Page 170 of Made in Love and Blood

“Y-yeah.”

The way Nico’s word hitched had Salvatore scrubbing a hand down his face and swearing under his breath. He had not expected to arrive home to a distraught Nico waiting in the driveway to speak to him.

Salvatore tried to do the math in his head, coming up with a two month, or thereabouts, difference between what would be Francesca’s due date, and his own wife’s. He thought one newborn in his fifties would be a lot to handle and adjust to, but two? Weeks apart?

The longer Salvatore stayed silent, mulling over his thoughts and feelings on the bomb that had just been dropped at his feet, the more restless Nico became on the white couch. Sunk deep into the cushions, his leg rested over his bouncing knee, and his gaze locked on the windows behind Salvatore. But his mind, that went somewhere else. He could see it in his eyes. Nico barely even noticed the dog sleeping at his feet.

Stella the cat, sitting on the edge of Sal’s desk, nibbled at the hair between her pink toe beans as if she didn’t have any concern for it all.

Nico drew in a shaky, wet breath, sniffling hard after. He used the heel of his palm to wipe away the tears that spilled down his cheeks. “Fuck.”

“Well, the time for crying is done,” Salvatore murmured, “as that’s not going to help now.”

“I’m s-sorry.”

Oh, he knew.

Nico’s guilt and everything else he felt about the situation permeated the room with heaviness and turmoil. Salvatore did not think for one second that it had been easy for Nico to get in his car, drive here, and tell his girlfriend’s father that he’d gotten her pregnant.

But he did it. Sal respected that. It counted for something.

“I tried. I did everything right, Sal. I—”

“Not everything,” Salvatore countered, but not unkindly. “At some point, things were not as they should be, if this is where we find ourselves.”

Condoms, he meant. He wasn’t going to spell it out. Who the fuck was Salvatore to talk, anyway?

He bet, in fifty other lives where the two of them existed, they would still have somehow come together, and this exact thing would’ve played out repeatedly. From day one, neither had any say or control between the other. Two moths chasing the same brightly burning flame.

“Fucking inevitable,” Salvatore muttered to himself, then.

Nico’s head bobbed up, and his teary eyes watched the man across the room. “W-what?”

“Oh, this whole damned thing. Just inevitable. Bound to fucking happen, wasn’t it?”

Nico’s shoulders shuddered with his next rattling breath. “I don’t understand.”

“You’ve got to get yourself under control. The tears won’t make a plan for you and Frankie.”

A harsh breath left Nico. “I know.” He wiped harder at his face, almost seemingly disgusted that he had to do it at all. “Boys don’t fucking cry.”

Salvatore could guess who told him that nonsense. “Perhaps boys don’t, but men do. You’re sure she’s going to want to keep it?” he asked carefully.

A low, pained cry crawled out of Nico.

“Y-yeah,” the kid mumbled around a hiccup. “If she didn’t fucking want to, she would have taken the Plan B I got for her, and she wouldn’t have kept it hidden it for a month and a half after she knew for sure. I’d say so, Sal.”

Salvatore cleared his throat, ignoring the attitude that bled into Nico’s words. But, he didn’t take it personally. He should have his feelings. This would be, undoubtedly, something that rocked his entire world. He’d turn twenty before he became a father, but that meant little when the mother was still a teenager herself, and a whole world of trouble piled around the boundary of their happy little bubble.

From the moment he invited Nico into the house, taking him up to the study where the two of them could have a private conversation about whatever happened, honesty came first. From beginning, to end, Nico told him everything.

How it happened, when it happened and why it happened. How he tried to fix it, how he did the right, responsible thing, and how it hadn’t happened again. He made sure of that.

And yet...

“We can only control ourselves, and our own choices and actions,” Salvatore said, folding his arms over his chest. “So, you did what you could, but you can’t control her path. Take a breath, and let yourself calm down, Nico.”

“I’m tr-trying,” Nico mumbled, still crying.