I woke up to Chance sitting on a chair by the window, showered and dressed, waiting for me to come around. I was embarrassed by my laziness and not sure where we stood.
I stepped gingerly to the bathroom, and checked again for blood, a compulsion I was sure would plague me for a while. Still clear. I sighed in relief and leaned my head against the wall.
I felt too naked, too vulnerable, so I wrapped myself in a big towel and headed back out to the room.
Chance stood up when I appeared. “Feeling okay?” he asked.
“Mostly. I could eat a pizza, though. The whole thing.” It wasn’t true, but it broke the tension.
He laughed. “Kid is definitely mine, then.”
I sank onto the bed. If he could joke about it, then maybe things would be all right.
He rubbed his eyes for a minute like he was tired. “So were you not on the pill after all?”
Blame. I could see it coming like a freight train. “I was. I just…hadn’t been with anyone in a long time. And I guess…I missed a few.”
I gripped the towel with an iron fist. If he wanted to get mad at me, I’d take it. I deserved whatever he could dish out about this. I had messed up and dragged him right into my disaster.
“I don’t reckon there’s any point in worrying about what’s past,” he said. “Just figure out where to go from here.”
I loosened my death grip on the towel. “Last night you acted like you might be interested in going back to California. Is that still true?” My pulse hammered in my throat.
“My biggest concern is getting a job at this point,” he said. “The kid’ll need health insurance and some stability.”
So things had changed. I swallowed around the giant lump in my throat. “Are you going to stay here in Tennessee, then?”
He moved closer, to the other corner of the bed. But not next to me. “What were you planning on doing?” he asked.
“I may have a job. I’m going in to talk to them next week.”
“Are they going to be all right with you being pregnant?”
I shrugged. “Not planning to tell them. I don’t have to. My mom is going to help with the baby.”
“So you’ve got a few pieces figured out.”
“Not really. It’s only been a few days. I’m making it up as I go along.”
“This is a hell of a thing,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to happen.” My eyes burned, and now that I knew the grain of sand was okay, I told it to lay off the waterworks, please.
“When are you going back?” Chance asked.
“Classes start again Monday,” I said. “I’ll fly back Sunday unless I need to be here.”
“So we have a few days.”
“We do.”
He stood up. “Well, let’s get you fed, although I’m not sure we can rustle up a pizza at 9 a.m.”
I managed a smile at that. I stood up and headed to my suitcase. “Toast and juice are fine.”
I snatched up another set of jeans and a shirt. He hadn’t run off, and he hadn’t gotten mad. I had to hope that things were going to work out all right.
~*′`*~
Chance and I headed for breakfast at a little diner up the street, walking along the sunny street with flowers blooming in the open circles around every tree.
“Chattanooga really is beautiful,” I said.
“Yeah, I actually started realizing that on my way back yesterday,” Chance said. “I’ve seen a lot of places now. I did like LA, though. The beach there was different than the one in Virginia.”
“I haven’t been to the Atlantic,” I said. “I’ve been a West Coast girl all my life.”
“The air smells different,” Chance said. “It wasn’t the same.”
His face darkened when he said it, and I wondered what had happened on the beach in Virginia.
“I liked your mom,” I said. “She seemed real old-fashioned.”
He laughed. “Well, she’s definitely not a modern woman. She does look after people, though. She did all right by me and Hannah after my dad left.”
I reached out to squeeze his hand. “Your mother mentioned that.”
“We did okay, me and Mom and Hannah.” But his face darkened again, and I knew he was thinking about his sister.
“I met her, you know,” I said quietly. “Hannah.”
“Charlie told me you got dragged to her room.”
“It was all right. She’s a very pretty girl.”
His jaw twitched. “She’s never going to wake up. My mother keeps her on life support.”
“The doctors said that?”
“Long time ago. I never thought it would go on this long. When I left—”
He stopped talking abruptly and dropped my hand. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “We don’t have to.”
We continued along the sidewalk in silence until we came up to a hole-in-the-wall diner with a glass front. “This is the place,” he said.
“Looks fine,” I said, although just the thought of bacon grease and fried eggs made me queasy.
When he opened the door, the smell turned my stomach upside down. I refused to let it get to me, though, and ducked beneath his arm to go inside.