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This should be the moment when relief washes over me. I should feel free of being shackled to Slade for not just eighteen years, as Slade said, but for our entire lives.
Birthdays, Christmases, graduations, their wedding…, and grandkids. Slade and I would spend our entire lives seeing each other for one event or another until one of us kicks the bucket.
Which, due to Slade’s current profession, has a higher likelihood of his body wearing out faster.
These pregnancy tests tell of a different ending. One where I am free to spend all those years sharing those memories with someone else.
I should be overjoyed.
I won’t have to start a new relationship with Win carrying another man’s baby.
Win won’t have to consider whether he’s willing to be a stepdad to Slade’s child.
But instead of feeling the weight of a possible accidental pregnancy lifting off my shoulders, I’m torn. I'm not completely relieved to not be pregnant, and I'm not fully disappointed by the negative results.
I’m somewhere in the middle and that might be more confusing than anything.
How can I want for both?
How did I let my emotions get so entangled with two men that I want to have it all?
I hear the sound of the cardboard box Slade had in his hand earlier dropping to the ground. I look up to find Slade screwing on the new showerhead and then tightening it up with the wrench.
He reaches down and turns the shower handle. A full-pressure stream of water sprays out from the shower head.
He fixed it, and now he has no reason to come back to my apartment.
He picks up the box off the ground and then plops the old showerhead into it for later disposal.
“You’re ready to go. You can call off the maintenance guy who never showed up,” he says, turning to me.
“I'd still like to reimburse you for the shower head,” I tell him.
“You don’t owe me anything. I’m glad I could take care of this for you. Let me know if it acts up for you again.”
I nod and then turn back to stare at the pregnancy tests as if, somehow, they might change.
He starts walking out of the bathroom and then stops directly behind me.
“You knew you weren’t sick when I walked in. You were just pale because the idea that you could be pregnant with my baby made you sick. Didn’t it?”
I can’t even begin to explain to him the mixed emotions I’ve had about possibly being pregnant since I bolted from the Hawkeyes stadium less than an hour ago. Mostly because I can’t even explain them to myself.
“How do I look now?” I ask, lifting my eyes from the tests to the mirror so he can see my reflection.
I wonder how quickly he’ll see that I’m struggling with the results.
I catch him staring back in the mirror as his eyes dart around my face in an attempt to read my emotions.
“Like the most beautiful woman I’ve seen,” he says.
He’s not going to call out the fact that if I was truly happy not to be pregnant, I’d be smiling. Or at least not sulking.
I glance back down to the negative tests. It’s odd that I’m having such a hard time looking away from them.
“How am I supposed to feel about this?” I ask, needing some kind of direction.
I feel Slade’s hand pulling my hair gently off of my shoulder and over to the other side, clearing the hair from around the right side of my neck.
