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And I didn’t have to.
Calliope hadn’t had a lot of things to say about Kip’s reaction to the pregnancy, which surprised me. She wasn’t known as someone to mince her words. At first, I’d thought it was because her loyalty lay with him. She’d known him since they were kids, after all. Told me she considered him a brother.
Everyone else had turned their backs on him, so I thought she might be showing him some grace, some mercy.
But no.
She was gearing up to be the most ruthless of them all.
I saw that the first day she was at my place after she’d found out about everything. We were sitting in the kitchen talking. Well, she was cooking. I was sitting, because even if I hadn’t been an absolute disaster in the kitchen, I couldn’t stand the smell of vegetables or meat. Though I was on the other side of the counter with the crisp sea breeze coming in from the open window, I struggled.
Kip had come into the room.
I’d frozen, as I did whenever he came into my general vicinity, unable to control my reaction.
Calliope, on the other hand, didn’t miss a beat. She continued speaking and moving around the kitchen, not even glancing in Kip’s direction. It was as if he didn’t exist.
That behavior continued whenever he was around.
There was the cold shoulder, but this was something else. Calliope had severely and cleanly cut Kip out of her world.
Two friendships had seemingly been severed.
Both of which had existed since before I came on the scene. Fuck, since birth, it seemed.
Part of me felt guilty about that. About being the catalyst. But most of me was angry for feeling that guilt.Kipwas the reason for his friends cutting him off. Rowan and Calliope were good people, with strong values and morals.
Kip had shown he did not have strong morals, that he might not have been the person they thought he was. He’d made his bed.
And he wasn’t sleeping in mine.
Which was a good thing, I told myself.
Except I couldn’t quite tell myself that in the middle of the night when I was staring up at the ceiling, the TV droning in the background to drown out the silence. That’s when I was the weakest. When midnight gave way to early morning. That’s when my fears and my past intermingled and my heartbeat would race, and all I wanted to do was escape my own mind. My own body.
Sex with Kip was the only thing I had discovered to do such a thing. Not other men, mind you. Otherwise, I would’ve dragged my ass out of bed and to the bar two towns over to get fucked, to get some relief—that’s how fucking desperate I was.
Even though I didn’t have these particular problems my entire life, I had plenty of demons that got a little too loud for my liking, and I quieted them like most slightly unhinged people did—with booze, shopping, food, binge-watching trash TV, and sex. Not necessarily in that order. And not necessarily all at once.
And even if I did those things all at once, they didn’t quite block out all that noise. I’d tried it. I’d tried pretty much everything.
Kip Goodman was the only man who could take me completely outside myself, if only for the length of time his dick was inside me—and he was pretty fucking great at keeping it hard and inside for a glorious amount of time.
So yes, sometimes in the dark of the night, I almost wavered. I almost got out of bed and crept to his room.
But for what?
I was getting absolutely no signs that he was still attracted to me. No, he was making it pretty clear that he wasn’t, that he didn’t even like me.
And I didn’t like him.
Therefore, even the pregnancy hormones and the pain of the past could not urge me to go beg for his cock.Nothingwould make me do that.
I wasn’t even halfway through this pregnancy, and the next twenty-two weeks yawned in front of me like a fucking chasm.
I was idly thinking about all of this while staring out the window at the ocean and picking at salt and vinegar chips that would never be as good as Smiths from back in Australia.
Weird I didn’t call it ‘home.’
