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Chapter Eleven
Riley
The day after Rebecca and I talked, I stood in my kitchen and dwelled over our conversation. Ethan would be back tomorrow, and what would he say? Was it even right to tell him about the baby when he was about to learn that his mother was dying?
I was a selfish person, I knew that, but wasn’t that just a little bit too selfish? Perhaps I would wait until after the funeral and then tell him. Maybe it would lift his spirits.
I clenched my eyes—or make him even more upset than he already was. Was there ever a good time to announce you were pregnant? Maybe for a lot of couples, but Ethan and I weren’t a couple.
Coral had told me at the coffee shop yesterday that Ethan was bringing a woman home with him. A woman! He’d been gone for four weeks and had already found another woman to warm his bed. What was he going to do when I told him he was going to be a father? What would the woman say? Was it serious with them?
I wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but I missed Ethan every moment of the day. It was like the minute he was gone, he was all I could think about. Now he had someone new in his life. I had screwed all of this up so badly.
I knew that Rebecca was keeping my secret. Had my family heard of my pregnancy, they would have been banging down my door. I was glad they didn’t know because I was still trying to wrap my mind around the changes my life was about to undergo.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t wanted children. I thought kids were great. I just hadn’t planned to have one this soon. In hindsight, I guess I figured I had a couple more years before I needed to give it serious thought, and during that time, I would find a man that I loved and wanted to spend my life with.
I stared at my back window as I held my coffee cup in my hands. Now I was going to be a single mother. Ethan had moved on and probably wouldn’t want anything to do with me. I had no clue how his new career would affect him when it came to the baby. Would he look at it as a good thing or bad? Obviously, with me attached to it, it would be bad.
What if he had a baby with this other woman? Then our baby would have a half-sibling. I didn’t want our baby to have a half-sibling. Was that weird?
Was that because I wanted Ethan to myself? I’d never considered a serious relationship with him. Would he break up with the other woman when he knew I was carrying his child?
I winced. I didn’t want him to be with me just because I was having a baby. I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to be with him. A little voice inside my mind whispered,of course, you do.
I set down my coffee without even taking a sip. I had learned the other day that I could smell the coffee all I wanted, but drinking it turned my stomach upside down until about two in the afternoon. I wanted to be irritated, but I couldn’t.
My hand floated to my belly, and I sighed. What kind of a life could I give this little one? Yes, I had a stable job, but I sucked at relationships, and I wasn’t committed to anything besides having fun. Not that I’d had much of that in the last several weeks. Nope, I’d been sober as a stone.
I also didn’t know what to tell Joe. I was still seeing him, and we’d gone out at least once a week, but I’d always put the brakes on sleeping with him. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I just didn’t think it was fair to sleep with him while carrying another man’s baby—especially if he didn’t know.
I knew that we were both on the cusp of becoming more emotionally invested in our relationship. I think that if I gave Joe the encouragement he was looking for, we’d take the next step. Sadly, that step involved me telling the truth, and I wasn’t quite ready for that.
For some reason, I didn’t want to tell him before I told Ethan. It only made sense to let the father know before anyone else knew, right?
I wished that I had someone to talk about all of this with, but I couldn’t say anything to my family. I sure couldn’t say anything to anyone else in his family. All of my friends were friends with either his or my family. God! Why did I have to live in such a small town?
There was a knock on my door, and then it opened. “Hey, your door is unlocked,” Henley said as he came in.
“Yeah, so?”
“So, you should keep it locked. You never know when some crazy person is going to come in.”
“Like you?” I said to him and quickly poured my coffee down the drain so he wouldn’t ask me why I wasn’t drinking it.
“Funny, no, but you should lock your door.”
“I guess I forgot when I got home last night.”
He grinned. “Joe keeping you up late?”
I wish, I wanted to reply. “I’m not sleeping with Joe.”
“Say what?” He laughed. “You’ve been with the guy for like a month.”
“So?”
“So, when have you ever dated someone that long and not been sleeping with them? Does he suck in bed? I could give him some tips.”
