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“What?” I asked stupidly. I thought he was calling because we had plans later. It took my brain a few seconds to catch up with what he was saying.
As if someone set the volume of the world on mute, the noise of my office just faded away. I was in the middle of the bull pen, just having checked the end-of-week performance reports, but it suddenly felt like I was in the middle of nowhere. My surroundings were completely irrelevant as five freight trains hit me with every frantic word that Mark said.
“Yeah, I just found out.”
It couldn’t be true. He had to be fucking with me, but he still didn’t know about Sophia and me, so he had no reason to think that pulling a prank like that would have any bearing on me whatsoever. “Are you sure?” I asked.
“She took two tests, man. So yes, I’m sure.”
“Holy shit.”
The world slammed to a dead stop around me. It wasn’t hard to do the math. I was the only guy Sophia had ever slept with. But it still took me several loud, drumming heartbeats to put two and two together.
Sophia was pregnant with my baby.
Then her voice was in the background of the call. “Mark, who’re you talking to?”
“Not you,” he snapped at her, and it stirred some protective instinct in me.
“I’ll be right there,” I told him and hung up the phone without waiting for an answer. I was already in motion, my feet carrying me to the elevator and then to my car without the need for me to think about it.
Reeling. That was what I was doing.
For the first time in my life, I was absolutely, positively reeling.
A small part of me, a part that I was immediately ashamed of, wondered if Sophia had been with somebody else after all. A fierce stab of jealousy and possessiveness ripped through my gut unexpectedly at even the thought.
The facts were the facts, though, and I had to face them: I’d worn a condom every time I’d been with her, and none of them had been broken. I was sure of it.
But I was also sure of Sophia. I’d known her for most of my life. We’d never talked about it, but I wasn’t fucking anyone else, and she wouldn’t, either. Would she?
Had she?
That same jealousy from before grew from my gut to my heart, an ugly green monster taking root in my very blood. I wasn’t one to get jealous about women. I’d never had any reason to be, but I couldn’t stop the feeling from poisoning my thoughts and growing in my body.
Sophia was mine, damnit. I didn’t know when it happened or how, but she was mine. And so was that baby.
If there was a baby. My mind raced with a million possibilities, but none of them made any sense to me. Was she making it up to get me to come clean to Mark? Was she trying to force my hand into a relationship? She knew me. She knew I didn’t date seriously. At most, I found women who had sex drives that matched up with mine, and we fucked for a few months before one or both of us got bored.
The ugliest thought I’d had so far came crashing into my mind before I had a hope of stopping it. Was she trying to get to my money? I only cared about money insofar as it was necessary to provide for Mom, but I’d heard other people in my position talk. People got used for their money all the time.
I shut that train of thought down as fast as I could, but it still gnawed at me. It swirled around in my head along with all the other questions that I had no answers to.
The drive to the apartment she shared with Mark was quick, but I made it in a daze. Thoughts and questions appeared and evaporated like smoke in my mind. I didn’t even know if I wanted kids. I’d never allowed myself to consider the possibility, and now, it was hitting me square in the face.
Not even just the possibility. If Sophia really was pregnant and if she was who I thought she was, which was someone who wasn’t fucking someone else on the side, then it was the reality. I was having a baby, whether I wanted it or not.
Because if there was one other thing I knew with absolute certainty, Sophia would want to keep the baby.
A baby.
A fucking baby. I’d never even held a damn baby.
I was an only child. My mom was my only family, so there weren’t a bunch of cousins or nieces or nephews running around. My friends, though some of them were married and stuff, hadn’t started crossing that frontier yet.
Babies were a complete and utter mystery
to me. The way I saw it, they were just little pink lumps that pooped and cried all day.
