I think, somewhere, in the back of my head I knew she had this in her. I just didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to face the truth of who I’ve spent the last several years sleeping next to. I always saw her as this woman who needed to be saved that I never really looked at her and saw her for what she is: a manipulative bitch.
Eventually her shoulders shake just slightly as tears fall down her face. Her grief is so quiet and yet profound that I can feel it from across the room. I can’t bring myself to scream even though I want to. My nerves are shot and my filter is gone. If I’m being honest with myself, I’m afraid of what I’ll do if I let myself truly respond to what she’s done.
“I’m sorry,” she says. I stare at her in disbelief as she raises her tear-filled eyes and fights to maintain some composure. Those two words aren’t enough. We switched to condoms months ago at her urging. After she fucked up her birth control.
“Did you think I wouldn’t ever find out? That we’d magically worked out because you manipulated me into getting you pregnant?”
“I’m sorry.”
So how many times have I fucked her without proper protection?
“Please don’t hate me. I couldn’t stand it if you hated me.” She’s almost shouting the words like I’m more likely to take them to heart if she says them louder. The thing is, it’s not necessary. I just feel numb.
“I don’t hate you.”
“I’ll go back on the pill. I’m so sorry, baby. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I don’t really care what you do,” I say. My brain is working so slowly that I’m struggling to get the words out. “Anything comes of this bullshit you’ve pulled and I’ll step up. You know that. But us? We’re done.”
“Please don’t,” she says through a sob that tears at her body. “Please. After everything you’ve done. Please don’t.”
After everything you’ve done.
“You wanna explain that?” My voice rises with every word. I’m finally angry. How fucking dare she try to manipulate me into getting her pregnant without realizing it. She could be pregnant now. Fuck. How in the hell am I supposed to move on, with or without Mel, if Lydia is fucking pregnant? “What the fuck have I done?”
She sucks in a few unsteady breaths and centers herself before she crawls to the edge of the bed and stands on shaky legs. Her eyes are bright red and swollen from the crying, her lower lip trembles, and she wraps her arms around herself.
“Melanie Kincaid,” she says like Mel’s name makes her physically ill. My eyes narrow, and my lips turn into a snarl. “I’m not blind, Jameson. Everybody knows.”
“This the direction you want to take this, huh?” I ask. Mel hasn’t done a fucking thing to Lydia. In fact, Mel’s the reason I haven’t cheated on Lydia. She made it clear if I did that, I wouldn’t be the man she needs me to be, so I didn’t push it. I was good.
“Yeah, I do. At least when I confronted her about it she had the decency to be honest.”
I scrub my hands over my face and take a deep breath. My entire body coils up like a spring. My muscles ache from the tension, and my lungs burn for enough oxygen to keep me from getting lightheaded.
“Did she really? And why the fuck did you think it was okay to confront Mel? And when the fuck did you confront her?”
“At the firehouse, last August.”
“Is that why she won’t talk to me?”
“You have no idea how painful it is to be in love with a man who’s in love with someone else!”
“That’s not her fault!” The ferocity in my voice surprises even me.
“Yes, it is!” Lydia screams right back, her voice breaking in the middle. “Everything was fine until you met her. We used to talk about getting married and having kids and growing old together.”
No, we didn’t. There’s a reason we’d been together for almost five years and I hadn’t proposed. I may not have met Mel until last summer, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew Lydia wasn’t the woman I wanted to give my last name to. My eyes fall to her small stomach, and I suck in the hate I want to spew at her. She’s most certainly not the woman I want having my kids. Fuck that.
“No, you talked about that shit. I just went along with it because I didn’t know any better. It wasn’t until I met Mel that I realized how entirely fucked this entire situation is! Do you get that? I was never going to ask you to marry me, and you certainly were never going to have my baby.”
Lydia places her hand over her mouth as her body convulses, and she pulls herself inward. Her tears move from violent to soft and back to violent again. She’s like a tidal wave, the way she moves in and out of her break down.
“You can stay here until the lease is up,” I say and head to my dresser where I pull out a fresh pair of boxers and a pair of sweat pants. “I’ll stay with my parents, what I should have done months ago.”