I was twenty-eight weeks pregnant, just starting my seventh month, finally in the home stretch. I feel like I had been pregnant for a year—it’s been the longest seven months of my life—I keep reminding myself it will all be worth it soon enough. Soon enough I’ll get to meet Pea.
I even began to think of names. I’m torn between Ashley and Aubree, everyone I tell them to hates both equally. I remember Riggs telling me his real name was Robert and tried thinking of similar names that I could name our daughter, However, I’m not willing to call my daughter Berta.
After I left his apartment last month he didn’t come looking for me. He sent me a text message thanking me, actually. He claimed I did him a favor by walking away.
My guess is that I saved him the hassle of doing the walking himself.
For the past four weeks I’ve been struggling not to overthink our situation or look for some fictional light at the end of the tunnel. I’m pushing forward, you might think I’m not as I just finished telling you I was contemplating naming Pea after him but I just want her to have something of him.
I know he loves her despite his actions.
Riggs doesn’t have a phony bone in his body. He’s not a man that has a filter either. He says and does what he wants and makes no apologies for it.
I saw how he was with me that night, how amazed he was by our baby growing inside of me. There was nothing fake about that.
It’s just sad, the whole thing is just so sad.
But there’s no time to cry.
Time to move forward. I found the path I was meant to be on, the one that included Pea. Now I needed to prepare for that road.
“What about this one?” My mother asked, as she began to push a stroller. “It’s light and rides nice. See if it closes easily. When Luca was a baby Adrianna bought one of those fancy strollers and needed to google directions on how to close it.”
I took the stroller from my mother and started to wheel it around the store. She insisted we take a trip to Babies R Us and make a list of things we needed for Pea.
“I like the other one better,” I said, pointing to the gray one. My mother zapped it with some little gadget the store gave us to help create a list. One thing down, twelve thousand to go. A baby needed a ton of things, things I didn’t even know existed. What the hell was a diaper genie anyway? Or a wipe warmer? I’m pretty sure my mother didn’t warm my wipes before she wiped my ass and I survived.
“Did you give anymore thought about what we talked about?” My mother asked nonchalantly, as we strolled down the bottle aisle.
My mother also suggested a week ago that I should speak with an attorney. She argued that the baby would be here before I knew it and I needed to decide if I was going to give Riggs any legal rights to Pea. She also mentioned that he is responsible for child support and I shouldn’t let him get away with that. I needed to protect my baby and stop worrying about my pride. Her words not mine.
She had a point.
I texted him this morning asking him if we could meet up to talk about Pea. He didn’t respond right away but when he did he said he was on a run and would be back at the clubhouse this afternoon. So after this shopping excursion I was going to head over to the clubhouse and ask him what he wanted to do.
“Yes,” I finally said to my mother. “I’m meeting up with him after here to discuss it.”
“Good, girl,” she said. “Even if he doesn’t want to be a full-time dad, he should still have to support that baby,” she added with a scowl.
A part of me wondered if she was projecting all the hatred she had for my father onto Riggs. They weren’t the same people, my dad turned his back on us and never looked back. Riggs turned his back and kept looking over his shoulder.
There I went being hopeful again.
I was fucking beat by the time I pulled up to the Dog Pound, being on the road ten days will do that to you. Jack ordered me to ride up north with Wolf to secure our connections with the Corrupt Bastards MC. They usually dealt with Blackie but with him at Ryker’s waiting for trial, they’d be dealing with me from now on. The kid Blackie pummeled into the asphalt survived so they weren’t charging him with murder but they had a solid case against him. The surveillance from the club aiding in their mission to declare Blackie a maniac. He’s looking at five years, best case scenario, and that’s with all the club’s money backing a fancy hotshot lawyer from Manhattan.
I smoothed things over with the Corrupt Bastards and even scored a potential deal with them that I would bring up at Church.
“Well it’s about time you two bitches came home,” Pipe called, walking across the parking lot toward us. “Just in the nick of time too, you can help unload the trucks.”
“What trucks?” Wolf asked.
“While you two were off riding the wind, I got a maintenance job, restoring all the Atlantic Express tour buses,” he grinned proudly. “The yard is full with buses and I had no room for the parts I had to order so I had them shipped here.” He glanced down at his watch. “They should’ve been here already.”