“Comme si comme sa,” she said, drawing on our high school French. “But it was a good start. My business plan is solid, and I might have some capital…” Her voice trailed off for a few seconds. “But I also had a great call with a few of my friends in California. I told them about the business. Well, as much as I can. They’re all businesswomen, so they get it. They offered to set up a brainstorming call with me next week. Sort of a ‘save Savannah’s business mastermind.’”
Her business. Her West Coast friends. Her life back in California. We’d been living in our little HEAT bubble for more than a week, but the reality of a long-distance relationship was just around the corner for us. I pulled her tighter, determined to enjoy every minute with her as long as I could.
“I called my aunt, too.”
“You really did have a lot of calls. Did you have a good talk with her?”
“A great one. Sometimes I forget how much she’s like my mom. I told her I’d visit soon, but I didn’t commit to a specific date because…”
She didn’t need to finish the thought.Because we have to deal with Devlin first.
I was happy she was moving forward and preparing for a post-Devlin career and was connecting with more people in her life who loved her. But that was a lot for one day. “Sav, are you sure everything is okay?”
“Yes. I just need… I’ll feel better in the morning. Depending.”
I pulled away from her a bit and squinted to see her face in the dark. “What’s going on? What aren’t you telling me?” A small, scared part of me worried that she’d decided she’d made a mistake and was separating herself from me. Maybe while I’d been thinking long distance, she’d been thinking clean break.
“I’m not sure I should tell you until I know more.”
I sat up, reached past her, and turned on the bedside lamp. “You should tell me now. I don’t care how little you know. If something’s wrong, I want to know right away.”
“I guess you deserve that. But I don’t want you to freak out.”
Shit. I did a body check. Pulse racing, breathing elevated, heart pounding. I took a few deep breaths and tried to go into mission mode. “I’m as calm as I’m going to get, so…”
She crawled out of bed and padded off to the bathroom.She returned carrying a small paperboard box. She handed it to me.
As I read the label, my eyes blurred, refocused, and blurred again. “Early pregnancy test. What does that… Early? How early? When…?” My breaths came in sharp gasps.
“You promised you wouldn’t freak out.”
“Doing my best, Sav. I’m not…” I breathed hard a few more times, then nodded. “This isn’t freaking out. Just caught me off guard. How and when? We’ve been careful, doubly careful, except…”
“Yeah. If I had to guess when, I’d say about eleven days ago, in the hotel.” She started explaining menstrual cycle variations and how vomiting could interrupt medicine absorption and statistical probabilities of getting pregnant on the pill.
I did another body check. Pulse calming, heart only halfway in my throat, sweat on my forehead drying. I was officially past freaking out.
I squeezed her shoulders. “The ‘why’ and the ‘how’ don’t matter now. How are you feeling? Can I get you anything? An extra pillow? A snack? A cup of chamomile tea?”
She shook her head. “Ben, I hate chamomile tea, and you’re kind of freaking out again.”
“Point taken. But just to be clear, this is all about the surprise of the situation. I’m not… Whatever you want to do, I support you 100 percent.”
“Let’s find out if I’m pregnant before we worry about making plans.”
“That’s smart,” I agreed. “But do you have any initial feelings about it? We never talked about kids one way or the other. Have you ever thought about it?”
“Maybe, once upon a time, I thought… And I still do… maybe. What about you?”
“At one point, I thought about it a lot.” Christ, I was about to sound like such a capital L- Loser. “I had this little, I don’t know, daydream scenario in my head.” I rubbed my handacross my face. “The first few months I was in the Army, when we’d just broken up, I used to think about finding out you were pregnant.” Hearing it out loud made me sound like an asshole. “Not because I wanted you to be alone with a baby. I’m not explaining this well.”
Savannah backed up a few inches. “You’re really not.”
“Okay, you know I broke up with you because I was sure I’d screw up everything. But if it turned out you were pregnant and you decided to keep the baby, of course, I would step up. And then I’d have a loophole, a reason to stay in your life.”
“I’m trying to understand the relevance of your story, but I’m still stuck on the part where I’m pregnant by my ex-boyfriend while he’s on the other side of the world.”
I ran my hand through my hair. “Yeah, like I said, I’m not explaining it well. My point is, that little fantasy got me thinking about having a baby with you. In fact, at some point, I fell in love with the idea.”
