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As soon as I step inside, I hear the retching. My stomach turns and guilt immediately starts to claw at me.
Maybe she really is sick. I shouldn’t have questioned her on it. Hadley might be secretive, but she has no reason to lie to me.
Actually, she has a lot of reasons to lie to me. Who I am makes it important for her to lie to me about some things. If I were her, I would curate lies to protect myself.
This isn’t one of those lies that I would tell, though. I should have believed her when she said she was sick instead of projecting my own issues onto her.
Great, now I sound like a fucking therapist.
I stand a little taller and look around the apartment as I hear the toilet flush. As I head to her bedroom, the bathroom door opens and she appears in front of me with a toothbrush hanging out of her mouth.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she asks, her words distorted. She pulls the toothbrush out of her mouth and glares at me. “Why the hell are you breaking into my apartment?”
“I didn’t think you were actually sick,” I say, more guilt rising to the surface as her eyes widen slightly. “I thought you were using it as an excuse to avoid me after we spent the other day together.”
Hadley rolls her eyes, her nostrils flaring. “You didn’t really give me a reason to avoid you. We sat on the couch and watched some movies. There’s hardly anything horrifying about that.”
“And what about leaving me behind at the club the other night?” I cross my arms, internally berating myself for how childish I sound right now. “How are you feeling?”
She thankfully ignores my first question. “I feel like shit. I haven’t stopped throwing up all morning and I’m starving. Except I can’t keep anything down either so I’ve been having a great time.”
Dark bags circle her under eyes and her cheeks look hollow. The pale gray tinge to her skin has me rolling up my sleeves and nodding to her bed.
“Get back in bed once you’re done with that. I’ll make you some soup.”
“I don’t have soup.”
“Brush your teeth and then get back into bed, kitten. I’ll figure out everything else.”
As I step into her kitchen, I wonder what the cartel would think of me now. Their fearless leader changes his plans for the day to nurse a woman he might care about back to health.
It’s not something that they would ever let me live down. That kind of behavior isn’t looked too kindly upon in my world. Not from the man who is supposed to be in charge of everyone. Take care of them in a different way.
Making them soup is not that way.
For her, I’m changing. I’m starting to see the human side I thought I killed a long time ago.
I pull open the fridge and start rummaging through the food until I find some vegetables and chicken. Humming to myself, I dump the ingredients on the counter and start looking through the rest of her cupboard for things to cook with.
It doesn’t take long to get everything chopped up and in the pot. By the time the broth is boiling, I can hear Hadley’s soft snores from the other room.
I leave the food to cook and go sit on her couch. As I sort through the papers on the table, looking for the remote, I see a note in her writing.
Dr. Morris. OBGYN. Prenatal. Nine. Monday.
My heart stops in my chest as I read the words over and over again. I feel like I’m going to be sick as I put the note down before picking it back up again.
Does this mean what I think it means?
I think back on the times that we’ve had sex and I’m not sure that there’s been protection involved in any of them. I can’t remember wearing a condom or asking her if she was on any form of birth control.
Rookie fucking mistake, Aguilar. You know better than to fuck around without a rubber.
I groan and run my hands down my face. There is no way that she is pregnant. She would have said something to me if she even thought she was.
At least, I think she would have.
I don’t know for sure, though. There are a lot of things I don’t know about Hadley. Her reaction to finding out she is pregnant is one of those things.
