Awk-Weird (Ice Knights, #2)(9)

“I thought the whole cats-rule-the-humans thing was an exaggeration,” Tess said more to herself than the kitten and stood up so she could lean over and look at the pregnancy test result screens on each of the four sticks.

Plus.

She stared, blinking and uncomprehending.

Plus.

Her pulse skyrocketed.

Plus.

A lump—of excitement? anxiety? wonder?—formed in her throat.

Plus.

Before she kept forgetting to breathe, and now, it felt like she couldn’t stop inhaling and exhaling air, but she was doing it so quickly that none of it was actually getting to her lungs. She pressed her fist to her belly, holding it firmly in place, and then jerked it away.

Baby.

There.

Okay, not really. And it wasn’t a baby yet but a fetus so small an ultrasound tech would probably be able to circle something on a screen but to Tess it would be indecipherable. That didn’t change the fact that this was happening. She was pregnant.

She plopped back down on the edge of the tub, her knees too weak to keep her upright, and focused on her breathing enough to actually slow the panicked hyperventilating thing she had going on and inhale a long, smooth breath through her nose and out her mouth. She repeated that five more times before she gave in to the constant whir of her brain and tried to process what she was going to do next. She had options.

It was too late for Plan B, but she could get an abortion.

She could have the baby but give it up for adoption.

Keep it and start her own family.

So which one was the right answer for her, right now, in this moment? Abortion made sense. Beyond her girls, she didn’t have a support system. Was she really ready to be a single mom without one? Did she have the tools to do it right, or would she be continuing the family curse? She’d barely gotten to a point in her life where she felt qualified to have a pet. A baby needed and deserved so much more attention and love than she was sure she knew how to give.

Then there were the logistical issues. The demands of being a small business owner weren’t conducive to going it alone on the parenting route. Who would cover the flower shop when she had to go to prenatal appointments? Could she afford health insurance for the both of them? What about day care? That was easily the cost of another car payment, if not more.

Standing up, she tried to still the thoughts running through her brain faster than she could grasp and then walked over to the bathroom mirror. She lifted her shirt, looking down at her stomach. The little pudge under her belly button had been there for years, so she expanded her abdomen to make it look bigger, rounder. That’s what it could be in a few months.

But was she ready? Even with her doubts, she couldn’t ignore that feeling that she was. She was staring down her thirtieth birthday, owned her own business, had an apartment, didn’t have that much debt, and a family was pretty high up there on her want list. Most importantly of all, she wasn’t her mother and never would be. This baby would know it was loved, had a place in the world, and was never an obligation. She couldn’t fix her childhood by having this baby, but she could give this baby the childhood she’d wanted—that had to count for something.

It wouldn’t be easy. Single momming was not for the faint of heart. Then again, neither was anything else she’d managed to do in her life, including working her own way through college, starting a business, and just living life on her own in general.

She could do this.

Glancing down at her belly, she rubbed her palm over it, one soothing circle followed by another and another.

She would do this.

She was having this baby.

Letting out a deep breath, her lips curled upward in a smile that didn’t falter until two words entered her mind: Cole Phillips.

How in the hell am I going to tell him?

…

Paint and Sip nights with Lucy, Gina, and Fallon were sacred. She wouldn’t miss it, not even with her brain not taking half a breath between shooting out pregnancy factoids at her.

“Placenta” is Latin for the word “cake.”

The uterus expands more than five hundred times its usual size during the course of pregnancy.

Babies drink urine in the womb.

God, her brain really needed to shut the fuck up already.

“Perfect timing, Tess.” Gina slipped her arm through Tess’s as they walked through the door into the studio. “I am dying for a glass of wine. It has been a week. The bride from Harbor City is a delight but her soon-to-be husband the accountant? Oh my God. Total nightmare. Groomzilla galore.”

“Tell me everything,” Tess said.

And that’s all it took to get Gina off and running on this Hank guy and how high-maintenance he was. It was a brilliant move. No one told hilarious demanding-client stories like Gina, and this would get them through at least the setup for tonight’s painting. She was going to tell her girls about the pregnancy and enlist their help in tracking down Cole’s number so she could tell him, but she wasn’t ready yet. Instead, she listened to Gina describe the ten-minute voicemail Hank had left about the difference between the colors white shadow and eggshell mist as they sat down next to Lucy and Fallon.

“Have you seen this week’s painting yet?” Lucy asked, nodding toward the front.

Larry, their instructor, stood next to a painting of a pie with a radioactive glow sitting on a windowsill with a view of a decrepit nuclear reactor. Someone must have been reading about Chernobyl or Three Mile Island.