Page 33 of One Moment Please
“Yes, a meeting. A meetup. Whatever you call this.”
She hesitantly hands it to me. “Josh, you do believe me when I tell you there’s been no one else, right?”
I watch her face for a moment, taking in her blotchy skin, her watery brown eyes, and wild chestnut hair. There are many things this woman is, but a liar isn’t one of them. “I believe you.”
A wobbly smile lifts her expression. “Okay. But you should know that I don’t expect—”
“I’m going to pass your chart off to the nurse. She’ll get you set up with an obstetrician and give you discharge instructions,” I interrupt, not ready to even begin to unpack the baggage we have. “I’ll…call you.”
I nod woodenly before turning on my heel and leaving. Walking down the hall, I exhale heavily. That probably looked pretty bad. She may have left my house like a thief in the night, but right now, I’m acting like a man on the run.
I’m seated on the floor of my newly empty living room still in shock that my entire life fit into a tiny little storage pod that the moving guys just drove off with twenty minutes ago. The pod will be kept at some industrial park in Boulder until I figure out what the hell I’m going to do with my life.
My life as its current state…
No job…check.
No place to live…check.
No love life to speak of…big, fat, bolded check.
And as if that list wasn’t sparkling enough, now I’m pregnant with a stranger’s baby…check, check, check.
I lean my head against the wall and let out a deep sigh.
How did I go from living my best life as a student, hanging with friends, wild and free, to being pregnant, jobless, and moving in with my parents? Where the hell did I go wrong?
Hot tears trail down my face. Tears have become my new best friend these past few days as I’ve processed this unexpected news.
This isn’t how my life was supposed to go. I have plans, goals, a career to start. I should’ve been in love and married to someone before I became a mother. And I certainly never intended to have a baby with a guy who can barely tolerate me.
How in the hell am I going to tell my parents all of this?
They already ask me why I can’t be more like my sister who got married right out of college and gave them two beautiful grandbabies. Whereas I graduated college and worked tirelessly in social work while pondering what I wanted to do with my life.
So, what does any self-respecting millennial do when they don’t know what their future holds? They go back to school. Because surely a master’s degree at twenty-seven years old will be the answer to all my problems.
Foolish.
I sniffle and pull my shirt up to wipe my nose. My front door opens, revealing Dean.
His smiling face falls when his eyes land on me. “Why are you crying?”
I shrug and then more tears fall.
He strides to me, squatting beside me. “Seriously, Lynsey. Why are you crying?”
I shake my head, my emotions so thick I can’t even communicate with words right now.
“Is it because you’re moving?” he asks, adjusting his dark-framed glasses and pinning me with a grave look.
More crying.
“Because you have to move in with your parents? I told you that you could crash at my place. This is stupid, Lyns.”
I shake my head, covering my face with my hands. It’s true, Dean did offer his place to me, but I worried that he would struggle with boundaries, and after him professing his love for Kate last summer and our history of dating, it would blur a lot of lines.
And moving in with my parents was supposed to be temporary. Now that I’m pregnant, I have no clue what any of it means.
