Wilmington. Not until the PR team had a good feel for how everyone was going to respond to us. Didn’t stop Blaise from using one of those, uhh, fetish sites, but—”
“You really wanted kids two years ago.”
It’s like a house of cards proving how much I’ve always wanted kids. Rows and rows of evidence balanced just so. That Suzie doll at the top, my dating profile toward the bottom, but there are plenty of layers in between. Girlfriends I didn’t have for more than a couple weeks because they didn’t know when they’d be ready for kids, the one who hurt me as much for telling me she’d lied about it as she did for cheating on me. All the kids’ charities I’ve volunteered for, the pee-wee football I coached before the Colts picked me up. But even more concrete than all of that is the time I spent with my niece and nephew and, most importantly, every single thing I’ve said to Joss since her pregnancy test.
It should be a good, strong house. It should withstand the stiffest winds.
Except there at the bottom is a single card, that fucking vasectomy lie.
I told myself it didn’t matter anymore. She’s happy. She wants this baby. She wants me to raise this baby with her, and she wants to spend the rest of her life with me. In my mind, that vasectomy card gently laid itself down while the house of cards stayed intact.
Joss’s tone tells me this is not the case.
I signal to the drivers behind me that I’m pulling over to the side of the road. I can’t have this conversation at fifty miles per hour, eyes ahead.
“If you stop this car now,” Joss says, her tone far too even and deliberate, “I will get out and walk the rest of the way. Do not test me.”
God help me, but for a moment there, I consider testing it. Even if she does get out, I’m so much stronger than her, so much better equipped to handle whatever fight she throws at me. Unless she sprints and happens to be a faster runner than me — not a difficult feat for my teammates, but they’re professional athletes, and Joss’s favorite sin is definitely sloth — it won’t be difficult to wrangle her and keep her contained so we can have this conversation the way I want to.
But she doesn’t have to say, “I will call 911 and end you,” for me to know how bad of an idea this is.
Oh, she does say it, but she doesn’t have to.
“I love you,” I say helplessly. “I love you so much. Everything I did was out of love.”
“What did you do, Gabe.” There’s no question. She already has her answer.
I swallow hard. “I know this is bad, but—”
“Tell me what you did. You need to say it.”
Ironically, we’re roughly where we were when it all started. It feels symbolic, in a way, that the little service road I found for us is only a mile ahead. I drive this road every day going to the sports complex. That turn-off frequently gets my attention. And as happy as I get whenever it catches my attention, a twinge of guilt always hits me. It’s faded as the months have passed, become less of a serious fuck-up and more of a necessary evil. I think I’d almost convinced myself I did the right thing.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you, I swear. It was stupid and reckless, but it wasn’t—”
“Tell me . . . what you . . . did.”
I have to focus on the road. I have to keep us all safe. This is my entire life. This is the only thing that matters. The lines blur in front of me, a solid white streak on either side of my hood guiding me forward. Guiding me to my doom.
If I stop the truck, she’ll get out. She’s gone.
If I keep the truck between these two white lines, she stays with me. I only lose her if I get off this road. I can keep her forever if I can keep driving.
I have a quarter tank of gas.
This is impossible.
So I turn off the main road and onto the one that will take us to Joss’s place.
“I never got a vasectomy.”
I want it to feel good to get it off my chest, but that’s stupid. It would have felt good if I’d confessed it without it being forced out of me. It would have been terrifying, but I would have known then.
“No, that’s not what you did. Not to me.”
I can’t play dumb here. There’s no point in pretending like the vasectomy is the real issue when she wants kids so badly. “I lied to you.”
I expect a tirade from her. This is her chance to lay into me, and honestly, I’m down for it. When I dislocate my shoulder, I don’t want to walk all the way to the locker room to deal with it, and I don’t want a ride there on the golfcart while they make a spectacle of me. I don’t want the medics to do gentle rotations to ease it back into place or a countdown while three people hold me to pop it back in.
I want Vedder to put his cleat on my chest, grab my arm, and yank.
That’s what I want Joss to do.
She doesn’t. She hums, brief and low, and looks back out that fucking window.
“I’m sorry. I know it was stupid. I was ridiculously irresponsible. I didn’t know if I had a condom in the truck, and I just said the first thing that popped into my head. I was going to tell you, I swear, but then I got all up in my head about how you were perfect for me. You are perfect.”
I should stop talking, I know this. I need to let her talk even if she doesn’t want to. But the words keep coming out of me the second I pause and silence fills the cab again.
“I got scared that you were going to realize how much better you are than me, how much more you deserve, and I . . . I didn’t want to hurt you, but then I saw the nursery and got it in my head that you wanted a kid and would be as happy with a surprise pregnancy as I would be. If we talked about it, we’d end up getting bogged down in waiting a year to get engaged and then waiting another year to get married and then waiting still another year to start having kids, and why do that if we could have a kid now? This was for us.”
Dead silence. Absolute silence.
This wasn’t for us. I told myself it was, I calmed myself with that, but it wasn’t.
“I’m an asshole.”
I’m so relieved when Joss finally responds that it lessens the blow of her words. “You were supposed to be the good guy. I felt terrible letting you into my life without telling you why I’m so hated in Wilmington, and it was so hard to respect your opinion that you didn’t want to know when you really needed to know, but I did respect your opinion. I respected you. And I told myself that you’re a good guy. I didn’t have to worry about you doing something so horrible because you’re a good guy.
“The lie should have been the worst part. Or . . . how massive the fallout from it would be. This isn’t just a lie, this is my entire life. This is a human being, their whole life too. Like, lying about a crime and someone else going to jail for it.”
I taste vomit in my throat at that. I’ve never done anything worse than throwing back beers in high school or driving a little over the speed limit.
If one of my sisters came crying to me that a man she’d had sex with lied about a vasectomy and got her pregnant, what would I do? I don’t know, but I’d be pissed. I’d probably beat the guy up, and I can count on two hands the number of physical fights I’ve gotten into off the field and outside of the usual scuffles with teammates.
“The worst part isn’t the lying, and it’s not the fact that you’ve taken it upon yourself to rewrite my life or that you’re forcing me to bring a child into the world based on some ridiculous assumption about why there’s a nursery in my home.”
“That’s why I stopped having sex with you after—”
Joss interrupts me with a voice dripping with venom. “I know that.”
It has me wanting to shrink away. I have this ridiculous urge to curl up at her feet like a bad dog who’s being punished for doing what he knew was going to upset his master but did it anyway. I want to whimper on the floor until she caves and remembers that she loves me.
Because that’s what you do with dogs. Because they’re dogs.
I am not a dog.
“Do you understand how much that hurt me?” she continues after a harsh breath, the hatred breaking into something more raw and far more devastating. “I had just bared my soul to you. I told you what my husband had done, how ashamed I was for not knowing anything about it, how badly the town shunned me, how I lost my baby, and then you refuse to touch me again? Do you have any concept of how dirty you made me feel?”
It’s a sucker punch. My heart constricts in my chest as I white-knuckle the steering wheel. I don’t know how I can apologize for that. I don’t think I can. But I can’t let her feel like that. “Can I hold your hand?” I ask, my voice reedy.
She pans her head, tilting slowly. “Are you for real right now? No, Gabe, you cannot hold my hand. You cannot touch me. You are going to drop me off at my place and get very far away from me for a long time.”
Silence falls between us as I hyper-fixate on the traffic light we’re sitting at, only three blocks away from her doorstep. I have three blocks to fix this. I can’t possibly do that. I wasn’t ready. I should have been, I know that, but I got so comfortable that I lost sight of this possibility. It was never going to be in the car, driving home from the airport, after she just met the entire family and every single one of them, even dad, made it very clear I could not fuck this up, that Joss is too good for me to throw away with something stupid.
It was never going to be while she was pregnant with my child.
That’s where my brain sticks as I navigate through the intersection. I can’t leave her. No matter what happens between us, we’re going to have a kid together. I’ll be devastated if I lose her, but she can’t remove me from her life entirely. “You need me. The baby—”
“There was a moment when I was flat broke in a way that’s practically inconceivable now. I was scared that even if I earned money on my own, it would still get taken away from me. And at that moment, I would have done anything, anything, to raise two babies by myself. I did do everything I could. So if you think that it would be an issue for me now, you are sorely mistaken.”
I tell myself to keep my frustration bottled up inside. I’ll be back home soon with people and weight room equipment I can beat the crap out of. Joss has every right to be upset, and we say things we don’t mean when we’re upset all the time. This is a conversation we can revisit tomorrow.
But I can’t do it. I can’t keep my mouth from moving. “If you think you’re keeping me from my child, you have lost your goddamn mind.”
Joss doesn’t say another word. She doesn’t have to. It’s fifteen seconds before I’m pulling the truck up to the side door. She hops out before I even have it in park. I start to open my door, and she says, “I will call the cops if you get out.”
“I’m getting your bag for you!” I snap at her.
She slams the door hard enough that I keep my ass in the seat, glowering at her reflection in the rearview as she drops the tailgate, half-climbs into the bed, and yanks her bag out. She doesn’t bother to close the tailgate before marching to her door and letting herself inside.
I sit there, waiting to make sure she gets up the stairs okay before I pull out and park on the side of the road to close the tailgate plus sneak around her property to make sure there wasn’t any vandalism while we were gone. Before I can do anything, though, she throws her door open and yells, “Hey Gabe?”
I roll the window down, hoping she’s backing down, hoping there’s damage inside, even. Some excuse for me to stand next to her on solid ground and work this shit out. To say things right the second time around.
“The worst part is I wanted this baby. Desperately. If you’d only asked me, I would have said yes.”