Page 54 of Dangers of Love

I’d thought he’d be in the same place I was. That his grand gesture of making over his new home to accommodate a baby and then proposing had been all he’d had on his mind. Not that they had been unimportant because they both meant a lot to me, but I’d still thought we would be on the same level when we had this discussion.

But he’d been taking charge and doing things that needed to be done while I’d been sitting around, talking to myself. He’d figured out health insurance that I hadn’t even thought about and had even made provisions in case something happened to him before we married. He’d pretty much assumed that I was moving in right now, and we’d be moving forward together from here on out, so he’d started to work on what shape that future would take.

I was upset with him for how he’d responded when I first told him I might be pregnant, but since then, he’d adjusted better and faster than I had. He was ready to announce our engagement and tell people about the baby too. I hadn’t even had the guts to ask Eoin to go with me tomorrow. I’d waited for him to offer.

Now, I had a question to answer and absolutely no idea what to say.

“Hey, talk to me.” Eoin’s concern was written all over his face. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

He meant it. I had no doubts about his sincerity. With the exception of me putting us in actual life-or-death danger, he always respected my choices, and I could excuse those prior moments of manhandling me without my consent since he’d done it to save our lives.

“I’m fine with telling your family that we’re engaged. It’s the pregnancy part I’m a little…leery of sharing.” I sat back down across from him. “I just think that we might consider holding off until I’m a little farther along.”

His finger traced a pattern on the back of my hand, and I had a feeling that he wasn’t even truly aware of the movement, focused more instead on what I’d said. “Is something wrong? With the baby?”

“No,” I assured him. “It’s just…my mom had so many issues getting pregnant, staying pregnant…I just don’t want to jinx it.”

He came around the table and knelt in front of me, taking my hands in his. “Everything is going to be fine. I won’t let anything happen to you or our baby.”

I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have control over enough of the world to make that type of promise, but I knew that he already understood that. He wasn’t making that vow because he was naïve or a dreamer. He was making it because he was just as scared as I was.

“It’s okay,” he said. “We don’t have to tell anyone that you’re pregnant. I just thought that it would make sense when we told them about the engagement. Either way, people are going to think we’re moving fast, but I thought it might make things easier.” He kissed my hands. “We won’t say anything you don’t want to. We don’t even have to tell anyone about being engaged. You can just be my girlfriend, and we stayed in L.A. because we wanted to spend our first Christmas here together.”

He’d do it. He’d let me hide our engagement and our child, like I was ashamed of them both. And how long would the deception really last? Even if we got married tomorrow, people would still be able to do the math and figure out that the baby had come before the ring. It wasn’t as if the two of us had even known each other long enough for anyone to speculate that we’d gotten engaged because it was the next logical step in our relationship.

I was scared that something would go wrong, and that came from my mother’s medical history, but if I was being truly honest, if the conception had happened at a later point in my life, after a slightly longer relationship, I wouldn’t have been leery of telling our families. I’d never had the health issues that my mom had always had from years of trying to stay thin enough for her career. I was also younger than she was when she’d started trying to get pregnant.

No, if I asked him to keep a secret like this from his family, I would be doing it for selfish reasons, concerned about what people would think about me and the choices I’d made in my life. They were going to be my family too, and I didn’t want the first time I met them to be looked back on as me hiding things from them. I also didn’t want Eoin to think that I was in any way ashamed of being with him. My own issues needed to take a back seat here.

Honestly, I was beginning to think that I should follow his lead in all of this. He clearly knew better than I did about what needed to be done or how to do it. I was in so far over my head that if I didn’t take his hand, I’d drown.

“No,” I said with a smile. “This isn’t just about me. This isourengagement.Ourbaby. I want you to be able to tell who you want when you want.”

“Are you sure?”

The joy I saw in his eyes told me that I’d made the right choice. After an awful year, he deserved to be able to share some good news with the people he loved. And unexpected as all of this had been, it was indeed good news.

Thirty-One

Eoin

If I didn’t quit sneakinglooks at Aline, she was going to catch me and want to know what the hell I was doing. Then I’d be put in the very awkward position of either lying to her and her figuring it out or telling the truth and pissing her off. Neither scenario ended well for me.

She’d agreed to tell my parents about our engagement and the baby, and I was going with her tomorrow to spend Christmas Day with her family. Both of those were things that I wanted, but I kept feeling like some other shoe was going to drop and ruin it. That she’d suddenly recognize the fact that she could do so much better than me and decide that, while she might want the baby, she didn’t want me along with it. Or she’d think about how pissed Freedom was going to be when she saw me and realize I wasn’t worth the headache.

Death wasn’t the only thing that could take someone away.

So, I kept watching her, paying close attention to every expression, to every shift in body language.

I’d been worried at Martina’s that I’d have to talk Aline into letting me carry everything, but she actually hadn’t had that much stuff, so it’d been easy to take the heavier bag and leave her with the smaller bag that held her laptop and other electronic stuff.

When we picked up things from her parents’ house tomorrow, I expected a little more push-back, and I definitely wasn’t looking forward to what would happen when we went to Stanford to move everything from the apartment she shared with Freedom. But that was the future, and I had enough to think about just for today and tomorrow.

On the way home, we picked up some Italian food from a restaurant run by Jehovah’s Witnesses, who explained to us that since they didn’t celebrate holidays, they made a killing staying open when everyone else was closed. They were reasonably priced, and the food was really good, so I didn’t mind that they’d included a couple copies ofThe Watchtowerin the bag with our food.

Now, as I finished cleaning up after our meal, Aline went to clean up and put on a nice sweater even though I’d told her that no one would care what she was wearing. I got it, though. I’d already planned on telling her to pick out my clothes for tomorrow because I wanted to make a good impression on her parents. Freedom already didn’t like me, so I had that strike against me before we even got there. Who knew the shit she’d told them about me?

“How does this look?” Aline asked as she came into the kitchen.

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