Chapter Eleven
Brett
“Sophia’s fucking pregnant,” Mark roared into my ear as soon as I answered my phone.
“What?” I asked stupidly. I thought he was calling because we had plans later. It took my brain a few seconds to catch up with what he was saying.
As if someone set the volume of the world on mute, the noise of my office just faded away. I was in the middle of the bull pen, just having checked the end-of-week performance reports, but it suddenly felt like I was in the middle of nowhere. My surroundings were completely irrelevant as five freight trains hit me with every frantic word that Mark said.
“Yeah, I just found out.”
It couldn’t be true. He had to be fucking with me, but he still didn’t know about Sophia and me, so he had no reason to think that pulling a prank like that would have any bearing on me whatsoever. “Are you sure?” I asked.
“She took two tests, man. So yes, I’m sure.”
“Holy shit.”
The world slammed to a dead stop around me. It wasn’t hard to do the math. I was the only guy Sophia had ever slept with. But it still took me several loud, drumming heartbeats to put two and two together.
Sophia was pregnant with my baby.
Then her voice was in the background of the call. “Mark, who’re you talking to?”
“Not you,” he snapped at her, and it stirred some protective instinct in me.
“I’ll be right there,” I told him and hung up the phone without waiting for an answer. I was already in motion, my feet carrying me to the elevator and then to my car without the need for me to think about it.
Reeling. That was what I was doing.
For the first time in my life, I was absolutely, positively reeling.
A small part of me, a part that I was immediately ashamed of, wondered if Sophia had been with somebody else after all. A fierce stab of jealousy and possessiveness ripped through my gut unexpectedly at even the thought.
The facts were the facts, though, and I had to face them: I’d worn a condom every time I’d been with her, and none of them had been broken. I was sure of it.
But I was also sure of Sophia. I’d known her for most of my life. We’d never talked about it, but I wasn’t fucking anyone else, and she wouldn’t, either. Would she?
Had she?
That same jealousy from before grew from my gut to my heart, an ugly green monster taking root in my very blood. I wasn’t one to get jealous about women. I’d never had any reason to be, but I couldn’t stop the feeling from poisoning my thoughts and growing in my body.
Sophia was mine, damnit. I didn’t know when it happened or how, but she was mine. And so was that baby.
If there was a baby. My mind raced with a million possibilities, but none of them made any sense to me. Was she making it up to get me to come clean to Mark? Was she trying to force my hand into a relationship? She knew me. She knew I didn’t date seriously. At most, I found women who had sex drives that matched up with mine, and we fucked for a few months before one or both of us got bored.
The ugliest thought I’d had so far came crashing into my mind before I had a hope of stopping it. Was she trying to get to my money? I only cared about money insofar as it was necessary to provide for Mom, but I’d heard other people in my position talk. People got used for their money all the time.
I shut that train of thought down as fast as I could, but it still gnawed at me. It swirled around in my head along with all the other questions that I had no answers to.
The drive to the apartment she shared with Mark was quick, but I made it in a daze. Thoughts and questions appeared and evaporated like smoke in my mind. I didn’t even know if I wanted kids. I’d never allowed myself to consider the possibility, and now, it was hitting me square in the face.
Not even just the possibility. If Sophia really was pregnant and if she was who I thought she was, which was someone who wasn’t fucking someone else on the side, then it was the reality. I was having a baby, whether I wanted it or not.
Because if there was one other thing I knew with absolute certainty, Sophia would want to keep the baby.
A baby.
A fucking baby. I’d never even held a damn baby.
I was an only child. My mom was my only family, so there weren’t a bunch of cousins or nieces or nephews running around. My friends, though some of them were married and stuff, hadn’t started crossing that frontier yet.
Babies were a complete and utter mystery to me. The way I saw it, they were just little pink lumps that pooped and cried all day.
I’d always just assumed that the supposed natural instinct to want to sow my seed and procreate had skipped me because I’d never felt that need.
And yet… No, that couldn’t be one of the feelings fighting each other inside me.
Shit, I couldn’t believe that this was happening. Maybe it was all just some cruel joke. It had to be. Kids weren’t a part of the plan. Certainly not now. I would be a terrible father. That much I was sure of. Hell, if I looked at the stock that I came from, there wasn’t a chance that I would be anything but an awful father. Mom was great, fantastic, but my dad hadn’t exactly stuck around. As far as I was concerned, that was the worst possible type of father. The one who was so much of a coward that he just abandoned his kid. That was the gene pool I came from.
My tires squealed when I pulled up outside their apartment building. It took a couple of deep breaths before I was calm enough to get out of the car and take the stairs two at a time to work off some of the excess nervous energy that was pouring into me.
Before I was nearly ready to face the situation, I was banging down their door, and I stormed past a red-faced Mark, right to Sophia’s room. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, staring at the middle distance like she was in a trance.
It was almost like she wasn’t even aware of the fact that I’d come crashing through her door. My gaze dropped to where a cracked plastic thing lay on the floor near her bed. I scooped it up and stared at the evidence that what Mark had said was true.
Sophia was fucking pregnant.
“Brett—” she started, finally having broken out of whatever had taken hold her before I got there.
“Is this real?” I asked, holding the test out to her.
Her jaw dropped a little, and a deep line appeared between her manicured eyebrows. “What?”
“Is this a real pregnancy test?” Of all the questions I had shooting into my head like bullets from an automatic rifle, somehow, that was the one that made it out of my mouth first.
Sophia couldn’t have looked more surprised if I’d slapped her. “Of course, it’s real. Don’t be an idiot. Why would I fake a pregnancy test?”
“I don’t know, for fun?” What the hell was going on with my mouth?
Sophia’s eyes widened into incredulous orbs. “Are you having fun yet? Because I’m not. Stop being an ass. It’s not fake.”
Maybe it was the tears that were welling behind those eyes or maybe it was the fact that I suddenly became aware of Mark standing in the doorway, watching us with narrowed eyes, but out of nowhere, I was back in control.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know where that came from, I know it’s not fake.”
Sophia exhaled on a deep sigh and nodded slowly. “It’s okay, You’re shocked, too. I—”
Mark stepped into my line of vision, pointing his finger first at me and then jabbed it at Sophia. “Woah, back up. Brett’s shocked, too? Why would he be?”
When Sophia’s eyes met mine, they were filled with resignation and apology, and I instantly knew what was coming. I gave her a small nod of encouragement. It was inevitable that Mark would find out now, and I could see that she wanted to be the one to tell him.
She sucked in a rattled breath, folded her arms, and looked her brother right in eye. “Brett’s the baby’s father.”
For what could’ve been a second, a minute, or an hour, Mark just stood there. Frozen. Blinking rapidly. He turned on me slowly, a look in his eyes that I’d never seen before. It took the guilt in my stomach and twisted a big, sharp knife into it.
I saw his fist coming from a mile away, but I let him get his shot in. It was the least that I deserved. Dull pain flowed from my jaw to my nose when it landed, but it didn’t hurt that bad. Mark didn’t share my dedication to working out, and since he worked an office job, I hated to even think it, but he was pretty weak.
When he went to land another punch, I grabbed his wrist and held it away from me. “Mark, just listen to—”
“It was all my fault,” Sophia blurted out, her voice shaky.
I shook my head, meeting Mark’s gaze. “It wasn’t. None of this was your fault, Soph. This is all on me.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about whose fault it was. How could you? Both of you?” There was such hurt in his voice that it ripped into my heart, and I winced.
“We didn’t mean to hurt you, brother,” I said. “Honest—”
“You didn’t mean to hurt me?” Mark yelled, a vein starting to throb in his temple. “You thought I was just going to be okay with this? Christ, I thought I could trust you, of all people, with her.”
“And you can, Mark. Really, I—”
“Can I? Because from where I’m standing, you’ve not only hurt and betrayed me, but you’ve ruined her fucking life.”
“He hasn’t,” Sophia interjected, tears streaming down her face. “Mark, he hasn’t.”
Mark turned on Sophia, and even though I knew he’d never physically hurt her, the instinct to protect her and my baby, roared into place from somewhere previously unknown. I shifted and angled my body so that I was between them, Sophia safely behind my back.
“Look, I get that you’re hurt and betrayed and shocked and god knows what else,” I said. “That’s why I let you take a shot at me. I’ll let you have however many more later, but right now, you’re upsetting Sophia, and that’s the last thing that she needs. So, you need to get out. Go.”
I didn’t have the first idea what Sophia needed, but I was sure that it wasn’t her brother shouting about how her life was ruined. I pointed to the door, and although Mark looked like he wanted nothing more than to clock me again, his gaze flickered to Sophia sobbing on the bed. With a final shake of his head, he spun on his heel and stalked out of the room.
Sobbing women were not my thing. Not at all. But knowing what to do came to me naturally with Sophia. I walked over to her bed, sank down next to her, pulled her into my lap, and let her cry into my chest. Her warm tears were soaking my shirt, but I didn’t mind.
She cried so hard that she hiccuped a few times, but I didn’t interrupt her. I just let her get it out. An indeterminable amount of time later, her sobs finally subsided, and her body stilled. I wondered if she’d fallen asleep, but when I pulled away slightly to look down at her, her eyes were wide open.
“What’s going on in your head?” I asked her. At least my mouth was working properly again.
She was quiet for another few beats. Then she released a deep sigh and met my eyes with hers. “Honestly? I don’t know. My mind’s racing so fast that I can’t grab hold of any thought. You?”
“Same.”
Sophia smiled sadly. “I’m sorry. If there was a way I could slow it down for you, I would.”
“You have nothing to be sorry about, but I might know how I can slow both of our minds for a while.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly, then she raised one of her eyebrows. “Surely, you can’t mean what I think you mean?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.” Before she could argue, I leaned down and kissed her. Hard.