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ONE
Pregnancy sucked.
And to top it all off, I was absolutely miserable.
Depression was slowly killing me inside.
I didn’t know how to function. I didn’t know how to survive this.
I didn’t even want to get out of bed anymore. In fact, each morning that I woke up, I was angry that I did.
I knew most women were excited about having a baby. Some women might even wish they were me just so they could finally carry the child they’d wanted for so long.
But I didn’t want this. I hated every bit of this.
And I was fucking sorry I was living the “dream” they’d always wanted.
* * *
Trent knocked lightlyon my open bedroom door. I slowly dragged my eyes off the ceiling to look over at him. He frowned and took a step inside. “Bailey, you need to come down and eat breakfast.”
“I’m not hungry,” I told him. And that was the truth. I wasn’t hungry. I had no appetite anymore, and it probably didn’t help that everything I ate eventually came back up later.
Three months pregnant, and my morning sickness still wasn’t getting any better. If my depression wasn’t killing my appetite, the constant nausea and sickness sure as fuck was.
Trent softly sighed and sat on the edge of my bed. He ran his hand over my messy hair. I leaned my head into his touch, swallowing past the sudden lump in my throat. I hated that I couldn’t find comfort in his touch like I used to. “Sis, I’m worried about you.”
I frowned up at him. “What for?” I asked. “Trent, I’m fine,” I lied. I wasn’t okay at all. God, saying I’m fine was the furthest from the truth. “I’m just still struggling to cope—that’s all.”
A dark look passed through Trent’s eyes, a look I knew. I swallowed tears. Everyone here was blaming Seth for this, and I hated it. At one point, I’d wanted to blame him, too, but I couldn’t. Because a fucked up part of me still wanted him to come fix me, to help me, to promise me that I wasn’t alone in this.
“I hate that Seth fucking walked away from you—gets to walk away from all of this, and you have to suffer the consequences of it all by yourself.”
Suffer the consequences.
Yeah, that’s what I was doing. I was fucking suffering. There was no better word to describe the turmoil I was experiencing.
A pang slid through my heart at the thought of Seth, just like it always did. He’d destroyed me; I knew that. I wasn’t blind to it either. But I craved him.
I really fucking missed him, and how fucked up was that? Our “relationship”—if you could even call what we shared together that—had been fucked up from the start. I knew it would end catastrophically—known it from the moment I made that fucking deal with him because I was so desperate to save him.
And it had.
Seth walked away from me and got to continue living his best life while I suffered the consequences of our entire time together.
I had saved him, and now, I had no one left to save myself. I didn’t even have the energy to put toward saving myself anymore. I was just letting myself drown.
It was bullshit. I knew that, but I couldn’t find it in myself to help me.
“Come on,” Trent coaxed. He grabbed my hands in his and pulled me into a sitting position. I glowered at him. He just smiled at me. My lips twitched with my own smile, and after weeks of being so miserable, it felt strange on my face. But Trent was my brother, my rock, the one person in this world I knew would never turn their back on me. “Let’s go eat, yeah? At least eat the meat on your plate, Bailey. I know shit’s hard. I’ve hit a similar low, but you’ve got to keep pushing forward.”
I sighed. That was the problem. I didn’t feel like pushing forward anymore.
Instead, I felt like giving up.
And I think Trent knew that, and I knew it terrified him.
* * *
