Brutal Game (Flynn and Laurel #2)(24)

Laurel jumped at the knock on the bathroom door, halfway to a heart attack.

“Yeah?”

“It’s me.” Flynn’s voice permeated the wood, a rumble that both comforted and unnerved her.

She was sitting on the tile, back against the tub, phone in hand. Neither of her roommates had been in when she’d gotten home, and just as well. She clicked out of the browser app and shut off her phone. “Come in.”

The door swung in and there he was. Familiar man in a familiar space, and yet she felt so utterly, irretrievably lost.

He did a double-take, surprised to find her on the floor. “Hey. How’s your head?”

She had no reply for that, so she shrugged, no doubt looking sheepish as f*ck. “How was the party?”

“Shitty without you. But also pretty special. I brought you a hunk of cake and some Vicodins Heather insisted you might want.” He held up a paper grocery bag then set it on the counter. “I didn’t explain exactly how terrible an idea that was, obviously.”

“She’s sweet in her weird way.”

“Don’t let her hear you say that.” He closed the toilet and took a seat. “I didn’t know you got migraines. Is it a pregnancy thing?”

“I…I don’t think so.”

“Wouldn’t you rather be someplace dark?”

She tried to smile, tried to be candid and brave and dignified, but one twitch of her lips and her entire face crumpled. Tears streaked her cheeks, burning hot.

“Whoa, honey.” He was on his knees in a beat, cupping her shoulders. “What’s going on?”

She tried to speak but nothing came, only a rusty squeak. She grabbed the maxi-pad package from the floor beside the toilet, held it up, flung it at the wall with a flash of anger.

His brows drew together, expression darkening from confusion to horror. “Wait. What is going on?”

“It’s gone.” The words felt odd, watery, coming from the roof of her mouth, somehow, not her throat. She gulped air. “The pregnancy. It just… I just started bleeding, at your sister’s.”

“Like a miscarriage?”

“Yeah. Exactly like that.”

For a moment he could only shake his head, looking lost. Looking slapped. “Jesus, Laurel… Does it hurt?”

“Yeah. So bad.” The pitiful, ringing truth of that opened something inside her, tears coming fast as though a dam had burst. “It hurts really, really bad.”

“How?”

“My back. And there’s cramps. But mostly it’s my back.”

“What can I do?”

“Not much.”

“Does it… Are you bleeding now?”

“Yeah, loads.”

He squeezed her hands. “Fuck me. Heather said you had a headache.”

She nodded, catching her breath. She stole one of her hands back to wipe her running nose. “I asked her to tell you that.”

His brow knitted. “What?”

“I didn’t want to wreck the party for you.”

“The f*ck?” He paused, caught himself. Sighed and let her other hand go and rubbed his face. He leaned over and freed the toilet paper roll from the dispenser and unfurled a long banner of it to hand to her. “Sorry. I’m not angry at you. I’m just…f*ck if I know. Upset, I guess.”

“I don’t blame you.”

Those blue eyes looked so tired. “So this happened hours ago? How could you not know how bad I’d want to be with you while you’re going through this?”

“I didn’t know if I wanted that.”

Hurt settled across his face like a shadow.

“Not because you aren’t a part of this,” she said, and blew her nose. “Not because you don’t have a right to know or to care, or to want to help. It’s hard to explain.” It was that same instinct that urged cats to hide themselves away when they gave birth, wasn’t it? The same one that made women so grumpy at the height of PMS. Something primal and isolating.

His expression softened. “What happened? To the baby, I mean.”

She wished he wouldn’t call it that—it was an embryo. Had been. Nothing more than a little squiggle of cells, or so she took comfort in imagining. She shrugged. “Something genetic, probably.”

He seemed to go pale at that.

“It’s really common. Something like half of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Usually before a woman even knows about it.”

“Oh.”

“It’s nothing either of us did wrong, or anything wrong with our bodies, or anything we could have prevented. This one just decided not to sign the lease.”

He smiled grimly, seeming a touch relieved by her levity.

“You’re allowed to be sad,” she said, and leaned forward to squeeze his arm. The motion triggered a fresh cramp and it took everything she had not to let it show. “Or to feel relieved, or any other thing. This was your experience too, brief as it was.”

“I’m here to be whatever you need.”

“Same.”

He scooted over to sit beside her, curled a palm around the back of her head, scrunched her hair and coaxed her face to his neck. He held her for a long time, rubbing her aching back with a hot, broad palm as she felt the tick of his jugular vein against her lips.