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I had convinced Solomon to let me put in an order at a local drugstore, claiming I was just picking up some bath products, and had squirreled away a pregnancy test amongst the rest of the products. Solomon handed the bag to me with a smile when it arrived, and I had managed to grin back, hoping he couldn’t see what was really going on inside my head.
Which was full-blown, straight-up, fucking panic.
I hadn’t bothered going to Alex with this request, since he had been acting like a damn robot since our confrontation the other night. I got it, I did – he didn’t want to talk about all of that stuff with me, but breaking it off? Right then and there? Without even giving me a chance to explain why I understood what he was going through? I wasn’t going to try to force him to give me what I wanted. He had made himself clear.
But, right now, he was the last thing on my mind. No, I had to take this test and figure out if I was pregnant – because I had a horrible feeling that all the reckless, exceptionally fun sex that I’d been having was going to come back and bite me in the ass.
And, in that instant, as I stared down at the test in front of me, reality was starting to settle in. Two thin red lines had appeared in the plastic window of the small strip I’d just peed on – I had checked, and double-checked, and yeah, that meant I was pregnant.
But I couldn’t be. Right? I mean, I could be, in a practical sense, but there was no way I was actually, really, truly pregnant. There was no way. Because if I was really pregnant, it was going to drop an atomic bomb in the middle of my life...
There was another test in the package. Let me take that one first before I get too sold on the idea. It was likely just a false positive, nothing for me to get too up in my head about...
I quickly took the second test, staring at the same plastic window as I waited for the single line to come up, so I could breathe a sigh of relief and then toss this stuff away.
But, instead, I slowly watched two more lines develop in front of me, two neat little check marks that seemed to say, yeah, girl, you’re pregnant.
And I slumped down against the tub and felt the tears begin to course down my face.
No. No. This couldn’t be happening. I was only twenty-two, for God’s sake – I wasn’t ready to have a child, not yet, not so soon. And even if I was...I didn’t even know which one of them the father was! I didn’t know if they even wanted kids! We hadn’t exactly sat down and had this conversation, given everything else that had been happening. Shit, shit, shit...
I stared at the two tests scattered in front of me and took a deep, shaky breath. I mean, there were ways out of this, if I wanted there to be. I didn’t have to go through with the pregnancy if I didn’t want to...
Even as that thought crossed my mind, something in me protested, refusing to so much as entertain that as an idea. I planted my hands on my belly and stroked the outline of it – I knew there was no way I would be showing yet, no way this little thing would be anything more than a cluster of cells inside of me, but I felt a sudden, deep pang of protectiveness.
No. No, I wasn’t going to have an abortion. The certainty caught me off-guard; I hadn’t exactly given much thought to children before this moment, and, when I had, I had assumed I’d have the same gene my mother did, that one that made it easy to walk away from the prospect of motherhood.
Just like she had walked away from me, all those years ago. A deep pain hit my chest, and I clamped my hand over my mouth, shocked by the enormity of the sudden emotion I was feeling.
My mother had left me all those years ago – she had abandoned me, when I had been little more than an infant, on my father’s doorstep, and left a note never to contact her again. I’d overheard my father and Damyan talking about it, though they hadn’t known I was listening in. My father would never have burdened me with that information if he had had the choice, but I knew it. I knew it deep in my soul, the way she had walked away from me, the way she had left me behind, as though I was nothing.
She had never contacted me, not once, not in all the time that had passed since then. And, sometimes, it left a hole in me so huge I wasn’t sure anything would be able to fill it – not my father, not my family, not my friends, nothing. Nothing seemed big enough to fix the deep, unshakeable knowledge that my own mother had chosen to leave me behind – that she had gone through the trouble of pregnancy and childbirth and then decided I wasn’t worth what came next.
But this child? No, this child was never going to have to feel like that. I was never going to burden them with the same pain. I was certain of it. I rose to my feet, and looked at myself in the mirror, locking eyes with my reflection and trying to steel myself.
Because, God, I knew this was going to be hard. I knew I was going to have to explain to my father how I had gotten pregnant when I was in the house alone with two bodyguards and nobody else; I was going to have to explain to Solomon and Alex why I wanted to keep the child, even if I didn’t know who it belonged to. Alex – God, Alex. After what had just happened between us, this couldn’t have come at a worse time. After he’d told me he wanted to move things back to being professional, I was going to hit him with this.
But I couldn’t let any of that stop me. No matter how much all of this scared me, I had to face it down, if I was going to be a mother. If I was going to be the kind of mother that I’d never had, the mother I had always dreamed of when I was a child.
A wave of emotion hit me hard. God, was this what it was going to be like being pregnant? Constantly feeling as though I was being rocked on this ocean of feeling? Maybe. Or maybe it was just the realization that, after all this time, I wanted to be the kind of mother I had deserved as a kid – I wanted to be there for this baby, no matter how much chaos it brought into my life, no matter how much trouble it caused.
"You’re worth it," I whispered, to the tiny little creature – no, the beginnings of a creature, really – that was growing inside of me right now. I knew they couldn’t hear me, but I needed them to know. I needed them to hear it. I needed that to be the very first thing they heard, that they were worth it, every part of it.
I jumped when all at once, I heard Solomon and Alex talking to one another; I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but it still made my stomach twist into a knot. I knew I was going to have to tell them – they were the first people who deserved to know.
Even if I didn’t have a fucking clue how I was meant to put it into words.
Chapter Twenty – Solomon
"What exactly did you want to talk to us about?" I asked Olya, as she twisted her hands in a heap in her lap. Alex was sitting beside me on the couch, staring at her, arms crossed over his chest as he waited for her to finally come out with it.
"I’m getting there," she protested. "Just...just give me a minute, okay?"
What the fuck was going on here? I couldn’t help but let my mind race. I knew something had happened between her and Alex, though neither of them had been in any rush to come clean about exactly what it had actually been. I guessed it wasn’t my business, but I still wished they would just come out and tell me – tell me what was happening, catch me up on whatever had changed to shift the atmosphere between us.
"What’s going on?” Alex pressed her, clearly not willing to wait around any longer than he already had. He didn’t like feeling as though he was out of the loop for any reason, and I could tell all of this was getting to him.
"I...I don’t know how to say it," she confessed, her voice shaking helplessly. I reached out, and planted a hand on her knee, silently letting her know she had nothing to worry about. I knew there wasn’t a damn thing she could say to me that would change the way I felt about her, not now, not ever.
