Sleeping Arrangements (Silhouette Desire) (19 page)

The fear she’d blocked from conscious thought for days now was demanding to be heard.

She had a mouthful of spit and toothpaste when the door opened behind her and Spencer entered the bathroom. He’d pulled pants on but hadn’t bothered to zip them.

“Are you okay?”

She turned her back on him, bent over the sink and spit. Raising her head, she swiped a hand over her mouth and looked at his reflection instead of facing him.

“No. I think I’m pregnant.”

“H
ow long have you known?”

She slammed another bureau drawer closed. All she wanted was a pair of sweatpants, damn it. How come nothing was ever where it was supposed to be?

“I figured it out about thirty seconds ago.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him, backlit in the doorway to the bathroom. She was rummaging in the dark in the bedroom because suddenly she didn’t want to stand naked in the light before him.

“And before?”

His voice was calm, neutral, but she heard the words as an accusation.

Finally, sweatpants. Sweatshirts. She settled the thick, roomy clothes on her frame and felt more protected. Not much, but some.

“Before? Before, I didn’t want to know,” she said. She felt around on top of the bureau until she found a scrunchie, then scraped her hair back into a tight ponytail. The need to feel
in control of things was overwhelming. “I could barely admit I was sleeping with you, much less that I might be pregnant.”

“Because that would be a bad thing?”

“Jesus, Spencer! Of course it’s a bad thing!” She was shouting at him now as the fear made her heart race and broke her mind into little tiny pieces that whirled in circles. Turning her back to him, she stared into the empty, dark room. Wrapped her hands around her middle and hunched her shoulders. God, her stomach ached.

When he came up behind her and tried to make her lean back against him, she didn’t bend.

“Stomach still hurt? Can I get you anything?” He rubbed her shoulder.

She didn’t want to be soothed, damn it.

“I’m not an invalid,” she said stiffly and broke away from his touch. “I’ll get it myself.”

All the way down to the kitchen, she could hear him behind her. The sound of his footsteps made her feel trapped. Why couldn’t he leave her alone for two minutes so she could try to figure out what she was going to do now?

In the kitchen, she tugged the refrigerator door open, the light making her blink, and grabbed a two-liter of Diet Coke. Unscrewing the cap, she swigged straight from the bottle.

“Addy, do you think that’s—”

“Good for the baby?” She slammed the fridge door and took another defiant swallow. Felt the coldness and the bubbles clean her mouth and settle her stomach. “I’ll tell you what, Reed. As soon as you start puking your guts out, you can tell me what I need to feel better.”

“Okay.”

“And stop being so reasonable, would you?”

He stepped in front of her and grabbed her by the shoulders, hunching over to force her to look at him when she wouldn’t raise her eyes. He shook her gently for emphasis.

“I’m on your side, Addy.” When she still wouldn’t look at him, he stood up and, sighing, wrapped her and the Diet Coke
bottle in a hug against his bare chest. His skin was warm on her cheek. “I love you.”

She heard the words both out loud and as the vibration that hummed in his chest along with the thump of his heartbeat. Her face was wet, her breath ragged.

“I love you,” he said again, and it hurt worse the second time.

She leaned against him for one moment more. How she would have given anything to hear those words just a few hours ago. When she pulled away from him, it was as if she were slowly ripping herself in half.

She could look at him now, because she loved him so much for what he would try to do for her. Lifting a hand to his face, she shook her head. “No, you don’t.”

Before he could speak, she covered his lips with her fingers to stop him. “We’ve been together for weeks now, and you decide that you love me five minutes after you find out I’m going to have your baby?” Her voice was gentle. She wasn’t trying to wound him now. “I remember how much you said you wanted to have children. How your other relationships ended when you realized those women didn’t want the same thing. And I’m glad. Glad that you will love this child.” She dropped her hand. “But that’s not the same as being in love with me.”

His arms hung at his sides, hands clenching into fists and then opening wide in a slow rhythm. She knew he wanted to shake her—it was easy to read the anger in the set of his shoulders and the thinness of his lips, even if good breeding kept him from letting it show in his voice.

“So you’re saying I’m lying to you.”

She laughed shortly. “No, that wouldn’t be polite. I’m sure you believe it when you say you love me.” Her voice caught on the last three words. “But I think you’re lying to yourself.”

If she thought she’d seen him in control of his emotions before, that was nothing compared to the way he shut down in front of her. Like a sharp blade scraping over glass, his face cleared of all expression.

“Apparently your great-aunt was correct and I have been giving you too much credit for possessing some measure of rationality.” The words dropped like individual cubes snapped frozen from the tray. “Or maybe this has been your plan from the beginning? After all, the property taxes alone on this house would beggar you. Unless of course you had the ability to call on someone with money. A lot of money.”

It took her a moment to figure out what he’d accused her of. When she did, her hand flew out of its own accord.

To be stopped in midair by his strong grip on her wrist.

“Careful, Addy. You’ll want to make good and sure you’re pregnant before you go alienating me completely.” His smile scoured her raw. “No, wait. You’ve already done that.”

He left the room.

Addy wasn’t sure how long she stood stranded in the middle of the kitchen floor before moving again. Long enough to feel a glacial coldness grind over her and settle in.

Upstairs, for the first time since she’d come to live there, she wished there was a lock on the door to her room. She set the cola bottle carefully on the nightstand, pulled back the covers and climbed into bed. She was shivering, shaking with cold, and the blanket she wrapped tightly around her couldn’t seem to warm her. There was a pain in her chest and she couldn’t catch her breath as she curled up around a pillow and stared into the dark. She could have wept, because her heart was breaking.

She could have thrown a brick through the window, she was so angry.

At dawn, she left the house and went to her mother’s.

She stood shivering on the front steps in the chilly mist of the early morning as she waited for her mother to respond to the buzzer.

When she did and the door opened, it took only one look on her part.

“Oh, baby,” Susannah said and pulled her daughter into an
embrace. Addy stumbled blindly into her arms, palms pressed against her eyes to hold back the tears that would not stop. With her mother’s arms wrapped around her, hands stroking her hair, Addy struggled to explain. The words broke off in ragged chunks between desperate gasping breaths. “I thought. It would feel better. To leave. Even just a little.” She couldn’t catch her breath. There was a pain in her chest as if she would die. “But it doesn’t. It feels sad. And lonely.” Her eyes ached. Her nose was running. The pounding in her head was so loud. “I’m so lonely, Mama.”

“Shh. I know.” And Addy held on.

An hour later, she was curled up on the couch in the living room, an old, worn afghan draped around her in an effort to stop the chills that still rolled over her. She still couldn’t get warm. The coffee mug she cradled between her palms—decaf, on her mother’s orders—warmed her hands but little else.

She’d wanted it for the smell, hoping she would feel her father with her, but it only made her think of Spencer, who hadn’t come after her as she’d left the house. She knew it was foolish to want that. It seemed she was indeed as foolish as he thought her.

“What are you going to do now?” Her mother sat beside her on the couch.

“Today? Call in sick to work?” She let out half a laugh. Her hair was down and she ran a tired hand through it. It was daylight out, which seemed strange. Time for her felt as though it had stopped. “After that, I don’t know. Go home, I guess. To my apartment,” she added at Susannah’s look. “I can’t go back to that house.”

“You can stay here if you want.”

“Thanks.” She stretched a hand out of the cocoon of her blanket and tangled her fingers with her mother’s. “I might. But can we keep everyone away for a bit?” She was thinking of her brother and sisters, not feeling up to the questions they would ask.

“Only for a few days, sweetie.” Susannah’s lips curved in
a gentle smile. “If we don’t let them in for dinner on Sunday, they’re going to know something’s wrong.”

“God, they’ll break down the door.” She laughed for the first time in what felt like her entire life.

Silence rested easily between them for a while longer.

“And the baby?”

She’d told her mother everything in the last hour.

“I want it,” was her simple answer. Beneath the blanket, she spread a hand across the stretch of her flat stomach and knew that much was sure. She looked at her mother, the dark eyes and the curling hair so similar to her own, and hoped she would be as strong and beautiful in twenty years. “I already love it as much as you must have loved me.”

To her surprise, Susannah frowned and seemed to hesitate before she spoke.

“I don’t know, Addy. Did I love you enough?”

“What are you talking about?” She was getting nervous now. This was a ridiculous line of conversation. “You loved me plenty. I’ve never doubted that. Ever.”

“If you knew what it felt like to have me love you, then how come you don’t recognize the same thing in Spencer?”

“Because it’s not the same.” She set her coffee mug on the table in front of the couch. Smiled an apology when her mother reached over and slid a coaster beneath the warm ceramic. “Spencer cares—cared—about me, I know. And he’ll love his child with all his heart.”

“But?”

The tears were gathering again. She tipped her head back a little to stop them falling. After she blinked for a moment, she could sit up straight again.

“But it turns out that I
am
the love-letter type.” Her breathing hitched. She let out a long slow exhale. Her words wouldn’t make sense to her mother. “I needed more than someone who just wanted to do the right thing.”

Addy stayed at her mother’s house for two days and let her mother answer the phone when it rang and the doorbell when
it buzzed. It was never who Addy wanted it to be, anyway. Spencer didn’t call or come by. On the third day, she dug out the key chain that she hadn’t used in three months and went back to her old apartment.

In the days that followed, she learned to live alone again. To sleep by herself in a bed without waking up in the middle of the night because she was reaching for someone who wasn’t there. When she woke up now in the night, it was usually because she needed to run to the bathroom and throw up.

As it turned out, she hadn’t been able to keep her siblings away for more than twenty-four hours.

Her brother had to be sat on, of course, until he crossed his heart and hoped to die and promised not to go back to the big house and pound the crap out of Spencer.

Then Maxie had to be sat on, until she promised not to clean out the north-side shops of every Onesie and T-shirt tagged “newborn.”

Sarah just smiled and handed her a copy of
What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

“Not as gripping as
Pride and Prejudice,
I admit, but more useful.”

There were hours of conversation. Plans were made and thrown away on a daily basis, and Addy smiled and talked and even sometimes laughed. She spoke of buying a house. She’d been saving for years for just that purpose, after all. But she knew it wasn’t just any house that she wanted to fill the hole that gaped wide in her and made her heart stumble in the first moments of the morning when she awoke hoping to find herself in a different room.

She told herself how lucky her child would be to grow up with aunts and an uncle who were already so excited about its arrival that they’d taken to talking directly to Addy’s stomach rather than her face.

Telling herself such lies would have been a comfort, if only she could believe any of them.

Although she’d gone back to work after a couple of days,
it was on a Saturday afternoon when her buzzer rang and she opened her door to see the same FedEx man she’d nearly flattened on an icy sidewalk so many ages ago.

He didn’t give any sign that he recognized her, but she knew even before she signed for the package and looked at the return address who it was from.

Her hands shook as she tore the cardboard strip off the top of the bulky envelope and dumped the contents on her lap. The sight of a white note card tucked under the rubber band that held closed the covers of an old leather journal had her vision blurring for a minute.

“I found this in the attic and thought that you should have it, at least.

S”

The straight lines of his handwriting, its steep slant, were as familiar to her as the lines on her own palms. She slid the card between the covers of the book and tried to drive away thoughts of the dozens of other cards she’d left behind, still sitting in the sock drawer of the dresser of her room at Great-Aunt Adeline’s house.

When the picture refused to go away, she looked at the journal, hoping to distract herself. It was a ledger, mostly filled with lists of monthly accounts. Payments made and received. There were occasional comments in the margin about the weather, a reminder to give the boy who mowed the lawn five dollars on his birthday. The handwriting was spiky and uncertain, at times dipping below the ruled line it traveled. Even without knowing that it had belonged to her great-aunt, Addy would have guessed that the inscriber had been very old.

What she didn’t expect to recognize in the pages as she turned them, scanning slowly, was the loneliness.

“Haven’t seen the mailman in three days. Hope he’s not sick.”

Three pages later. “Neighbor’s boy came in for cookies after finishing the lawn. He’s getting so tall.”

There was no mention of anyone who might be a friend. And she knew that there’d been no family left after Adeline
had closed the door on her niece, Susannah, for refusing to give up her lover or her baby.