Brutal Game (4 page)

L
aurel crept
out of the bathroom practically on tiptoes, paranoid any sudden movement might somehow queer the test.

Flynn was planted at the edge of the mattress, hands clasped between his knees. “Well?”

“I just did it. Two minutes to go, probably.” She wished she hadn’t done the dishes already. A chore would be a welcome distraction.

“That took ages.”

“I know.” She flopped down beside him, splaying her hands on her belly and staring up at the ceiling. “I read the instructions, like, eight times. If we only had the one test, I wasn’t looking to send you back out in the snow.”

“How hard can it be? ‘Step one, pee on stick.’”

She let her arm fall back behind her, smacking his side. “It’s trickier than that. You have to angle it and stuff, and pee for just the right amount of time.”

“Good thing you’re an engineer.”

She shot him a look. “Are you being mean to me?”

“No, sorry. Not on purpose. Fuck, I’m fucking nervous.”

Laurel softened. “Me too.” She sat up and circled a hand over his back. “Have you ever done this before?”

“No.”

“I swear I’ve been taking the pills correctly.”

“I believe you. You won’t even let the toilet paper hang facing the wall—no way you’d get sloppy about that sort of thing.”

“It’ll probably be negative. The chances are really low.”

“Maybe I have, like, stealthy-ass fuckin’ Jason Bourne sperm that snuck by your defenses.”

She snorted. “My uterus isn’t a Swiss bank. It doesn’t work like that, anyhow. It suppresses eggs from being released.”

“My sperm are so powerful your eggs couldn’t resist them.”

“My God, if it’s positive you’re going to be insufferable, aren’t you?”

“Maybe. After I regain consciousness. Think it’s been three minutes?”

Her hand stilled. “Yeah. But I’m too scared to check.”

“I could. One line is negative and a plus sign is knocked up, right?”

“No, no. I’ll go.” She sat up, looked at him long and hard.

He must have sensed the time for joking was over; he took her hand and gave it a squeeze. “I can go with you.”

She pursed her lips. It all felt so insanely intimate, this moment. Whatever the verdict might be, she didn’t yet know what she’d feel about it. Though she did know one thing. “I’ll go by myself. I’d prefer you hear the news from me, rather than from staring at a stick I peed on.”

“Whatever you need.”

She took a deep breath, blew it out slow and noisy and didn’t feel a jot calmer.

Flynn offered another squeeze and nodded toward the bathroom.

“Right. Okay. Here I go.” Her hand fell from his and she crossed the small apartment, the journey at once endless and way, way too short. When she hit the switch, the light was so bright, the fan so loud. The tub so white and the tile so cold. The plastic wand sat on the sink’s edge, so innocuous. She crept up on it, squinting so she couldn’t make out its little window. When she had it in hand, she shut her eyes, took a breath, another, another. Opened them.

It took a moment to make sense of it. A blue line. Another blue line, fainter, crisscrossing the first, the point where they met darkest of all, like stripes intersecting on a field of gingham.

“Plus sign,” she muttered.
That means pregnant. Doesn’t it?
She set the wand down with a trembling hand and fished the instructions from the trash can. The illustration left no room for doubt.

Holy fuck. I’m pregnant.
She snatched up the stick and stared at the window, expecting the second line to be lighter, maybe negligible, maybe inconclusive. But no, there was no denying it.

“Fuck.” She glanced down at her belly, eased up the hem of her shirt. Same pasty white skin as always, same navel with the same single freckle beside it. How could this landscape look so normal, and yet something so monumental be taking place just an inch or two below the surface?

“Laurel?”

She looked to the door. “Be right out.” Staring in the mirror, she found herself only wide-eyed, looking drunk or high or dazed. At a loss, she sputtered her lips in a raspberry and finger-combed her hair.

Time to change a man’s life forever.

She left the bathroom. Flynn was sitting in the same spot on the bed, eyes nailed to her as she emerged. His brows rose but he said nothing.

She didn’t know what to say herself. It wasn’t as though they’d been trying for this. She couldn’t rush him, pee-stick in hand, tossing herself into his arms and making his dreams come true.

Her silence seemed to speak for her.

“It’s positive, isn’t it?” he asked, voice soft and serious. Not grave, but somber, she thought.

She nodded.

“C’mere.”

He took her wrist as she drew close and pulled her down onto his lap. Strong arms encircled her waist and hugged her tight, and he pressed his mouth to her throat. His exhalation was long and warm and heavy.

“What do you think?” she whispered, wishing she knew her own answer to the question.

“I don’t know.”

“I have no idea what to do—” She’d nearly said,
what to do about it,
but that sounded so cold, like it was a pest and she had to choose between squashing it or trapping it with a glass and an envelope and shunting it out the window.

“Two choices,” Flynn said, lips tickling her neck.

“Two really awful choices. Oh. Three, I guess.”

He pulled back to meet her eyes. “Three? You mean adoption?”

She nodded.

His smile was small, a mix of sad and mischievous. “Honey, if you decide to have this baby, I’m raisin’ it, whether you want to join me or not.”

She could only stare at him.

“That’s not to say that it isn’t completely your decision to make. And whatever you decide, I’ll support you. But I know what it was like, having my dad walk out of my life, and no child born into this world with me as its father is gonna find out what that feels like.”

She didn’t know what to say to that. She doubted she could form words, anyhow, emotion lodged like a fist in her throat. Flynn’s expression was soft but those eyes shone with something she knew well both from fight nights and from sex. Something hard and male and unbreakable.

“If you’re not ready to be a mom,” he said, “I get that. You have plans. Ones you put on hold long enough.”

“Yeah. I do.” She didn’t want to have a child now, not before she put her degree to use, landed a job with a salary capable of even making parenthood feasible. Boston was no place to raise a kid on tips. She needed a career, and a chance to live with this man for a while, as a couple—

“Honey, you okay?”

She blinked, slipping free from the swirl of panic. He must have seen it on her face. “I’m okay. Just overwhelmed.”

“We can talk about it for ages, still,” he said. “For weeks, probably, right? Until you have to make a decision?”

She wasn’t sure how long you could wait before getting an abortion, but she guessed she was only five weeks along, so there was time, probably. Although
time
sounded suffocating, same as the choices. “I’ve got a while, I guess… You’d really raise a kid on your own, if I decided I wasn’t ready?”

“If the choice was that or adoption, yeah. I would.”

“That’d be so hard.”

“It would. But Heather managed it.”

“I can’t imagine what…” She trailed off, lost all over again. What on earth would the kid think of her if she walked away, left it all in Flynn’s hands? To imagine saddling a child with the pain and resentment she felt toward her own mother opened up a pit in her stomach, raw and aching. She put her hand to the spot then quickly moved it away, remembering what was going on in there.

Would leaving it in his hands really be so bad, if the alternative was subjecting it to an unfit mother? A depressive, thoroughly not-ready mother?
She couldn’t even seem to get her professional life in order. How the fuck was she qualified to raise a child?

“You’d be okay if I decided I wasn’t ready, period?” she asked.

“Completely.”

But could he be? If he knew already he’d be willing to take the responsibility on by himself, did that leave room for ambivalence? Did it leave room in his heart to keep loving a woman who might choose to end the pregnancy? Was it even okay, she wondered, to be so completely clueless about what she wanted to do? Both choices made her sick to her stomach.

“I wish I felt as certain as you seem to,” she whispered.

He laughed faintly. “Honey, I’m as lost as you.”

“You promise?”

She felt him nodding, his chin brushing her temple. “I’ve felt more lost, though,” he said. “Like after Robbie died, and after my dad walked out. I might be sure of what I’d do if you decided to have it, but my certainty ends there. Trust me.”

“Okay.” She wanted to believe that was true, but maybe he was only saying it so she wouldn’t feel pressured.

“There’s no way we’re gonna feel any more sure about what to do before bedtime,” he said.

“No, definitely not.”

“What should we do, then? Movie?”

“Maybe.” She wouldn’t take in a second of it and she doubted Flynn would either, but it sounded like a comforting farce. She left his lap to cross the room and open her bag, pulled out her computer. He didn’t own a TV, so they watched things in bed, the laptop propped on a milk crate between their feet. Half the time they just wound up messing around, but for some reason they never sat on the couch.

“I brought cheesecake back from work,” she said. “You want any?”

“Nah. Maybe for breakfast.”

Probably wise. Her stomach was a merry-go-round.

One with a single tiny rider.
Jesus Christ.

“What movie?” she asked, voice half-breaking.

“You pick. No superheroes.” He headed for the bathroom. He’d no doubt find and study the pee-wand still sitting on the sink.

Laurel grabbed the milk crate and set up their makeshift entertainment center, sitting cross-legged before the screen. She scrolled and scrolled, finding little of interest. In truth, in no universe was there any movie half as engrossing as the unexpected drama currently unfolding in her middle.

In the end she settled on some generic action movie, cueing it up, waiting for Flynn. She left the bed, intending to get herself a glass of wine, then promptly sat down, realizing her drinking days were done until such time as she knew what her choice was going to be. It triggered fresh panic, to think she had to get through the immediate future without the aid of alcohol. And the fact that that panicked her panicked her further.

How the fuck can I have a baby? I’m not even sure if I have a drinking problem or not.

Plus there was her depression. Did that make postpartum depression a greater likelihood? She didn’t even need to wonder if having a depressed parent could hurt a kid—that was the story of her life. Plus the kid could inherit those same struggles, or Flynn’s anxiety, or her mom’s shit, or all of the above.

Flynn finally reappeared. He’d taken so long she wondered if he too had gotten caught up re-re-re-reading the test’s instructions and staring at the faint blue line.

“What kept you?” she asked, mustering a teasing smile.

“Just starin’ at a plus sign until my eyes crossed.”

“I guessed right.”

“What’re we watching?”

“We’re going to pretend to watch some movie about a hit man. But I imagine we’ll both be thoroughly stuck in our own heads.”

He nodded, opening a dresser drawer and pulling out some pajama bottoms and a clean thermal. Laurel watched him change, admiring his body with a reverent strain of appreciation. She was lost in biology just now, awed by Flynn in a way that had nothing and everything to do with sex.

His child is growing inside me.
Perhaps a dream come true five or more years down the road, but for now, the most confounding decision of her life.

They went through the usual ritual, Laurel hitting
play
and the two of them propping pillows up against the shelves behind the bed, sitting side by side, her leaning into him, chilly feet finding each other beneath the covers. Usually she had a glass or bottle of something in her hand at times like this, and there it was again—that guilty pang to register how much she wanted a drink right now.

Her hand sought his atop the covers, and she took comfort in the size of it, the familiarity. She didn’t trust her intuition. It had become a close friend in the past half a year, but right now it felt like a broken Magic 8-Ball. Like she might ask it what to do, but all she’d get back was blue liquid pooling in her lap and the rattle of plastic inside plastic. Or perhaps simply,
Reply hazy. Try again.
And again, and again, every answer the same, identically unhelpful.

For half an hour they each pretended to give the movie their full attention, Laurel lost in what-ifs and certain Flynn was equally preoccupied.

She squeezed his hand before letting it go. “Need the bathroom.”

“Pause it.”

“Nah, I’m fine.” She had no clue who any of the characters were or what they were up to, and wasn’t interested in finding out.

When she returned, Flynn had tossed the covers aside, sitting with his legs outstretched in a V—a familiar invitation. She climbed onto the bed and got settled before him, grateful for his warm chest at her back, his strong arms circling her middle. She pulled the blanket back over them and laid her hands atop his in her lap.

“You taking any of this in?” he asked.

“Not a single pixel. What are you thinking about?”

“Blue lines. You?”

“Mainly marveling how I can have absolutely no idea what the right decision is supposed to be.”

“You’ve got time,” he reminded her.

We,
she wanted to correct him.
We’ve got time.
It felt scary and lonely having the choice shoved wholly into her lap. She wanted to resent him for it, but she knew where his insistence was coming from. It was always the woman’s choice, ultimately. Though fuck, that was a shitload of responsibility.

“It’d be easier if you were an asshole,” she said.

“Oh?”

“It’s obvious what decision would be best for me—this is the exact worst time possible for me to have a child. But if I could also say it’d be shitty for the kid, it’d make it all so easy. But I’m pretty sure you’d be a great father, so really, deciding to end it sounds completely selfish.”