Motherfucker!
“And I was so fucking happy about it.” A smile inched its way across her face. She looked at me, almost embarrassed. “I’ve never been as excited as I was once the shock wore off. It was like—like I did something right. Like I wasn’t a failure. I had never thought much about carrying a baby because I was young and Blaine was my first real relationship, but once I knew that there was a child inside me . . .” Her eyes misted over and she looked to the floor. “It felt like the most natural thing in the world. I felt like I was a woman.”
I wanted to interject, to tell her a million reasons why she was a woman, but she kept going.
“I couldn’t wait to tell Blaine. I waited for him to come home from work, already imagining which room would be the nursery and how we’d decorate it. I was making mental lists of baby names and things that my mom had read to me as a child that I wanted to read to him or her.”
The tears were pouring down her cheeks, her chest rising and falling so hard. I reached out and brushed some of the tears away with the pad of my thumb, but it was pointless. Each tear was replaced with three more. She didn’t lean into my touch as she usually did. She just sat there like a stone.
It broke my damn heart.
“Blaine came home that night. It was late. I was sitting on the couch . . .” Her voice trailed off. She turned her head slowly towards me, dragging her eyes with it. “I told him.”
The simplicity in her voice told me the conversation was anything but simple.
“He called me a bunch of names. Said I must have tried to get pregnant on purpose.” She sat up taller, her voice laced with anger. “He said I wasn’t any better than the other girls out there, trying to trap him with a kid. He wasn’t home twenty minutes from the time he got there until he left again.”
“He left you?” I asked in disbelief. The thought of Kari being alone and devastated made me sick to my stomach. Just imagining her sitting there, crying like this because of someone else . . . I wanted to go find that “someone else” and make him pay for hurting her.
Blaine had everything with Kari that I wanted so fucking badly.
He had everything I wanted. Everything she wouldn’t give me.
That sonofabitch had it all and walked away.
“He left me that night, but he came back. You know,” she shrugged, “to get his stuff.”
Her voice broke on the last word and I didn’t care what she did—I pulled her into me, wrapping my arms around her and holding her against me. This precious girl crying broke me in two.
She fisted my shirt in her hands and cried quietly for a long time. I just held her, going through everything in my mind, wondering how she got along.
What happened between them? What happened to the baby? Sam had said his ex had aborted it, but I couldn’t see Kari doing that. But if she had, did it make a difference?
I looked down to her shaking body in my arms.
It really fucking didn’t.
All that mattered was fixing her. Showing her that I would never walk away from her, that whatever she did in the past was in the past. We would figure out the future together. I wouldn’t walk away from her if she got pregnant. Hell, it’d be the happiest day of my life.
Eventually her tears turned to sniffles and she pulled back, wiping her hair out of her tear-stained face. “I’m sorry.”
“Never be sorry for feeling,” I whispered, brushing a piece of hair stuck to her face out of the way. “Never be sorry for that.”
“I haven’t seen him until today. He came back a couple of days after he left originally and got the rest of his stuff and I haven’t heard from him since. I guessed he’d moved to California and I’d never see him again.”
“You never have to see him again,” I promised her. I hated him for hurting her like this. Although if he hadn’t, she’d probably be married to him now with a baby.
She blew out a breath. “It’s not your problem.” I could see her walls going up again, blocking me out. This was the Kari I had met, the Kari scared of the world.
It pissed me off.
“It is my problem. If it hurts you, it’s my problem.”
She stood up, smoothing down her dress with her hands, not looking at me. “Didn’t you hear what I just said?”
“I heard everything you said,” I said, rising. “I’m not sure what your point is.”
“Max,” she said, her voice cold and even, “I can’t have kids. I will never be able to do that. The fact that I got pregnant once was a fluke. There’s little chance it’ll ever happen again.”
Her eyes were locked up, her soul put away, and all of a sudden everything started coming together.
That was why she fought me. That was why she didn’t want to get too close. She thought I wouldn’t love her if I knew, so she was doing her best to keep me out.
Try harder, sweetheart.
“I heard you.” I tried not to smile, knowing she’d misinterpret it.