Chapter 37
Tad
Breezy’s pregnant.
Breezy’s. Pregnant.
Breezy’s pregnant.
Knuckles white and mottled, I grip the wheel and try to focus on the road as I tear out of town past the water tower toward Molene. Thoughts move faster than my wheels, and repeated chills run up and down my spine.
Sweat dots my forehead and drips from my lip as I try to find a way to calm down, but the onslaught of memories is too much, too fast, all at once.
The first day of spring break plans.
The eggs on the stove.
The smell of coffee in the pot as I left for my forty-eight-hour shift.
Veering recklessly off the road and into the heavy, snow-caked dirt on the side of it, I slam on the brakes and skid to a stop, my breathing labored.
Salty tears tinge my previously dry throat.
“I wasn’t supposed to do this again,” I murmur.
My words are soft and pleading at first until they grow some legs and start sprinting off my tongue.
“Why? Why? Fucking why?” I shout into the cab, the question an affront to God himself and the plan he saw fit for me.
The cruelty. The disparity. The ironic end to a sheep-filled pathetic effort at doing something other than ending it all.
“Why? Why would you do this to me? Don’t you see I’m barely surviving? Don’t you see?”
Tears fall unchecked now as I plunge forehead-first into the steering wheel, setting off the horn and startling myself back upright. My chest shakes, and tears breach the corners of my eyes. I pull up my shirt and wipe them away, hammering the sick moisture in my throat back down with sheer will.
A dangerous numbness washes over me as I move the shifter back into gear and pull back out onto the road without even looking for traffic.
I hang a U-turn, swinging back in the direction I came from, but instead of going back to CAFFEINE, I drive straight home.
The lump in my throat is big enough to close it off completely, but for now at least, it’s stopped up the tears.
Randy is in the front, repairing a stretch of fence and lining it with the new electric ribbon from the co-op I was supposed to bring back out to him yesterday when I was spying on Breezy, his head rotating up at the sound of me pulling in.
I shift into park and turn the key, but I don’t climb out. The truth is, I don’t think I can.
I don’t know how long I sit there—time disappears into a vacuum of nothing and everything all at once—but the knock on my window from Randy’s folded knuckles eventually ends the spell.
I shake my head, the energy to open the window or door as vacant as my sanity. He rounds the hood then, opening the passenger door, climbing inside, and tossing his heavy, yellowish leather work gloves up onto the dash and stretching his arm out across the bench seat.
When I don’t move, he squeezes my shoulder. “Rough day?”
“Bennett’s sister,” I say, the words sounding like they’re coming from somewhere—anywhere—other than me. “Breezy. You know her. We’ve…well, we’ve been sleeping together.”
“Yeah, brother. I know,” he answers without hesitation. “The whole farmhand thing wasn’t a very good cover, considering farmhands usually do actual work and they don’t sleep in your bed or wake up in the house in the morning wearing your fucking clothes.”
Yeah. I guess Breezy and I have been spending way too much time together for that bullshit cover story to seem true to my brother. The man might not live in the farmhouse anymore, but he’s here every day.
“Eileen announced her pregnancy in the paper this morning. Breezy’s pregnancy,” I clarify, realizing how it sounds. “Not Eileen’s.”
He’s thoughtful. Silent. Painfully fucking calm.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” I say, a desperation breaking through the numbness. “It was never supposed to happen for me again. I keep it casual. I don’t get serious. I don’t…I can’t.”
“You can.” It’s guileless. Kind. Patient. It’s everything I’m incapable of right now.
“I can’t.” I shake my head against the desperate urge to run away to a whole new place and never look back. “I was never supposed to be in this place again.”
“What place?” he asks, his voice soft.
I swallow thick saliva down like a golf ball to clear the path to honesty. “At risk of losing everything.”
Randy lets out a deep, sympathetic sigh. “Oh, brother.”
“I just don’t…I don’t think I can do it.
” I say it like I’m asking permission. I say it like Randy, somehow, can absolve me of a nagging, building sense of guilt because he knows.
He knows where I came from, what I’ve been through.
He knows how broken I am—how unfit a cracked foundation is to hold up a new house.
“What’s the other option?” he asks instead, the gentleness in his voice doing nothing to quell my nausea.
“I know there’s risk. I know it feels scary and impossible, and I know it wasn’t supposed to happen.
But it did. And as much as you’re having a hard time with the risk of losing everything, the fact that you have it to lose?
” He shakes his head. “Tad, that’s a gift. ”
My head falls forward, and I bring my hands up to meet it. He reaches out to squeeze my shoulder once again.
“Take a little time to get yourself together. You’ve more than earned that. But then you move forward. Don’t let the past hold you back from this. You’ve done your time. You’ve been a shell long enough. You deserve happiness, Tad. You really fucking do.”
Emotion clogs my throat, but I swallow it away.
My mind still reels at what went down in Josie’s coffee shop this morning.
The shock of seeing the news of Breezy’s pregnancy in the fucking newspaper.
How sad and worried her eyes looked when they met mine.
The hesitant way she nodded her head to confirm the truth.
And my insane reaction to all of it.
“I ran out of the coffee shop without saying a word to her,” I say, but my voice rasps with guilt and shame. “She looked scared, and…and I couldn’t do anything but leave.”
“Brother, you found out your girl was pregnant in a fucking newspaper in a busy coffee shop,” Randy says through a soft laugh. “That would make any man want to run. Even men who haven’t been through the shit you’ve been through.”
“I don’t know, Ran. I feel awful for fleeing the scene like that. I didn’t go over to her, didn’t say a word. I just left like a fucking coward.”
“Relax, man. You’ll fix it.” He pats my shoulder. “I know you don’t think about this much, but once upon a time, my brother was so confident in himself, he didn’t think there was anything he couldn’t fix.”
Both of us know he’s right. But both of us know why I haven’t been that guy lately too.
And with no one and nothing but myself to worry about, I didn’t need to be.
That’s changing now. Breezy—and the baby we made together—need me to be more. I have to choose to be the best version of myself, for them.
Breezy deserves that.
Our baby deserves that.
And fuck, maybe I deserve that too?
In one smooth motion, he snatches his gloves from the dashboard and pops the door open to climb back out of the truck. Before he can close the door, I stop him.
“Randy, wait.”
He turns back, slightly disgruntled. “What?”
“Thank you.”
“For what exactly?” he asks, quirking a cocky eyebrow in my direction. “For my years of patience with these stupid fucking sheep? For my sage wisdom? Or maybe it’s everything combined?”
I laugh. I can’t help it. “For everything combined,” I tell him. “You are, obviously, the better brother. I wouldn’t have survived without you.”
He nods, his jaw rolling. “Oh, I know.”
No more.
It’s time to start living my life like I’m alive again. It’s time to stop focusing on where I should’ve been ten years ago and start being where I need to be right now.