With trembling hands, I take one out — a hot pink one — and face him. “Why do you have these?”
He’s standing now, his face still battered but at least he’s got bandages and his cuts are clean. He looks at what I have in my hand and replies, swallowing, “Because you probably didn’t have a chance to get these. Not in the dorms. Not yet.”
He’s right.
I haven’t had a chance. “I was going to go get one this weekend while I was home. But you…” I glance back at the cabinet. “You bought like a ton.”
Just like when we were talking about the book, his cheekbones sport a slight flush. “I didn’t know which one would be best.”
I know what he means. Because there are so many. I Googled them at school.
Rapid detection. First response. Early detection. Digital countdown, whatever that means. And I was so dreading it.
I was so dreading going to the pharmacy all alone and getting myself a pregnancy test. I was dreading walking down the aisle, standing there and picking out the best one among hundreds.
And then I was dreading taking the test. All alone.
But I don’t have to now, do I?
I don’t have to buy the test all alone. I don’t have to take the test all alone either.
Because he already bought me one and he’s here.
I blink as I feel tears filling my eyes again.
God, I have to stop this. I get emotional about everything, on the littlest things.
But then, this is not little, is it?
Nothing that has happened here today is little.
Because somehow there’s an us.
“Thank you,” I whisper, hugging it to my chest, hugging it right where my heart is spinning.
He watches me for a few seconds and then throws out a short nod. “I’ll wait outside.”
With that he leaves.
And I do the very first thing a girl does when she finds out she’s pregnant: take a pregnancy test.
The door is thrown open as soon as we get there.
The door to my house, I mean.
We live in a decent neighborhood, not too rich and not too poor, where all the houses pretty much look the same. All the front yards look the same too, mostly with slightly overgrown shrubs and messier grass — people don’t have a lot of time to tend to their gardens or the money to hire regular help so they do the best that they can — and more often than not cracked cement driveways.
It belonged to my mother. I’ve lived here all my life. All my brothers have lived here all their lives too.
And despite being a house full of rowdy boys, who have been parentless for the last fourteen years, this is the first time a noise of this level has erupted out of our house.
An explosion, followed by the brother who’s closest to me in age marching out of the house, bounding down the stairs before I’ve even gotten out of Reed’s Mustang.
The sky is slowly lighting up and dawn is breaking.
After taking the pregnancy test, which basically confirmed that I’m pregnant — that dark pink line was really hard to miss — I was ready to leave. I was ready to race back home because I knew my brothers would be up and I knew they would’ve somehow figured out that I wasn’t home.
I knew that they wouldn’t have been able to sleep all night after the news I gave them and they would be worried sick.
But as it turned out, Reed’s scent could only hold off my morning sickness for so long. Because as soon as Reed pocketed the test — he’s keeping it, and when I told him that was gross, he simply looked at me and said that he didn’t care — my nausea won the battle.
I spent the next hour alternately heaving and dry heaving in his toilet bowl.
While he was right by my side, holding my hair back and God, he wouldn’t go away.
No matter how many times I told him to.
Although I will admit that I didn’t want him to leave. I liked being held by him. I liked that he was rubbing my back and making soothing noises.
I know I should guard myself better.
I should care about not getting too close to him now that we’re doing this together.
But my nauseated self, my scared self from the past week ever since I found out that I’m pregnant, liked his nearness, his support, his strength. And the fact that he didn’t let me leave that cozy house without having some tea and saltines. The fact that he cared.
But now we’re here, in front of my house, and the reality is setting in.
The reality that Reed is not the guy for me and I can’t trust him again. But I’m pregnant with his baby.
And that my brothers hate him for a reason.
My belly flutters with nerves, with her, and I jump out of the car before it’s even completely parked to go intercept Ledger before he gets to Reed.
Reed, on the other hand, is completely relaxed, or was relaxed until I made the crazy dash out of his Mustang. Now he’s glaring at me as he emerges.
But before he can say anything, which from the looks of it he was going to, my brother reaches him and grabs the neck of his hoodie.
“I should’ve killed you last night,” Ledger growls, shaking Reed and pushing him into his Mustang, making the car shake.
“You should’ve,” Reed breathes out, his mouth tight with fresh pain and the pain from the already-inflicted wounds. “But then no one would’ve been around to do your job last night.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“It means what the fuck were you doing, letting your sister run around town in the middle of the night last night?” Reed snaps, grabbing Ledger’s fisted hands on his hoodie. “Do you have any idea what kind of condition I found her in? She could barely stand.”
“I’m going to —”
“Stop, Ledger. Let him go,” I speak over my brother as soon as I reach them.
I even grab Ledger’s arm and try to tug it away and Reed snaps, “Get the fuck back, Fae.”
I don’t.
I can’t.
Everything is happening so fast. Everything is just spinning out of control and we haven’t even been here for more than five seconds and I need it to stop.
I need them to stop fighting.
So I keep tugging on Ledger’s extremely strong arm, which hardly budges. “Ledge, please. I don’t want you guys to fight right now. Can we please just talk?”
My brother looks at me then, his dark eyes made even darker with fury. “You spent the night with him?”
“Ledge, please.”
“Did you?”
“Yes,” I reply. “No. I mean, it wasn’t my intention, Ledge. I was just —”
“Yeah, got it,” he snaps and jerks out of my hold so easily.
As easily as he did last night.
But maybe last night I was more in control of my faculties, which is a surprise given how nervous I was. Right now though, I’ve been rendered so weak from my morning sickness and my absolute dread that I stumble back, dizzy and suddenly so faint.