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I just had to know what was worth the fight.
THIRTY-ONE
Greyson
“Where is my phone,shit! Sorry, gotta go, bye!”
The whirlwind of activity seemed to stop as soon as it started, and I realized as I fully woke up that Laurel was late for work again.
I hadn’t woken up to her alarm, so I wasn’t sure what the issue was. Whether she didn’t set it for the right time, whether her phone died during the night, or whether she meant to hit the snooze button and accidentally turned it off.
Whatever the reason was, however, she was out the door in a flurry, and I couldn’t help but feel both frustrated and guilty over her being late again. I knew she was the one who had to have the ultimate responsibility when it came to getting herself out the door on time, but I wasn’t happy that she had been late to get up and out the door again after the conversation she and I had had the night before.
But, I also didn’t feel it was my place to lecture her about it.
I wasn’t her boss and I wasn’t her father. It wasn’t my place to tell her what she was doing or should be doing. Or shouldn’t be doing, for that matter. But, I did hope she wasn’t going to get in trouble with her boss again for being late this time. It was technically the third time she was late during this work trip, and I knew that wasn’t going to look good for her, especially when it came to that promotion.
I was alone in the hotel room, and I figured I should get up and head back to my own quarters.
I wanted to shower and get ready for the day, though I didn’t have a lot of personal things I had to get done myself. There were plenty of things I could do, but I wasn’t really in the mood to go out and deal with the hustle and bustle of city life.
But, that was the way it went in these big cities. It was part of the reason I had chosen to live in a small, quiet side of New York City, and why I was going to be happy to get home and get back to my real life. Not that I wasn’t having fun here with Laurel and experimenting with what we were doing with each other, but still.
I missed my routine, and I missed the life I had back home. I loved being out and traveling, but I also missed going back to the normal things I did on a day-to-day basis. Not to mention the fact I felt it would do Laurel some good to be back home and back in her own routine as well. I pulled myself out of bed and headed to the bathroom. Deep down inside, I felt that I should bring it up to her in some way, but I wasn’t sure how to do that without making it sound like I was trying to be controlling or like I was telling her that she was doing her job wrong.
She was the one who knew what to do with her own job and her own career, but looking at it from the outside, I wasn’t sure that she was doing it in a way that was sustainable, and that concerned me. I didn’t want to be the reason why she lost her job with her company, and I would feel terrible if she didn’t get the promotion for being late as many times as she had been.
I used some mouthwash that was sitting on the counter and wiped up a few of the drops I spilled before I left. I tossed the tissue in the garbage, but something caught my eye.
A white plastic stick with a pink cap was sticking out of the garbage, and I immediately knew what it was. Not that I made a habit of buying pregnancy tests or even dealing with them, but I knew what one looked like when I saw it. And the fact that Laurel was the only person in the hotel room meant that she must have been the one to use it.
A knot formed in my stomach as I pulled it out of the garbage.
I looked at it. The test itself was pretty straightforward to read, but the problem was that both the lines had faded, and the entire thing was blank. I’d heard that tests that were left out for a long period of time weren’t accurate, so I had no idea what this said.
Was it possible she was pregnant?
I grabbed my phone, still feeling sick to my stomach as I hurried to get back to my own room. Once there, I called Kenton.
“You know, it’s starting to feel like you needed me to have a phone more than I needed to have one,” Kenton said when he answered. “Pretty sure for the one time I called you, you’ve called me like what, three or four times now?”
“Shut up and listen. This is an emergency,” I said.
“What’s going on?” he asked, suddenly serious. “What happened?”
I quickly told him what I’d found that morning in the bathroom.
“I wasn’t trying to snoop, but when I saw the stick in the garbage, I couldn’t help it. I could be a father right now and have no idea,” I said.
“Slow down, settle down,” Kenton told me. “You don’t even know if she’s pregnant yet. You said you found it in the trash, and it’s too faded to be able to read. So that tells me that she must have used the test sometime other than today, right?”
“Yes,” I said, trying to follow his logic without letting my imagination or fear get the better of me.
“So with that in mind, you have to think if she is pregnant, she would have found out about it before today – and she didn’t say anything about it to you, did she?” he asked.
I knew he was trying to make sense of the situation, just as much as I was, and he did have a point, too. But, I didn’t know what was going on in Laurel’s mind. I didn’t know how long she would wait to tell me, or if she was even pregnant for that matter. I wanted to find out, but I wasn’t sure how to do that without telling her that I had snooped.
Then again, was it snooping? I didn’t know. I had been so taken aback with the suddenness of the entire thing that I wasn’t even sure if it could count as snooping to have seen the pregnancy test in the garbage and to check it out. After all, I was the only one she had been having sex with, so if it was positive, then I was the father.
