There was no way I could finish my gelato, so I brought the half-empty pint into the kitchen and tucked it back into the freezer. When I returned to the sofa, Tori was watching TV, still absently stroking her bump.
“Tori,” I asked. “Would you ever do it alone? Have a kid, I mean.”
Her eyes went wide. “Oh God, I hope I’d never have to. Don’t jinx your brother.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “Although if anything happened to Stefan, God forbid, you’d still have all of us. I meant, like—if this had happened in high school or something.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she finally said. “I mean, I was pretty sheltered back then. I wouldn’t have known what to do with a penis if it bit me. Why do you ask?”
Suddenly, she narrowed her eyes and turned her full attention to me.
“You were a virgin?” I blurted out instead, desperately needing to redirect the conversation. “Until when? Weren’t you just out of high school when you married Stefan?”
She went red. “Yeah. I met him on my eighteenth birthday. I was…not experienced.”
“A virgin bride! Boy did my brother luck out on you, with nobody else to compare him to,” I joked. “He must have had his work cut out for him.”
Generally I didn’t like to talk or eventhinkabout my brothers’ sex lives, but I was doing everything I could to distract my sister-in-law. Luckily, with Tori blushing and sputtering on the other end of the couch, I could tell the subject was officially changed. Which was probably good, because she would have guessed the truth before too long. There was only one real reason why anyone would ask a happily married pregnant woman about single motherhood.
And the last thing I needed was for someone to figure out what I was hiding.
Emzee
Chapter 4
All night, I tossed and turned. Even though Stefan and Tori’s guest bedroom was perfectly made up and the bed itself was incredibly comfortable, every time I drifted off to sleep, I’d have bad dreams. Dreams that had me waking in a sweat, heart pounding, adrenaline rushing.
Some of them took me back to high school, where I was forced to relive the torture I’d experienced at the hands of my classmates. In one, I was running down the halls of Wayland-Blaine in my uniform, chased by taunts and cruel laughter, every surface covered with the word WHORE. When I looked down at myself, I found that my arms were covered in slurs too, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t scrub them off. Then, just when I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, I saw Ford at the end of the hall. Relieved, I ran toward him, knowing he’d save me. But when I grabbed his shoulder and spun him around, his face turned into a demon’s.
I definitely didn’t need a dream dictionary to tell me what that was all about.
My other dreams were equally stressful and unsubtle.
I’d be alone carrying a bundle that kept getting heavier and heavier, with no one around to help me—but when I pulled back the swaddling, it wasn’t a baby in my arms, but a rock.
Worst of all was the dream I had where Ford was holding me, telling me he loved me. It was so real that when I woke up, I started to cry. Because it wasn’t real. What I’d had with Ford had never been real. My fairy tale was a lie. That was the nightmare I’d never wake from.
Giving up on sleep around dawn, and totally exhausted, I took a quick shower and slipped back into the pjs Tori had loaned me. Then I padded down the hall like a zombie, focused on getting some coffee in me. It was just before seven, but the unmistakable scent of piping hot java had reached my nose already. Maybe Tori hadn’t slept at all.
But when I got to the kitchen, it was Stefan who I blinked at through my bleary eyes. He was leaning against the counter with a steaming mug in his hand, just staring off into space. If anything, he looked like he’d had an even more sleepless night than me.
“Hey,” I said, my voice coming out soft and scratchy.
Without a word, he took down a clean mug, filled it with coffee, and handed it to me.
“Sugar? Half and half?”
I smirked. “Come on, bro. You know I take it black. Like my soul.”
“Just trying to be a good host.”
I walked over to the table and sank into the chair closest to the window, trying to soak up the first rays of morning sunlight. It wasn’t until I’d taken the fourth or fifth sip of my coffee that my vision fully cleared.
“You look as exhausted as I feel,” I told Stefan. “Tori sleeping in?”
“You could say that.” He sighed. “She hasn’t been sleeping well the past few weeks. She usually sleeps on her stomach, but that’s kind of impossible right now. I think she was up until four just trying to find a comfortable position. I’ll be glad when the baby’s here.”
“We all will. You guys pick out any names yet?”
