let her up yet.
He needed a minute.
Not because he couldn’t handle the sight of a woman vomit. Courtesy of his mother, he’d been hardened to that at an early age. So seeing Elise pitch at the park was about as close to old home week as he got. The only thing missing was the sinus-burning fumes of cheap liquor in the mix.
No, what had Levi’s gut wringing harder than the cloth in his hands was the short list of reasons women were suddenly, violently sick to their stomachs. Without a fever.
Yeah, Levi had definitely needed a minute.
To do some math. To think back … very carefully … and come up with a whole lot of holy hell. He couldn’t recall more than two nights at a stretch they hadn’t seen each other. In over a month.
Catching sight of himself in the battered rectangle of mirror above Elise’s single bathroom sink, Levi tried to rearrange his features into a mask of something that at least resembled calm. It wasn’t working.
Tossing the washcloth into the sink, he stalked out of the bathroom before Elise could get a look at him.
“Levi?” Elise sounded tense behind him.
Because she wasn’t sure how he’d take her blowing the contents of her stomach in front of him?
Or because she had something she hadn’t been ready to tell him … and she’d just given him a very big clue.
Gripping the back of the couch in the front room, Levi stared at the window, seeing nothing beyond. Just feeling the slow press of the walls around him. An incremental tightening of his skin.
God, it couldn’t be that.
“Levi, I don’t know what to say. I’m really embar—”
He turned, staring hard at her. “Are you pregnant?”
“What?” Confusion flashed in those guileless gray eyes. Confusion followed close by horror. “You think because I—” Her hands waved in a small churning circle. “No— Oh, my God, no.” Her shock was genuine. No one could fake that level of stunned distress—or at least Elise couldn’t.
“No. I can’t be.”
That was the answer he’d been hoping for. Only between that breath and the next, Elise’s eyes lost their conviction and her face went pale.
Damn it.
“Let’s just start simple. When was your last period?” This wasn’t the kind of conversation he typically had with his dates. But then most of his dates barely registered as more than a blip on the radar. And no, it wasn’t that he didn’t think they could get pregnant because he only slept with them once or twice. It was more that the kind of women he generally went out with tended toward the more sexually practiced. So in addition to his religious condom use, there was typically another form of birth control in play. The pill. The patch. An IUD. Something.
But Elise. She didn’t have the kind of lifestyle where she was looking to be prepared just in case something came up. Which meant the condoms he’d been packing were flying solo. And they weren’t one-hundred-percent effective.
A small furrow dug between Elise’s eyes as she pinched the bridge of her nose with one hand, using the other apparently to count on her fingers. The muscles along his spine cranked tighter.
“Aren’t you supposed to know this kind of thing?” he bit out, the words coming more harshly than intended.
A rush of pink surged up Elise’s neck and into her cheeks, making him feel like an ass of the worst variety. But this was important. For both of them.
“Okay, let me help you out here. Before you met me or after?” There were only two options; how could she not know? “Elise.”
“Just give me a minute.” Her voice had taken on a frantic edge to match the one cutting through his gut that very moment. “My cycle sometimes skips and honestly I don’t always pay a lot of attention to it.”
His vision tunneled. “You don’t pay attention to it?”
“No, Levi. I don’t. It’s never been particularly reliable and, aside from the fact that I have just a few other things going on in my life, before you, I hadn’t had sex in over a year. So no! I hadn’t paid it much attention lately.”
Unreliable.
His sanity clung to the concept like a lifeline as one breath filled his lungs, and then the next. His heart slammed, pushing blood in a rush too fast through a system already jacked on fear and dread.
“Before.” She looked up at him with a little-girl-lost stare too vulnerable for the place he was at. “It was definitely before.”
ELISE sat in the corner of the couch, her legs drawn up close to her body with her arms wrapped tight around them. Holding herself together. Or trying to, anyway.
It had been about six weeks since her last period. And though she’d told Levi it wasn’t the first time she’d been that late, the information seemed to have pushed him past his limit nonetheless. She’d watched, helpless, as he walked from the apartment without a word, leaving her alone in a way she hadn’t been since the day she met him.
Brows pressed against her knees, she breathed deep.
She couldn’t be pregnant—couldn’t believe she was. Wouldn’t she have felt some change in her body? A connection to something bigger than she, and yet contained within her?
Granted, her life was full in a way she wasn’t exactly accustomed to these days. The distractions vast, each one more consuming than the last. But she hadn’t sensed … anything.
Even at Levi’s prompting, all she felt growing within her was denial.
The certain sense that it simply couldn’t be. It wouldn’t be fair. After all the waiting. After all the work. To finally be so close to reaching her goals— A pang of guilt struck her hard in the chest.
Selfish.
If she was pregnant, there wouldn’t be any room for that kind of thinking. Their baby would deserve better.
Their baby …
Hers and Levi’s. This thing between them wasn’t supposed to be anything more than a single night. It wasn’t supposed to turn into something Elise had begun wondering if she could live without. It wasn’t supposed to be love.
Levi was leaving in three weeks’ time.
But a baby would change everything.
A baby was forever.
More important than the plans she had for her studio. More important than anything. And though the idea of her life changing so radically scared her near senseless, Elise realized one thing … She wouldn’t be alone.
All
