Page 64 of Player Misconduct
The smallest smile pulls at her mouth. Then she reaches into her bag and takes out her phone. “I recorded something at my last appointment,” she says. “Do you want to hear it?”
“Yeah,” I breathe.
She hits play.
And then I hear it—the heartbeat.
For a second, the world tilts again. I’m not even aware of breathing.
That’sourbaby. Our heartbeat. Beating because of one impossible night that was never supposed to happen.
I look up, and Kendall’s watching me, uncertain, like she’s waiting for me to break.
Instead, I grin. “That’s our kid,” I say softly.
She nods. “Yeah. That’s our kid.”
A laugh bursts out of me, pure and unfiltered. I run a hand over my face, still half in shock, half dizzy with something that feels a hell of a lot like joy. “God, I don’t even know what to do right now. Half of me wants to go skate a lap around the city, and the other half wants to never stop touching you.”
Her laugh is small but real. “You don’t have to do anything, Aleksi.”
I meet her eyes and smile. “Too late. I already am.”
“We still need to talk and figure this out. No interviews with the media blurting out that a little bundle is coming, okay?”
“What’s there to figure out? We’re having a baby.”
“Please Aleksi…”
“Okay. We’ll do this your way.”
“Thank you. For now, you need to get to orientation,” she says.
“Oh shit… I completely forgot what the hell I was doing the minute I saw you in the window.”
She smiles. “You need to go. We’ll talk later. I still don’t know how this happened since we used protection. You used a condom every time, right?”
“Of course I did.”
She nods and then looks down at my hands as if still trying to piece together how this happened.
“I mean, I ran out of the condoms I brought in my duffle but luckily we had the one from the vending machine.”
Her eyes shoot up to stare back at me, her face turning white as a ghost, her eyes darkening like a storm rolling in, and her jaw dropping. “Youused the condomsthat have been sitting in a vending machine, in the middle of a blazing hot desert, for who knows how long? Did you even check if they were expired?”
My stomach drops. Dammit, this is my fault… isn’t it?
In my defense, it was a desperate situation. Kendall was begging for more and she was only giving me one night. I wasn’t thinking about anything else other than getting back inside of her. The vending machine condoms looked like salvation at the time. Not exactly the best combination for being concerned with reading fine print.
“I mean… probably?” I offer weakly.
She just stares, her jaw slightly dropped.
“Okay, maybe not.”
For a beat, neither of us speaks. Then she lets out a breath that sounds halfway between a laugh and a groan. “You’re unbelievable.”
“Yeah,” I say softly. “And apparently fertile as hell.”
