Stella peeks her head in. “Cool if I come in?”
“Yes,” I answer. I need someone right now.
She smiles and sits down in the empty seat next to me. “Have you called your mom yet?”
I shake my head. “I honestly don’t want to tell anyone. She’ll want to fly here and take care of me, which is what I don’t want. I need time to breathe on my own, to accept this, to take it in.” I rub my stomach. “Can you give me a ride home when they release me?”
She squeezes her hand over mine. “Of course.” She opens her mouth and then shuts it. She wants to talk about Dallas, most likely wants us to patch things up, but that’s impossible right now.
Like I told Dallas, I understand now. I know how it feels to lose someone you love so much, someone you thought you’d spend years with.
And I understand never wanting to let them go.
Three days have passed since Stella brought me home from the hospital.
I’m sore. Exhausted. Hopeless.
Calls and texts have gone ignored, and the only reason I’ve seen Lauren is because she has a spare key to my apartment and lets herself in, uninvited. I’m selfish because they’re worried about me, but I want to be left alone. I asked Dallas to give me some space, and except for a few texts, he has. But no words, no lecture, nothing will stop me from feeling some blame in this. I was too stressed. I wasn’t eating right. I should’ve been resting more. The guilt that my body is the one that lost my child kills me.
I called my mom the day I got home. We cried. She prayed. She begged to fly out here to be with me, and I begged her not to.
I’m reading another article on vanishing twin syndrome when I hear my front door open. I turn around on the couch and shut my laptop at the same time Lauren walks in, wearing her scrubs, going straight to the kitchen like she owns the place.
“Hey, girl,” she calls out when I meet her. “I hope you have an appetite.” She starts the oven and begins pulling out containers of prepared food. “Tacos are on the menu for tonight.”
I do a scan of all the items laid out on the counter. Meat. Lettuce. Cheese. Salsa. Guacamole. “You made all of this?” I ask. “Didn’t you have to work?”
She laughs, removing the lid from the meat and pouring it into a pan. “Sweetie, you know my cooking is shit. Although my reheating game is pretty good.” She turns the burner on. “Dallas did all of this last night before going to work and asked me to bring it over.”
I snort. “Why? Is he scared I’m not feeding myself well enough, and we’ll lose the other baby?” The words come out before I can stop myself.
She narrows her eyes at me. “No. And we both know he doesn’t think that, so quit acting like a brat.”
“Excuse me?” I snap.
“You heard me,” she says, her attention going back to the stove. “Quit acting like a brat.”
I huff. I puff. I want to kick her out of my apartment, but she keeps going, “I get you’re going through pain, but don’t forget you’re not the only one experiencing this loss. So is my brother.”
I press my finger to my chest. “He’s the one who tried to blame me for losing the baby.”
“Did he say those words?”
“Well … not exactly.”
“The only thing that’s exact about your argument is that he never said you’re to blame. Not once. You’re pissed at him because you have no one else to be mad at—because no one is to blame. No one. You heard the doctor. The miscarriage would’ve happened, no matter what.”
“I don’t blame him for the miscarriage.”
“But you blame him for what occurred before the miscarriage. You need something to blame for losing the baby, so you’re blaming it on Lucy’s stuff at his house.”
“Don’t do this, Lauren,” I mutter. “I’m not talking to you about this.”
“Then, don’t talk to me. Talk to him. Please.”
“I have. We’ve texted a few times.”
“Maven has a sleepover tonight. Let him come over.”
“I can’t,” I whisper, and my voice starts to crack. “It’d be too hard.”
“Going through a hard phase in life is a lot more difficult with no one at your side. It starts getting softer, gentler, when you have someone else with you. Trust me.”
Dallas knows food is the way to my heart. The tacos and the slice of blueberry pie he sent over are making me reconsider seeing him. Lauren’s right. We’ve barely said a few words to each other since our argument at the hospital. I’ve run our exchange through my mind hundreds of times, staying up late because I can’t sleep, and I’ve tried to dissect every word that fell from his lips.
I shut my eyes and remember what he said.
“Take a step back from the relationship we’ve been building? Take a few steps back from making love?”
He said making love. I corrected that and said we were only fucking.
I’m the only one being honest with myself, with our relationship. We were both in a sensitive place the night of our one-night stand, and I’m afraid we’re only pulled to each other because of that and my pregnancy.
But bad days, bad months, don’t last forever, and eventually, we’ll get over our bad times and realize we were only using each other as a Band-Aid until we healed. He’ll go back to being a widower mourning his wife but still be getting laid. And I’ll go back to being a woman who doesn’t want anything to do with love but still getting laid.
We’re having sex for the need of it, the connection of it, for desire. Not for love, like he said. I gulp. Not for love on his part because the more time I spent with him, the more I knew I was falling into the pit of somewhere I didn’t want to go. A hole of falling for a man not interested in falling for me other than in the sheets. I’m afraid to admit, I’m in love with this broken, beautiful, loving man.
There’s a knock at the door when I’m taking a tray of cookies out of the oven. Dallas cooked for me, so I wanted to return the favor. Making the cookies has also helped keep my mind off everything I’m going through. Granted, I used a premade box mix, but a girl has to start somewhere.
Dallas said he’d be over after dropping Maven off for her sleepover. I take a deep breath and don’t bother looking through the peephole before answering the door.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I yell.
Brett is standing in the doorway with flowers. Yes, fucking flowers again.
His blond hair is swept back in a baseball cap, and a T-shirt and jeans cover his tall and scrawny body.
My asshole ex has a history of bad timing—having a girl in our bed when he thought I was out of town, sending dick pics without putting a password on his phone, being on a date with another woman when I ran into him at the frozen yogurt shop.
I stumble back when he takes a step forward and shuts the door behind himself.
“I heard about what happened to our baby.”
“I’m sorry. What did you just say? Our what?” I’m dreaming. I have to be dreaming. This isn’t happening.
Brett is out on bail. He shouldn’t even be leaving the county, let alone the state.