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I wait near the front of the store for his return, feeling like a little duck in a lake full of alligators as I shiver next to the checkout lane. I get a few strange looks, but nobody speaks to me.
Finally, I see Eddy emerge with a cart stacked high with food and four 12-packs of diet soda. I forgot that he basically lives off that stuff. Refuses to drink water. God knows I’ve tried to change him, but it’s proven futile.
At the counter, I can feel my face flush as the cashier scans the pregnancy test after the food, placing it in a separate bag. Eddy distracts me with idle conversation about the differences between the Walmarts and America and Mexico, but it’s just noise. My mind is busy swirling in a sea of possibilities.
Back in the car, Eddy glances over at me, then at the small box sitting on my lap. I’ve refused to put it in the trunk. I feel like I need to have it with me the entire drive back.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks.
I sigh. “What is there to talk about? Nikolai’s life is hard enough, and a baby would make everything more complicated. I can’t see how he’d be happy about this.”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“Not yet,” I reply, looking out the window as the buildings blur to either side of us. “He still hasn’t told me that he loves me. I thought he was going to, but I stopped him, and he just hasn’t said anything about it since.”
“You can ask him about that, too,” he suggests.
“Maybe… But I want to know the results of the test first. I need to know if I’m actually pregnant.”
“We’ll make it work,” he says. “Whatever it comes out to, we’ll make it work.”
I hide my tears as we arrive back at the house, rushing out before anyone can see me and locking myself in one of the upstairs bathrooms. There, I fumble with the little pink box until the pregnancy test comes clattering out onto the floor.
“Dammit,” I hiss as I scoop it up. I hope it’s not broken.
I turn it over a few times in my hand, and nothing seems to be out of place. It’s just a stick of white plastic with a little window on it that I’m supposed to piss on. If men had to take pregnancy tests, I’m sure they would be pine-scented with a picture of a naked woman on the front with their mouth open.
I laugh a little at how crude the idea is, but from my experience, menarecrude. I’m never going to forget the first time Nikolai told me to lick his cum off the floor.
The keywords here beingfirst time.
Maybe I just got an oddball, but he’s a lovable one.
And he takes care of me. He’s not the asshole I first mistook him for. He’s softer on the inside. All it took was a little time and a lot of sex.
Thinking about him makes the wait easier after I’m done taking the test. The package says three minutes, and I try not to look at it for that long, but my eyes are drawn to it when the results appear in the corner of my eye.
31
Nikolai
“Hey, are you busy?” Dream’s voice is so quiet beside me that I barely even hear her.
I look up from my book, The Art of War. I’ve read it a dozen times already, but this house doesn’t have a very large library. I’ve already gone through everything else of interest. “What’s up?”
She clasps her hands together, wringing them so hard that it looks like she’s trying to get water out of them. Honestly, it looks painful. “Can we talk?” She looks over at Jasha, who’s still engrossed in a copy of some trashy romance novel. “Alone…”
My heart skips a beat when I think about what this could be about. Did I do something wrong? Is she sick? Does she just want to have sex again? She looks awfully nervous, so I doubt it’s that.
Maybe she broke something of mine, but everything I have is replaceable.
Perhaps a text from Diego?
I set my book aside, marking the page with an old receipt. “Of course. Let’s go to the study.”
Dream looks relieved as she follows me, but her face still holds a certain kind of dread that I can’t quite place. With the date for the attack on the Cartel headquarters rapidly approaching, her face is making my stomach twist tight with anxiety.
I open the heavy wooden door and flick on the light. There’s a delay before the light comes on, but once it does, it reveals a beautiful unused study with leather chairs and an antique coffee table. There’s a bit of dust around, but nobody should bother us here. Something tells me that we need extra privacy for the conversation we’re about to have.
