“I was pregnant with his baby.” Fuck. I really didn’t want to say that. I can’t look at Lincoln, but I know what he’d look like. Stunned. Perhaps angry. Confused.
“Pregnant?” he whispers, now looking around the apartment for baby items I assume. “Where, uh . . . is the baby with him?”
I shake my head, tears welling in my eyes. I look to the ceiling and take a deep breath. “Shortly after our dinner, Anthony and I got into a fight. He hated the relationship I had with you. He was incredibly jealous. He deleted you out of my phone and when I tried to grab the phone away, he pushed me.” A tear falls down my cheek and I quickly wipe it away. “I was off balance and crashed into the coffee table. It was a bad fall, I was bruised up and down my back and then a few days later, I had a miscarriage.”
“Jesus,” he says, leaning forward now.
“The doctor wasn’t sure if it was from the fall or not, but I had to have surgery to remove the fetus.” I suck in a harsh breath, and Lincoln quickly moves to the coffee table where he takes a seat in front of me and grabs my hand. His thumbs rub over my knuckles and he grips me tightly.
“You’re breaking my goddamn heart, Indie. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because . . . I was embarrassed. I was dealing with a lot of shame. Anthony proposed to me when I told him I was pregnant. It was his quick fix to everything. I said yes because it felt like the right thing to do. I quickly realized it wasn’t. He was controlling and for some reason, I let him control me. I was missing you, trying to forget you, and once I found out I was pregnant, I put in my resignation for the team. I lost everything at once and was clinging to the one thing that I was familiar with.” I wipe another tear. “Once Anthony and I broke up, I stayed in Texas for a while until I got the job with Brentwood.”
“You could have told me,” he says.
I shake my head. “No, I saw your face at that dinner . . . the disappointment.”
“It wasn’t disappointment, Indie.”
“Then what was it?” I ask. “Because you sure as hell shut down the minute Anthony stepped into the picture. You shut down quickly. I thought maybe, just maybe, you’d reach out again, but you never did and I knew. You’d finally moved on.”
“Because I thought you were moving on. Hell, you did. You were engaged. What was I supposed to do? Try to fuck you while your fiancé watched?” he asks, his voice full of irritation.
Removing my hand from his, I say, “No, you could have been a friend. Our relationship didn’t start with fucking. It was a friendship.” One I treasured. A lifeline at times.
“I always wanted to fuck you, Indie,” he says and for a second, I don’t recognize the guy sitting in front of me. Anger billows off him in waves, his brow is pulled together, and when his hand pushes through his hair, his forearms fire off with tension.
I can’t be near him, not like this. I stand and walk away as he calls out, “Indie, stop.”
I go to my door and I hold it open. “I think you should leave.”
Without a word, he stands, walks over to me, and shuts the door. He then leans against it arms crossed and says, “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Lincoln, that’s not your choice to make. This is my apartment, and I don’t want you here.”
“Well that’s too damn bad. I’m not leaving, not when we’re like this.” He motions between us.
“Like what?”
“Angry at each other. Yelling. Clearly not in a good place.”
“Saying that our relationship was all about fucking puts us in a horrible place,” I say pulling my robe closed tighter.
“I didn’t mean that.” He pulls the back of his neck and pushes off the door. “I’m just irritated. Frustrated. Jesus Christ, Indie, you’re here in Chicago. We should be celebrating. We should be hanging out. We should be—”
“Fucking?” I ask with a shake of my head.
“No,” he says, walking toward me. He cups my chin with his fingers, forcing me to look at him. “We should be there for each other. And you’re not letting me be.”
“Because you dropped out of my life, Lincoln.”
“When has distance ever been a hinderance to what we have?”
I step away and walk to my bedroom, tired and over this conversation. “When I needed you the most and you weren’t there.”
I go to shut the door, but he’s too quick and slips into my bedroom. “How the fuck was I supposed to know you were going through a miscarriage? Last time I saw you, you were happy with your fiancé.”
“Was I happy, Lincoln? Did I look happy to you? Think about it, did you truly think I was the same Indie that night or were you blinded by your disappointment or whatever it was to notice?”
“You can’t be fucking serious. You’re mad at me because I couldn’t read you that night? Are you hearing yourself?”
I sigh. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have assumed you’d be able to read me. Not after all the years of you knowing exactly when something was wrong with one glance.”
“You’re not being fair. You have no idea what I was dealing with that night.”
“What you were dealing with?” I ask, brows flying up. “Are you—”
“I had plans,” he shouts. “I was so fucking excited to see you, Indie. To pick up where we left off. I had an entire weekend planned for us. And leading up to that dinner, our conversations, our playful texts. Jesus Christ, my hopes were so high that the minute I saw Anthony, it was like you’d picked up the knife from the table and stabbed me in the chest. Yeah, I shut down, but not because I was disappointed.” He pounds his chest with his fist. “I was fucking hurt. My girl was engaged. My girl, who didn’t believe in marriage. My girl, who I thought—” He blows out a frustrated breath and pulls on the back of his neck again while looking at the ground. “Well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. All that matters is that I was there for us, and you showed up with someone else. A heads-up would have been appreciated so I didn’t have to walk away with my tail tucked between my legs.”
“So your pride was broken?” I say, trying to make sense of this. Of what he’s trying to tell me. After he FaceTimed me, naked, I started feeling differently toward him. Desperate for him, for more. Our conversations after that made me wonder what life could be like if there was more between us, if we broke the seal of fuck buddies and grew our relationship into something with so much more substance. The floodgate opened, and the jumbled feelings I’d suppressed for years crashed over me again. He came to me when my dad died. He drunk called me and told me he missed me with so much sincerity, I’d wondered.
Could there have been more?
There was never a scenario in my head where I actually thought Lincoln could want more prior to that night.
But then, I said yes to dating Anthony, got pregnant, and had gotten lost in that shock as I continued to grieve the loss of my dad. Lincoln hadn’t known that his texts had held me together. I hadn’t told him that in my confused state, I’d said yes to marrying a man I barely knew. One who . . . treated me woefully. Hurt me.