Chapter Ninety-Three
SUNNY
I tape box after box, lost in my own thoughts. It’s all hitting me at once as I stand alone in my almost empty apartment, wrapping up my final moments here.
It’s becoming too real. I am leaving.
Clearly I’m not good at the leaving thing. I spent my whole life living in one place. Moving around will take adjustment like anything else, but it’s something I have to do. Or at least, that’s what I try to convince myself.
Tomorrow morning is my target departure considering my tired body desperately needs a night's rest. So I lay on my mattress, looking through my emails to confirm the start date of my next job. I sit up, realizing Ryan and I’s anniversary is coming up.
Once upon a time, the thought made me giddy. I loved tallying those months that turned to years. I was proud of the ever-growing number.
Then I realize…
I count the years on my hand and gasp as the realization dawns on me.
My fucking IUD expired.
Panicked gasps leave my lips as I stare at the number on my trembling hand. My heart beating a litany of screams as to how I could let this slip.
I’d gotten an IUD around the time we started dating so we could be safe. Five years comes and passes so easily. I changed my number so I didn’t receive my reminder texts and calls from my doctor’s office back home.
I clutch the phone in my trembling hand, trying to back track to when it expired. I’d gotten it a few months before our actual anniversary date so my body would adjust… when we’d started talking. Which means it expired at least two months ago.
Fuck.
TYLER
“We can just bail,” Sam says while we both sit in her jeep outside of our parents’ house.
I look at the red brick and marble pillars, wondering how I still come back when once upon a time I’d tallied the days until I was able to get out.
I spent the remainder of the night and day at Sam’s place. We watched TV and ordered food until we had to leave for our obligatory dinner with our parents. It’s the last place I want to be, but where else would I go? I’m convinced these dinners are the one thing that keeps my mother hanging on.
I shake my head and check my phone one last time. “No, it’s okay.”
“I don’t think she is going to text you,” Sam says with a broken look.
“That’s not what I’m worried about.” I grab the flowers from the back seat. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”
After thirty minutes of cocktails and tension, I sit with my hands in my lap and stare at the expensive food in front of me while my parents chat together about things I don’t care about.
Lamb chops.
We are eating fucking lambchops for dinner and Sunny is leaving. There’s too many forks and spoons to choose from, and despite the fact I grew up learning those types of manners, I’ve completely forgotten the purpose behind each.
I toy with the smallest spoon, the voices of my parents and sister background to the thoughts in my own mind.
Defeat is crushing. It’s suffocating. For some reason, I can’t pull myself from the rubble of it.
I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket, but I don’t look at it to save an argument from my mother. She only gets a numbered, scheduled time with us, so I’ll let it be unbothered if I can.
“Tyler?” She interrupts my thoughts. I look at her concern with furrowed brows. “Are you okay, honey?”
I don’t think I’ll ever be okay again.
I don’t even know what to say, but before I can even think of it, my father speaks. And I’m about ready to make him wish he hadn’t. I’m so close to stapling his fucking mouth shut.
“He is just pouting because that little blonde girl, who, by the way, lied about herself, is leaving.”
My eyes flick to my father. I love her, Mitchell. Do you even know what love feels like?
Another vibration in my pocket.
He doesn’t miss a beat, doesn’t even wait for a reaction from me, because he knows he won’t get one. I don’t have the goddamn energy anyways.
A part of me is gone with you now, Sunny.
Then my phone rings again.
SUNNY
I sprint to the pharmacy to grab a test.
Not just one, but five.
A shadow of eeriness radiates down my spine as I frantically rummage through the pharmacy. The ever present feeling of someone watching me persists despite my unrelated panic.
I pee on every single one of the tests, laying them all out upside down in the pharmacy bathroom because I couldn’t wait to go home.
I sit on the bathroom floor, foot tapping as I count the minutes until I can look at the tests.
All at once that broken heart of mine slams against my sternum, the pain of it lacing through my bones just as the panic does while it shreds apart my chest.
I clasp my shaking hands and curl into myself as the time to look approaches. Yet I can’t bring myself to. But then it’s all I want to do. The chances still have to be low, right? It’s only a few months expired.
Finally, I sum up the courage and grab a test that sits before me with shaky hands, waiting to find out my fate.
I keep my eyes closed and take a deep breath.
As I flip the test over, and I’m greeted by two dark pink lines staring back at me.
The panic rises like bile in my throat. Or maybe it is bile.
I flip over the next, two more pink lines stare back at me.
I flip over the two digitals that read Pregnant, like it’s mocking me for even thinking it wasn’t a possibility.
My body tremors so profoundly my bones shake and some of the tests fall to the floor.
Leaning back against the wall, I slide down to the floor as a painful sob claws up my throat.
I pick up all the scattered tests and shove them in my bag, rummaging through it to find my phone, but it isn’t there. I must’ve left it on the bed. I pause, trying to steady my breathing.
“Get your fucking self together, Sunny,” I mutter before I step out of the bathroom.
I try to gain my composure but the panic still shows as a shaky hand reaches for the doorknob of the bathroom. That lingering impending doom storm cloud is a torrential downpour on me now.
Walking home in the glow of the dusky sky, it’s quiet outside, and there isn’t a lot of activity on the streets. I swipe at my runny nose as I glance around me.
I’m supposed to leave tomorrow.
I thought I was panicking before, but I’m fucking panicking now. I have no clue what to do. This changes everything.
Feeling the nausea hit again, I know it isn’t caused by nerves. No, it’s something much bigger, more terrifying than ever. It’s a part of me, and a part of Tyler inside me. I’m taking a part of him with me. And I have to tell him, right?
We’re over. But I also know, me and Tyler will never truly be over, because of that damn string, that connection between us, yanking us together.
And now…. Something else ties us together and could potentially connect us forever.
The guilt overwhelms me. I’m leaving and now with this heavy secret I haven’t told anyone. And I think back to Sam’s words when she found out she was pregnant with Cole’s baby.
I wish I had told him as soon as I found out.
Taking a deep breath, I know what I have to do.