12. JB #3
She laid there quiet for a minute, her body still warm against mine. She shifted closer and rested her hand on my stomach while I stared up at the ceiling.
I knew exactly what I had just done. Lee told me she wanted my baby, and knowing damn well I should’ve pulled out, I ain’t. Now she could really get pregnant.
I looked down at her, and the fucked-up part was that the thought didn’t scare me. I wanted another baby with Lee, wanted a son with her. If she told me tomorrow she was pregnant, I’d probably be happy as hell. And that was fucked up considering Hannah was already carrying my daughter.
Then another thought crossed my mind that made me feel even worse. If Lee was pregnant when she found out about Hannah and JJ, maybe she wouldn’t leave me.
I knew how foul that shit was soon as I thought it. I hadn’t brought Lee to Colombia planning to knock her up, and I damn sure wasn’t secretly trying to trap her with a baby.
A baby wasn’t gonna make Hannah disappear or change the fact that I’d been lying to Lee since she came home. But if Lee was carrying my baby when she found out? Shit. Maybe she wouldn’t walk away so easily.
She started tracing her thumb over the little gold bar on her bracelet like she ain’t have a care in the world.
Always.
That word felt a whole lot different now than it did when I saw the bracelet in the store.
“You tired?” she asked, lifting her head off my chest.
“A little.”
She smiled. “I wore you out?”
“Man, go to sleep.”
“Mmm-hmm.” She laughed and laid her head back down. “That’s what I thought.”
I smacked her ass, making her laugh again, then pulled the covers over us.
It ain’t take long for her to fall asleep. I laid there a while longer listening to her breathe, but my mind wouldn’t shut the fuck up. Between Hannah, JJ, the baby, and what I had just done with Lee, sleep wasn’t happening for me.
Eventually, I eased my arm from underneath her and got out the bed. I grabbed my phone off the nightstand, poured myself some rum, and went out on the balcony.
Medellín was still lit up below me, mountains and buildings stretching as far as I could see. Any other night I probably would’ve stood there enjoying that shit, but I couldn’t enjoy none of it. Damn near the whole trip was gone, and I still hadn’t said shit.
My phone buzzed in my hand, and Hannah’s name lit up the screen. I let it ring, but a few seconds later, another notification came through, this time with a picture of JJ knocked out on the couch with his mouth open, drooling all over one of the cushions.
He keep asking when Daddy coming home.
I stared at my son for a minute, feeling that familiar shit hit me in my chest. I loved that little boy. None of this shit was his fault. He just knew his daddy had been gone a week and he wanted me home.
I turned and looked through the glass at Lee.
She was knocked out in that big-ass bed, sleeping good as hell with no idea that the little boy on my phone even existed.
She didn’t know about JJ or that Hannah was pregnant.
While she was counting down the days until she could finally come home to me, I had built a whole other life she knew nothing about.
And tonight I had made the shit even worse. I looked back down at JJ’s picture thinking about how my son was waiting on me to come home, and Hannah was too while Lee still believed my home was wherever she was. How the fuck had I let this shit get this far?
I took another drink, even though I already knew the answer.
I kept waiting on some perfect time to tell Lee when there wasn’t one.
Every time I got close, I found another reason to wait.
First I wanted her to get settled. Then I didn’t wanna ruin the trip.
Tonight she thanked me for still being there, and I used that as another excuse to keep my mouth shut.
Truth was, I wasn’t protecting Lee from shit. I was protecting my own ass, and I knew it. I deleted Hannah’s message and set my glass on the little table beside me.
“Tomorrow,” I muttered.
Tomorrow I was telling Lee everything. I meant that shit too, just like I had every other time I told myself I was finally gonna do it.
But tomorrow came and went, and I still ain’t tell her. By the time we got on the flight home, that bracelet was still on Lee’s wrist, Hannah was still a secret, and I had officially run out of excuses.
Lee slept damn near the whole flight with her head on my shoulder. A couple hours in, she shifted against me and opened her eyes just enough to look up.
“This was the best week of my life,” she mumbled.
Of course she had to say that shit right then.
I looked down at her and kissed the top of her head. “Mine too, baby.”
She smiled, closed her eyes, and went right back to sleep while I sat there staring straight ahead.
I had brought Lee all the way to another country telling myself I was finally gonna tell her the truth. Instead, I fixed her smile, put Always around her wrist, told her I loved her, and brought her right back home believing the same lie she left with.