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She grabbed the pot of coffee he’d brewed and poured a cup. “Mornin’.” She brought the cup to her lips and sipped. “Tell me you’re just as hungover as I am.”
“I chugged two glasses of water and took some pain meds. Yours are on the table.”
She walked over and stared at the pills and the water. She didn’t put down her coffee mug or take the pills or the water. She just stared, her eyes glued to the two white pills.
Pete brought over the first plate of pancakes and set them in front of her. A lone tear fell from her eye and onto the table.
He grabbed her shoulders, turning her to face him. “Bea, what is it?”
Her head slowly rose, and Pete saw it there. The hope that had sprung inside him after last night plummeted as quickly as a fall from the halfpipe. One misstep and boom, game over. But he didn’t think they’d made a misstep. He’d thought things might finally be moving forward with Bea.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want to lose you.” She stepped into Pete and wrapped her arms around his waist so tightly he felt his lungs struggle to breathe.
He held her for a few minutes before asking, “What are you talking about?”
She stepped back and wiped the tears that were flowing down her cheeks. “Because we slept together, and now you’re making me pancakes and leaving me pain meds and water. You want a relationship, and I’m not sure I can go there.”
Pete laughed then registered the smell of smoke from the pancakes on the stove. He ran over and turned off the burner, tossing the pan to the other side of the stove.
“Now I ruined the pancakes,” Bea wailed.
Pete laughed. “What the hell is going on? I would have done this had I slept on the couch all night.” He was being truthful, but at the same time, he was pushing down the hope that maybe Bea would be ready for a relationship with him. He’d played the friend card for a year, and they’d gotten to know each other better than anyone else in their lives.
She shrugged. “You mean you don’t expect a relationship now that we slept together?”
“Bea, it’s pancakes, water, and pain meds. I didn’t order six dozen roses and heart-shaped candy and teddy bears.”
Bea looked at the ceiling and back at him. “So, I overreacted?”
“Maybe a tad.” Pete put up his fingers, measuring a sliver of space between them. “But…”
“Oh, thank goodness because I thought this was…” She shook her head. “I do love you, you know that. As a friend.”
Pete had learned to hate the word friend, especially when it came out of Bea’s mouth. But he pushed his feelings aside, swallowed them down like those pills he’d taken earlier, and made the rest of the pancakes. Bea took her pain meds with the water and sat down, pouring syrup all over her pancakes before digging in.
They sat at the small table for two and talked about everything except them. That had become the norm lately.
Pete moved in the following week.
They lived together for seven weeks before Pete decided that he was going to be honest with Bea and tell her that he was going to move out. That he needed some space away from her and his feelings for her. That maybe friendship wasn’t an option since the feelings he had for her weren’t fading.
She had never promised him anything but friendship. This was on him, not her. Plus, he had an opportunity that might pan out to something more in the snowboarding world, but it meant he had to leave here…leave Bea.
He grabbed them dinner from a sushi restaurant they loved, so it wouldn’t be the worst night of his life if Bea got upset with him.
Bea walked through the door, and Pete immediately saw that something was wrong. He hugged her as he usually did when she’d had a shitty day at work. She was struggling to find what she wanted to do for an occupation, and the office jobs she was taking were horrible.
He sat her down at the table, poured her a glass of wine, and brought out the sushi from the fridge.
She stared at it, then looked at Pete. “Is this some test? A joke?”
Pete was baffled. “What?”
“You always know what’s going on with me, so did you purposely buy this to pry it out of me?”
Pete was clueless. He grabbed his chair and slid it across to sit right in front of her. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Tears flooded Bea’s eyes and cascaded down her cheeks. She shuddered out a breath, and her crying quickly got out of control. “I’m…” Another deep breath.
Pete wanted her to spit out. He couldn’t handle being in the dark, and he felt sick at seeing her so upset and not knowing what he could do to fix it.
“I’m…pregnant.” She buried her head in her hands, inconsolable.
Pete leaned back in the chair as thoughts piled up inside his mind like a heap of garbage.
A baby. She was having a baby. His baby.
Everything he had planned that night flew out the door that Bea had walked through moments ago.
