“I didn’t say that.”
“Yeah. You did.” Brooke stood up and yanked on her underwear and jeans, which Ryan had tossed on the floor. He didn’t want this, she thought. He didn’t want her. She should have known he’d react this way. She’d been a fool to think anything else. She bent over, looking for her bra, and when she found it, she put it on, followed by her white T-shirt.
“Brooke, stop. Let’s talk about this.” Ryan rose from the bed, pulled on his boxers, and came around to where she stood. He grabbed her arm, and again, she tugged away. He stared at her with dark clouds in his eyes. “Please. Tell me the truth. Did you . . . was this . . . something you planned?”
“No! I’m on the Pill, but apparently, it didn’t work. No birth control is a hundred percent.” She shook her head in disbelief. “You think I would do that?”
“I don’t know.” He raked his thick fingers through his hair and looked away, out the window to the sparkling lights of downtown. “I’ve seen it happen. A friend of mine got divorced, and his mistress poked holes in her diaphragm to trap him into marrying her.”
“I’m not your fucking mistress,” Brooke said, hoping he could hear the disgust in her tone. Even though technically speaking, since he was still married, she was his mistress, she hated the dark underbelly indications of the word. “And I’m not trying to trap you into anything. If you don’t know me well enough by now to know I would never do something like that, then maybe you don’t know me at all.”
He was silent for another moment, still staring out the window. “I do know you,” he finally said.
Brooke hesitated, his words serving as a temporary balm. Maybe she was being too hard on him. She’d had a week to get used to the idea of carrying his child; she should give him more than two minutes to do the same. She reached out and took both of his hands in hers. “I promise, I don’t have an agenda here. I just needed to tell you. That’s all. I needed you to know.”
“Of course,” Ryan said. “And I’m not going to leave you alone to deal with it. I’ll help.”
“Really?” she said, softening her voice. She allowed herself to feel another brief spark of hope, a softening around the edges of her heart, a place that had been hardened for years.
“Of course,” he said. He gathered her into his arms again. “I’ll pay for everything. Go with you to the appointment.”
The muscles surrounding Brooke’s stomach seized. The whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of her baby’s heartbeat played inside her head. “You want me to get rid of it,” she said, quietly.
“What else can we do? You know my situation. If Michelle found out I knocked you up—if she found out about you at all—she’d have the exact ammunition she needs to take everything she wants from me in court. I can’t have that, Brooke. I can’t have anything more involved than what we already have.”
Brooke cringed at his use of the phrase “knocked you up.” The crudeness of it; the total lack of heart. She broke out of his embrace and took a couple of steps back. He sounded like a selfish, irresponsible teenage boy, terrified of telling his parents what he’d done, focused only on how the situation affected him.
“And what do we have, exactly?” she asked him, lifting her trembling chin. She crossed her thin arms over her chest, curling her shoulders forward.
“We have this,” he said, gesturing toward the bed. “We have fun together. We laugh. We don’t take anything too seriously.”
“No responsibility, no commitment,” Brooke said, keeping her voice low. This was what she always had with men. What she wanted. And yet, with a baby on the way, couldn’t she want something more? Wasn’t she entitled to it?
“Yes,” Ryan said. “Which doesn’t mean I don’t care about you. But I thought you understood it. I thought you knew what not telling Michelle or the boys about you meant.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means you can’t get pregnant!” Ryan said, throwing his hands up in the air, and then letting them drop back to his sides. “It means you can’t keep it. I’m sorry, but why would you want to ruin a perfectly good thing?”
Brooke blinked back her tears and focused on saying her next words without crying. “I already made the appointment,” she said, but before she could continue, he cut her off.
“Oh.” The relief in his voice was tangible. “Good. You probably should have led with that.”
“No,” Brooke said, raising her eyes to meet his. She wondered if their baby would have her violet eyes or his brown—if they’d have a girl or a boy. “You don’t understand.” She kept her voice as calm and steady as she could. “I went to the appointment today. But I couldn’t go through with it. I want to keep the baby.”
Ryan put his hands on his hips, shifted his stance, and glared at her. “It’s not just up to you.”