Chapter Nineteen
Two weeks. That was how long had passed since Nate and I had seen each other last. The flowers that he had sent for me had long since started to droop on the countertop, browning around the edges, but I didn’t quite have it in me to throw them out yet, even though I knew it was ridiculously sentimental for me to still be clinging on to them at all. I just didn’t want to say goodbye to them quite yet, as though they were some kind of direct line to Nate. I read the note that he’d sent with them a hundred times a day, the shape of the letters burned into my memory, as though that would be enough to hurry along his decision.
I had tried to focus in on catching up with my friends around the city, especially Patricia– she had moved outside of town for a job, but she made the trip back in to the city to catch up with me over breakfast one morning. I had been going to a lot of breakfast and lunch dates with my friends recently, because it was far more acceptable for me not to drink at them than it was any other time. I still hadn’t told anyone else about the pregnancy and I had no intention of doing so yet; I wanted to be able to exist with people who knew nothing about the ridiculousness of what was happening to me.
Patricia had known something was up, though. She always did. She sat there opposite me as I picked at my food, my appetite light thanks to the morning sickness. Nothing on the menu had really appealed to me so I had ordered some fruit and some toast and was doing my best to put them away so I didn’t look so obviously pregnant. I knew it wouldn’t take much for her to put the pieces together.
“Are you sure you’re doing alright?” She asked, for the third time since we’d hugged outside the diner that had been our regular hangover-busting breakfast spot when I had lived with Matt and spent as much time as I could with her instead of him. I nodded.
“Honestly, I think I’m just stressed about the job search,” I shook my head. “You know how it is. Not all of us can walk straight out of college and into careers, can we, Patricia?”
She grinned proudly at my jibe – I knew she was pleased as punch to be doing so well with her job, and I was pleased for her, but more pressingly I knew that talking about what she was up to at work was likely to distract her from pushing too hard on what was up with me. Because the last thing I wanted was for her to put the pieces together and figure out the problem with me.
Breakfast was fun, even if I had to flee to the bathroom to throw up when a waitress came past me with a plate with bacon on it – meat had been turning my stomach and I could hardly even look at the stuff anymore. But I was pretty sure that I’d gotten away with it for now. I returned to my apartment and sank into the couch with a long sigh, and checked my phone for the dozenth time that morning. I still hadn’t heard a thing from Nate. What the hell was he doing?
Because I had been pretty damn sure from our last conversation that the two of us were heading towards finally giving things a shot. Maybe I had been a little too keen to hear that, or maybe he had led me on without intending to, but I could have been damn certain that everything he told me was leading up to an “and now I realize that I have to be with you and that there was no way in hell I could ever be with anyone else”. That was certainly what my whole thing had been heading towards, and now that it hadn’t turned out the way I planned I felt somewhat lied to.
Which was unfair. Because I had gone over that conversation we’d had, the one where we’d told each other the truth for the first time, and had realized that I had all but told him that I had only gotten together with him because I wanted someone to take my mind off some drama in my personal life. Maybe he felt used or hurt by that. I wouldn’t have blamed him – I sure as hell would have. I had scanned every word that came out of my mouth that day, lying awake at night and trying to figure out what I could have done or said differently to get the answer I wanted, but I figured that all of it was the truth and he deserved to hear it in full. Every time my brain made another go-around, I reminded myself that if I wasn’t honest with him then we would have been starting the relationship on uneven ground, and that was just asking for trouble. No, I either wanted to be with him properly and without holding back, or I didn’t want to be with him at all. It just seemed like he had already chosen the latter option for us.
And that was driving me a little crazy. Because I was sure something had brought us together – every inch of the relationship to date seemed to have been brought together by some impossible coincidence, a one-in-a-million chance that had dumped us back together, again and again, as though the universe was urging us to catch on already and figure out that we were meant to be together. I felt as though I had already gotten to that point, and now I was just waiting for Nate to catch the hell up already and jump on board. From our first meeting when I had been sent up to his office to drop off those papers, to trying to end things, to meeting each other once more at the launch event, to the pregnancy; the world had thrown everything at the wall in an attempt to get the two of us to stick together.
But he was still hurting from his ex-wife. That much was obvious, even to me. As much as he tried to play the carefree bachelor with this crazy-luxurious lifestyle and a worldview that seemed more focused on success and victory than it did on anything else, there was this soft side to him, one that he had exposed to his ex and that was clearly still hurting from the pain of her leaving him. With me and Matt, I had always been careful to keep him at arm’s length, to play-act being in love for him and for all our friends and for myself, but I had never truly fallen for him, not the way I had fallen for Nate. Nate had loved fiercely before, and it had ended in agony for him. I could understand why he didn’t want to do it again, even if it hurt to accept that.
So I tried to focus on building my life outside of him. Applying for jobs, seeing my friends – it was all practice and preparation for what I thought was inevitable, his dumping of me as soon as he got the chance. He was still hurting and still scared and I wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t want to do that all over again. Even if I wasn’t sure that I would ever stop hoping he would change his mind and finally come round to what the two of us shared together.
In fact, I was applying for jobs when I got the phone call. I had been expecting to hear back from one of the companies I put in an application for, so I wasn’t exactly surprised to get a call. I yawned and reached for my phone, running my fingers through my hair and glancing at the time on the computer. It was past eight, later than I thought any company would be getting in touch with me, but I would take it if it meant a chance to get my foot in the order. I cleared my throat and straightened my back, even though I knew they couldn’t see me, and picked up the phone, only to see that it was my Dad calling. My shoulders sank. Oh, well. We had caught up when he had been in the city a couple of weeks ago and I thought that would be enough to keep him at bay for a while, but evidently not. I took the call, lifting the phone to my ear and putting on a smile.
“Hey, dad,” I greeted him, but before I could say anything else his furious voice came crashing down the line, taking me by surprise.
“You’re fucking pregnant?” He exclaimed, and my stomach dropped. What in the name of holy hell? How did he know that?
“What are you talking about?” I answered as smoothly as I could, given that my brain was lunching itself off in a thousand different directions at what he’d just said to me. Had Mom found the pregnancy test in the bathroom? No, I had been careful to dispose of it to make sure that that didn’t happen.
“Nathan called me,” he snarled. My mouth hung open, halfway through a defense of myself, but I couldn’t come up with anything convincing. Nate had told him? What the fuck had he been thinking? And now I had to dive in and cover for the two of us, coming up with something a little bit more convincing than just gobsmacked silence.
“Oh yeah?” I prompted him, daring him to tell me more. “What did he tell you?”
“He told me everything about what happened between the two of you,” Dad went on, and I could hear the disbelief in his voice mixed with fury mixed with – a little sadness, if I wasn’t much mistaken. Well, I didn’t want to be an asshole, but I wasn’t going to let him speak to me like that.
“Okay,” I nodded, taking a deep breath. “Well, yeah. I am pregnant. And I’m keeping it. So-”
“You can’t do that,” Dad cut me off emphatically, and I rolled my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. I was so mad at Nate for dropping me in this without warning, and I still couldn’t figure out why he thought this was anything close to a good idea.
“Why not?” I rounded on him. I felt like a kid again when he told me off, but I wasn’t just going to docilely lie back and take all this from him. I was a grown-ass woman and I didn’t want to be spoken to like a child. Dad was going to have to learn, at some point soon, that I was an adult and that I could make decisions for myself and there was nothing he could do to stop me. If he wanted to be in this kid’s life, and I had a feeling that he would, then he needed to get that through his head sooner rather than later.
“Because…” He trailed off, and it was clear that he’d snatched up the phone right after getting the information from Nate and hadn’t given much though to what he was actually going to say to me. “Because you spent so long getting your damn college education and planning to have a career and now that’s all down the drain.”
“Nate said he’s going to support me every way he can when the baby comes along,” I assured him. “And I’m not going to be sitting at home on my butt every day, trust me.”
“Are you guys even together?” He demanded. “You certainly didn’t seem it when-”
“I don’t know,” I cut him off swiftly. It was too painful to consider that right now. “But that isn’t important.”
“I think it really fucking is,” he went on. I wondered where Mom was and if she knew about any of this yet. I had a feeling the answer was no, because I was pretty sure that she would have dived in to intervene in this phone call if she did. She wouldn’t have subjected me to this on top of the stress of everything else that was going on in my life right now.
“He’s good enough for you as a business partner, right?” I tried again, coming at it from a different angle. My father was a businessman, after all, and if I could appeal to that side of him maybe I could actually land him on my side for a change.
“That’s got nothing to do with this and you know it,” Dad replied firmly. “Besides, you really think I’d have gotten into this deal with him if I’d known about any of this?”
“Yeah, I think you would have, because you know that business and…everything else are completely removed from each other,” I argued as best I could. “Does any of this change what kind of businessman he is? How hard he’s worked to get where he is?”
“I’m not talking about him as the guy who runs that business,” Dad dismissed me once more. “I’m talking about him as the guy who got my daughter pregnant and won’t even do the decent thing-”
“What, you expect him to drop everything and marry me?” I demanded. “Really? What kind of world do you think we’re living in that that’s even a possibility? He’s offered to support me every way he can and that’s about the best I can ask for him, don’t you think?”
“You don’t know how hard it’s going to be,” He warned me, like he took great pleasure in letting me know how badly he disapproved of my decision. “You have no idea-”
“Yeah, you know what, I don’t!” I finally exclaimed back at him. “I have no fucking clue how difficult this is going to be and maybe all of this is a really dumb idea, but I’m going through with it now and I could really use the support of my family to help me get through it, okay, Dad?”
He fell silent, and I realized that I was breathing more heavily than I had been before. I had also gotten to my feet, waving my arm around wildly as I spoke; it was still frozen in the air in front of me and I slowly let it drop to my side, like I was backing down from a stand-off. I could hear him breathing down the end of the line, the rushes of static making my ear prickle as I waited for him to respond.
“You don’t know what you’re dealing with,” he repeated himself, as though he wasn’t convinced that I’d taken in the seriousness of his warning the first time around. “You have no idea, Nia. And if I can’t talk you out of it-”
“You can’t,” I cut him off, a little childishly, but I wasn’t going to let him come at me with that shit any more. I had made my decision and come to terms with it and was confident (if a little terrified) in what I had decided on, and I wasn’t going to let one stroppy phone call from my father change all that.
“Then I guess…” He trailed off and I held my breath as I waited for him to finish out that sentence.
“I guess I just have to hope you come to your senses,” he sighed, and then hung up the phone, leaving me standing in that apartment all by myself with the dead phone pinned to my ear. My stomach was churning again, but this time I knew it wasn’t the food.