Page 74 of The Omega's Secret Baby
“Any chance you can get Valium there?”
“Probably not. Sorry, man.” He patted me on the back and headed out the door.
I took another deep breath and started pacing the living room. What was I going to do about my college aspirations if I was pregnant again? No, no, no, I couldn’t think about that now.
I sank onto the couch.
Was I really going to have my dreams smashedagainby my stupid fertility?
I couldn’t do this to Griff again, either. My brother really needed to start his own life at some point. Preferably before he was fifty. I totally owed him too much already. He’d been a godsend through all of this, but I couldn’t keep holding him back. The man was still a virgin, for fuck’s sake!
Okay, Eli, breathe.
Maybe Matt could help me. That was an option now, right? I mean, sure, I’d gotten mad at him earlier, but he was new to this whole parenting thing. It was unfair of me to expect him to be perfect at it from the get-go. Jake was going to survive his run-in with Matt’s family, and I’d just have to take a firmer stand on the whole matter in the future. For Jakeandfor this baby. If I was having a baby.
ButifI was having a baby, could I seriously expect a CEO to spend a lot of time with it? No, his family raised their kids by hiring other people to do that for them. It wasn’t generally a bad thing to get a little help, but they were really overdoing it. I wasnotgoing to hand over my baby like that.
If Iwashaving a baby.
Dear Lord, what was taking Griff so long?
I got up and started pacing again. By the time my brother came back from the drugstore, I’d almost walked a pattern into the rug, and not a very pretty one.
“You’re back!” I snatched the paper bag he was holding out of his hand.
He grabbed it back from me. “That’s my cupcakes!”
“You went to get cupcakes?” While I’d been sitting here worrying? “Where did you even get those?”
“I have my sources.” Was he blushing? Where had hebeen? My brother was becoming a mystery to me, lately. I wasn’t at all surprised that he had someone to go to for sugary snacks—they were his drugs—but someone who made him blush like that?
Interesting.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“No one, okay? Don’t look at me like that.” He pushed a smaller bag at me that I hadn’t seen at first. “Go take your test.”
“Okay, okay.” If it was important, I’d find out about this guy sooner or later. “Wish me luck.”
“Are we wishing for baby or no baby?”
I opened my mouth, the reply I wanted to give on the tip of my tongue, but it wouldn’t come out. “Just wish me good luck,” I said in the end.
He stepped up to me and squeezed my shoulder. “Good luck, bro!”
I saw him start to dig into his cupcakes as I made my way to the bathroom. God, why hadn’t I checked the date on the condoms? Such a stupid mistake!
Closing the door to the bathroom behind myself, I got ready to find out whether those condoms had doomed me to another pregnancy. It wasn’t that I never wanted another child, but thissowasn’t the right time. Not while Matt was taking on new responsibilities and I wanted to go back to school. Not while I wasn’t sure if we could even make this relationship work after all. So much had happened between us. So many things left unsaid for too long. Perhaps the worlds we lived in truly were too different.
But none of that mattered if this test turned out to be positive. Then we’d have to find a way to work alongside each other even if only as co-parents. No matter what I’d said earlier, I was never going to repeat the decision I’d made in the past. Keeping Jake from Matt had been a mistake. I knew that. I was just angry. And scared, in a way, of what was going to happen if that horrible family got their hands on him.
The thirty seconds I had to wait for the test result were theworst. I was convinced there was some sort of spell on these stupid test sticks that made time slow down while they did their thing.
And then when the thirty seconds were finally up, I couldn’t make myself look. Like the chicken I was, I took the test stick and took it downstairs without peeking at the result.
My brother was still in the living room, face full of questions.
I held the stick out to him. “You tell me. I can’t look.”
