Page 8 of Mountain Man's Forgiveness
Chapter 6
Eva
Istare at the white stick in my hand, not believing what I’m seeing. The word “pregnant” is screaming at me in capital letters. My lips start to tingle as my breaths come in shallow gasps. I don’t bother with the rest of the tests in the box because I’m never late.
Flustered, I toss the stick onto my bathroom counter and sink to the floor, where I place my head between my knees. I slowly inhale and exhale several times, the oxygen good for me and the baby.
The baby.
Being a mother isn’t something that I ever imagined for my life. Not even as a child. When most girls played with baby dolls, I played with lizards and frogs and roly-polies. I was always outside, my pockets full of living things. I never even babysat kids. I was too busy with school and summer science camps.
Omigawd. Omigawd. Omigawd. This was the variable I never accounted for, the one thing I couldn’t predict or control. What am I going to do? There is a tiny life growing inside me that is depending on me to take care of it.
My first instinct is to research everything from folic acid supplementation to micronutrients to the epigenetic changes occurring in my body. But I need to sit with this news and feel it.
My eyes well up at the gravity of the situation when it occurs to me that I am having the mountain man’s baby. The guy who agreed that our sex was a onetime event. Never mind that it was so freaking hot. We did it three times in five different locations in his house, including outside, which was incredible.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That’s when it happened. We were standing on the back porch, leaning over the rail. That had to have been it. It’s the only time a condom broke.
My nerves spike up to ten, which can’t be good for the baby, so I do the only thing that brings me peace quickly. I grab my binoculars and head out the door to the park near Lake Indigo.
There’s something comforting about birdwatching, about focusing on a cardinal in the canopy and pretending, for entire stretches of time, that I’m nothing but a pair of eyes behind glass, not a person who has to tell my one-night-stand that he’s going to be a father.
A mother jogs by, the sticky elastic of her sports bra peeking out as she pushes the jogging stroller. She seems unbothered by anything, smiling at her little one as she moves. I find myself smiling and reaching for my belly.
Off to the left, I see a group of people exercising, probably Station 8 fitness. I see their flyers all over campus. They host several classes a day at all fitness levels, though this particular one is obviously advanced. Their instructor wears mirrored sunglasses and stalks among the students, barking out corrections and encouragement.
Each time she shouts “burpee!” they throw themselves to the ground, spring up, and land grinning and breathless, some moregracefully than others. I envy their commitment to “good pain.” I couldn’t do it.
As the group breaks up, I recognize the lone male figure headed this way.
Aiden.
My insides practically shrivel up. I have to tell him about the baby. Now.
He lopes over, t-shirt soaked, hair drenched with sweat the way it was the day we conceived our child. It’s been four weeks, two since our last excursion. Julia was with us both times, so it was easy to pretend nothing had happened between us.
“Fancy seeing you here, Trouble.” He drags the back of his hand across his forehead. “I thought you stuck to the trails.”
I laugh because it’s what I’m supposed to do, even though my heart punches wildly at my ribs. “Even biologists need a break from the monotony, you know.” I fiddle with the hem of my shirt, delaying the inevitable.
He studies me, those gray eyes as unreadable as the sky before a thunderstorm. “It’s good to see you.”
“Aiden, I’m pregnant.”
The words hang between us like soggy tree moss after a storm. Aiden stands there, hands on hips, not blinking, his chest expanding and contracting as if his body is the only part of him capable of movement.
When I said it to myself in the mirror this morning—practiced it, actually—it sounded distant and abstract, like an obscure fact I once had to recite for a quiz. Now, it’s a boulder loosened suddenly at the crest of a hill while the unsuspecting victims wait below.
His jaw ticks before he says the opposite of what I expected to hear.
“You look beautiful.”
Chapter 7
Aiden
Eva’s pregnant.
