Chapter 7

My hobbies include being difficult for no reason and ignoring texts.

-Krisney to Reed

Krisney

I moaned, stomach swirling and tilting, as I made my way out of bed.

I skipped the jeans, going straight for the yoga pants, and slipped them on.

They were tight.

Sooooo tight.

I was almost embarrassed by how tight they were.

Like, I probably looked like a busted can of biscuits at this point.

They were a size small, and it was obvious to everybody as well as to myself that I wasn’t a size small anymore.

I’d gained weight…and when I said I gained weight, I meant that I gained weight.

Not a pound or two. Not even five. Hell, I probably would’ve been happy with ten.

I was at twenty pounds of weight gain since my parents had died, and yeah…that was a lie.

It was because I was in a depression.

Ever since I’d left Germany…and Reed…I’d been off.

I ate everything in sight. I’d stare longingly at the door, almost fantasizing that one day I’d see Reed on the other side of it. Then there were the dreams. Oh, God. I couldn’t stop them.

I’d wake up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding and not because of anything good. Because of lots of bad.

Jay. Reed leaving me. Amy dying.

God, I couldn’t freakin’ think.

I couldn’t breathe.

And now my pants didn’t fit anymore.

Dammit!

I needed to go on a run, but the idea of running was about as appealing as having my fingernails pulled off.

I needed to stop eating food, but the idea of giving up food made me want to die a little more inside.

What I didn’t need to do was think about what I was having for lunch.

But did that stop me as I tugged one of the oldest t-shirts I owned on? No. I still thought about hitting up Whataburger for lunch on the way home from my useless appointment.

Well, not so much useless.

Maybe.

I’d been having some weird cramping going on, and I’d mentioned it to Hennessy, along with all my weight gain, and she’d somehow convinced me that I needed to go see a gynecologist to make sure that I didn’t have some form of cancer that was eating my reproductive tract.

Hennessy was a worrier.

So, I was humoring her. I’d go see the doctor, and I’d happily tell her that she was fucking crazy once I had my number one with an extra-large French fry. Oh, and the biggest fucking sweet tea that they had there. Which was big.

Oh, God.

I was getting so fat.

Moaning, I walked to the closet and picked up the first pair of socks that I could find…they had ‘fuck you’ stitched on them.

I loved them.

Hennessy had bought them for me at the Trades Days that was usually put on a couple of counties over from us. It was a huge garage sale type event with hundreds of vendors who came from all over to sell their goods. A lot of it was stuff I didn’t need, but these socks? Yeah, I’d be going back for a few more pairs, because they were badass.

My phone rang just as I was slipping my feet into my Crocs—don’t judge me, they’re comfortable.

“Hello?” I murmured.

“Hi, this is Opal with Dr. Kemp’s office?”

“Yeah?”

If they told me that they couldn’t fit me in today, I wouldn’t be upset.

“Dr. Kemp is currently delivering a baby, but we have a new doctor here that will be able to fit Dr. Kemp’s patients into his schedule if you’re interested,” Opal from Dr. Kemp’s office murmured.

I rolled my eyes, wondering if I could get away with not going and still have Mexican food with Hennessy tonight without hearing her nagging.

“Umm,” I hesitated. “I guess that’s fine.”

“Good, I’ll put you down with him. We’ll see you in thirty minutes.”

I rolled my eyes.

I wonder if anybody ever said no. I wanted to, but a doctor was a doctor to me. Everything was all the same. It was an uncomfortable experience, regardless of whether it was a man or a woman or if it was a doctor I knew or didn’t know.

Might as well get it the hell over with.

I walked to my kitchen, looked at the dishes that I’d forgotten to do last night —or purposefully overlooked, and winced.

Yeah, I really needed to do that today. Maybe I’d have the energy to do it later.

Inwardly I laughed, because I knew that to be a lie. That was why they were piled up so high—because I just flat out didn’t have the energy to do them.

I’d been temping four days a week, twelve hours a day, at the local dentist office. Added onto that was the Kids Brush project that I volunteered with the schools on Fridays, and I was downright exhausted.

Luckily, today I wouldn’t be wrestling any alligators—I mean kids—to clean their teeth, because I didn’t know if I could handle it.

Searching for my purse, keys, and phone took longer than it should have.

By the time I arrived at the hospital thirty minutes later, I was on the verge of being late.

So, I took the stairs instead of the elevator, and immediately regretted it when I felt the drip of sweat roll down my back and pool at the waistband of my panties.

Oh, God.

That poor man would have to smell me all sweaty.

Shit, shit, shit.

I slowed down to a walk, and made it to the fifth floor with three minutes and nine seconds to spare.

Score!

Walking into the room, I immediately groaned.

There were like, fifty pregnant women there. Okay, more like ten, but they took up a lot of room, and at least five of them brought their kids, who were running around and screaming.

Fucking wonderful.

It wasn’t that I hated kids so much as I hated other people’s kids. I was sure that I’d like my own kids…but the fact that I couldn’t tell these kids to control their shit when they ran by me screaming was enough to cause me to want to scream along with them.

Closing my eyes, I tried to meditate and keep my calm, but by the time my name was called a fucking hour and twenty minutes after my appointment? Yeah, I wasn’t so calm anymore.

So, call me crazy when I got into the room and my blood pressure was through the roof.

“Your blood pressure is a little high…” the nurse’s aide taking my blood pressure said. “Are you feeling okay?”

“The waiting room was hot, there were about eight million screaming kids running around it, and some big man sat next to me and hogged my armrest for at least an hour of it. I’m fine, but I’m a little on edge right now,” I said carefully. Not to mention y’all made me wait for an hour and a freakin’ half.

“Ahh,” she nodded. “I’m sure that’s it. What brings you in today? I see that your last exam was less than six months ago.”

Exam? Was that what I was calling what Reed did to me?

What I allowed him to do me?

“I’ve had a significant weight gain in the last three months, and I’ve been having continuous cramping since then, too. I’ve been tired, irritable, and I’m fairly sure that I have eaten everything that’s in front of me as soon as it’s put there,” I told the girl.

She looked at me oddly, then walked me to a door that said ‘bathroom.’

“There is a cup in there with your name on it. Use the moist towelette…”

I held my hand up and nodded.

“Got it.”

She grinned. “Put it in the silver cabinet when you’re through.”

I nodded and went in there, picking up the smallest cup in the history of cups.

After cleansing myself with the towelette, I tried my best not to pee on myself as I held the cup, and then moaned when I overfilled it.

“This would be so much easier if I were a man,” I muttered to myself, placing the cup on the edge of the counter and trying not to drip as I did.

And I watched in horror as the cup slipped and fell right into the sink, splashing the wall.

“Oh, fuck,” I muttered, watching as my pee slid down the wall. “Dammit.”

I reached for the cup, thankful that I still hadn’t finished going, and filled it up again.

Well, ish.

I filled it up to the first line, which meant there was barely a half an inch in the bottom.

It’d have to be enough, because I literally didn’t have any more to give.

This time, I stood up and walked it over to the cabinet with my pants and panties around my ankles, opened the door, and bent down to place the cup inside.

When I did, the other half of the door opened, and I was met with a woman’s laughter as she said, “Oh, Dr. Hail, you’re the funniest.”

I nearly dropped my pee.

“Oh, shit.”

My ‘oh, shit’ brought the attention from the man across the room.

His eyes automatically looked at me, through the other cups of pee in the cabinet, and his amusement was clear.

I set my cup down, then slammed the door so hard that the mirror rattled, returning back to the toilet to finish my business.

Then I decided that I was going to have to make a run for it.

Yes, that was the best course of action.

I would have to run, and I’d probably die, but I could do it.

I’d done it before.

Sure, it’d been a while since I’d run, but I had a feeling I could make it.

I washed my hands, grabbed my stuff and was out the door before I could rethink what I was about to do.

I made it to the first exam room when I was caught.

He came out of the room—what I guessed was the lab—and blocked my way with just his body.

“Can I show you to your room, Krisney?” Reed asked sweetly.

My eyes flittered around the immediate area, seeing if we had any witnesses, and I groaned.

We did.

There were two pregnant women, one on a chair getting her blood pressure taken, and another in an exam room directly across from where I was standing. There was a nurse taking the blood pressure, another at the counter filling out some paperwork, and another doctor that was standing in the doorway to the exam room with the pregnant woman in it.

They were all looking at me.

“Sure,” I nearly choked. “Which one is it?”

The nurse taking the blood pressure pointed to the one that I’d already run past, and I winced.

Sighing in resignation, I turned around and hurried back to the room. He didn’t follow.

My mind whirled a hundred thousand miles an hour.

Reed. Here. Doing my exam.

“If you’ll take off all your clothes and place them over here, then slip into this gown, Dr. Hail should be with you in a moment.”

I jumped at seeing a nurse almost directly behind me, staring at me with weirdly astute eyes.

She left then, leaving me alone in a room with nothing to do but to think.

Which I did.

Oh, God.

Reed.

Reed. Hail. Doing another exam on me…yeah, that wasn’t going to work.

But what option did I have? There was one office in town that did the vagina stuff that I needed. One. If I wanted to go to another one, it’d be over two hours away. And just switching doctors wasn’t going to work. He wouldn’t let me be seen by another doctor in his office when he was there.

I knew that down to my soul.

Oh, hell no.

I got up walked to the corner of the room, and yanked the little curtain shut as I reached for my pants.

“Guess you never did figure out how to be an adult.”

Everything inside of me froze except for my arm.

Reaching up, I carefully parted the curtain, walked back out with the tiny paper towel wrapped around me, and gently took a seat on the table. Then laid back like I didn’t have a care in the world.

This was going to be bad. Very, very bad.

“I thought you were in Germany,” I mumbled to the ceiling.

There was a freakin’ light over the top of the table, shining directly down onto me…blinding me.

I continued to stare at it. Maybe if I did it long enough, I wouldn’t be able to see him when he started doing things between my legs.

Maybe…but I didn’t have the best luck in that department, though.

I was the unluckiest person in the world.

“Came home about three days ago. Worked with my brother for one of those days.”

“I thought you were there for a year,” I continued.

His hand touched my thigh. “I thought you were there for a year.”

“Touché.” I grimaced.

That was the nice thing about being in the Reserves at this point. Although I could’ve stayed there, I didn’t have to.

I’d gotten out of the Army a while ago on a whim.

Knowing that Reed could possibly pop up anywhere was getting to the point where I was always looking over my shoulder. So, I’d gone and joined the Reserves. Unknowingly, so had Reed.

Which meant he could possibly follow me.

He hadn’t out and out admitted that he did, but I knew it wasn’t a complete coincidence that he always ended up showing where I was.

I didn’t think he actually wanted to see me. I thought he truly just wanted to make sure I was okay, while still keeping his distance.

Yet, even though I knew he wasn’t purposefully trying to ruin my life, he still was.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this really wasn’t a good idea. Like, if I could choose from of a list of bad things that I’d never want to happen, having him do another vaginal exam on me was pretty damn close to the top of that list.

So, I got up and walked to the corner, shoved the curtain aside, and stepped behind it before closing it again.

He didn’t interrupt me.

In fact, he waited until I was fully dressed and walking back out the door.

Reed followed closely behind.

But before I could get the door all the way open, he spun me around and pinned me to the wall.

“What are you doing here?”

He was looking at me with such concern that I wanted to vomit all over him.

Well, in all actuality, I’d wanted to vomit for a really long time now. It wasn’t the act of seeing him that made me want to vomit. But now, I just wanted to do it on him, because he pissed me off.

He hadn’t seen me in four months, and he felt like he could just touch me like that?

And honestly, if I wanted to fucking leave, I could leave!

“I’m fine,” I snapped.

“You’re fine?”

I nodded stubbornly. “I’m fine.”

“Then why are you here?”

I bit my lip. “I’m out of birth control.”

His eyes narrowed. “You got a six-month script for it. I remember because I was the one to sign the script.”

I swallowed.

That was true.

It was also a lie on my end. I hadn’t taken any birth control since we’d done the dirty in the exam room.

I didn’t think I needed birth control anymore. I was literally done with men.

I’d die an old maid.

I’d decided yesterday that I was going to be an old cat lady with seventeen indoor cats.

“I lost it,” I lied.

A knock was at the door, and we both moved as one to get out of the way of the swinging door.

“Here are her labs, Dr. Hail.”

The same woman who’d been in the room with Dr. Hail earlier gave him a white sheet of paper.

I backed away even further so that we weren’t in such close proximity, and felt a shiver course through me.

“Dr. Hail,” another nurse came in on the heels of the woman leaving. “Here are her notes. She’s complaining of fatigue, weight gain, and intermittent nausea.”

Reed’s eyes widened as he got to the point of why I was really here.

Dammit.

I couldn’t quite understand what the problem with the symptoms was, but he filled me in moments later when he flipped the labs over and started to scan them.

“Pregnant.”

One word. Two syllables. Instant heart attack.

Nine minutes later, I was back undressed, on my back, with my legs spread.

Only instead of Reed’s dick penetrating me, the ultrasound wand was.

They tried to do a regular ultrasound over my belly, but apparently the placenta was directly over the front side of my uterus, and they couldn’t see a single thing due to its position.

Which then became the reason for having him use the wand.

It felt weirdly uncomfortable, and I was trying really hard not to think about Reed inserting anything into my vagina, or the fact that I was, indeed, pregnant.

Reed hadn’t said a word except to the nurse who brought the two machines into the room.

He’d made hand gestures that I had to guess what they meant, but other than that, he was very quiet about what he was doing, and feeling.

He knew, just as well as I did, that this kid was his.

And I knew he was freaking out inside.

Hell, I was freaking out inside.

“Your nurse friend wasn’t very happy that you were doing this by yourself.” I tried to talk about something that wasn’t the obvious elephant in the room.

“No.”

He’d told the nurse that I was his girlfriend and that he needed a few minutes alone with me.

The nurse’s eyes had widened, because it was obvious to everyone in the office that I was something to Reed, and that Reed hadn’t known anything about what was going on with me. Plus, the one nurse, Opal, had witnessed Reed going into this scary trance and watching me like I’d utterly betrayed him.

Which led us to now.

Reed sticking a probe inside of my vagina.

His eyes weren’t even on my vagina, but rather the computer screen that showed him the insides of my uterus.

It took me a while to realize he’d paused.

In fact, I was going to say something more when I saw that he paused in moving the wand around my belly.

My eyes turned from the screen, to Reed, then back again.

“What are you…”

Then I saw it.

It wasn’t even small enough not to know.

Head—big. Legs. Feet. Tiny little hands. Toes, oh God. The baby’s toes were so tiny and cute that I was crying before I’d even realized what I was doing.

Then he moved the screen some more, maybe to get a better angle, and tapped a few buttons.

I watched as the screen split into two…and I was confused at first.

“What are you doing?”

He typed something on the screen. Clicked more buttons. Then moved to the second screen.

I read the first screen while he moved to the second screen. I felt him moving the wand to get a better position, but my eyes were stuck on ‘Baby Hail #1.’

Number one?

What?

Then my eyes moved to the second screen, and what I read there nearly made me pass out.

If I hadn’t been already lying down, my body would’ve hit the ground.

Because there, in bold lettering, was the second big surprise of the day: ‘Baby Hail #2.’