Frayed (Connections, #4)(118)

But when a slight smile crosses her lips, I think I’ve succeeded. She twists and pulls a brown paper bag out from her purse and hands it to me with trembling fingers.

“What’s this? Nothing that’s going to jump out at me, I hope.”

She stares at me, looking scared shitless.

My own hands are shaking as I unfold the bag. What the hell could it contain that makes her look like that? I pull out a purple box that reads EPT, with the words early pregnancy test written out below it. My eyes widen, my heart pounds, and my pulse races as my head snaps to her.

“Are you pregnant?” I ask in shock.

“I don’t know but I think I might be,” she answers. All the color has left her face now.

A million different emotions pass through me, but I settle on one—pure elation. I jump from my chair and take the box and her hand. “Well, let’s find out.”

“Now?” she asks, completely taken aback.

“Right now.” I grin at her.

“You’re not upset?” She sounds surprised.

I pull her flush to my body, not caring that we’re in a restaurant. “Upset? Are you out of your mind? Now come on, you have a stick to pee on.”

She tugs on my hand.

I turn around.

“What if I can’t go?”

I stride back to the table and pick up both glasses of water. When I return to her I tell her, “Drink these, baby.”

She smiles in a way that lights up her eyes and gulps both of them down.

“You can’t come in here,” she says when I push open the door to the restroom.

“Fuck I can’t.”

She shakes her head and enters under my arm.

I shakily open the box and hand her the stick.

She stares at me.

“You have to go in there,” I say, pointing to the stall door.

“I know.”

“Then go!”

“So bossy,” she says as she takes the stick.

When she comes out we both stare at it as she sets it on the counter.

“The instructions say to wait two minutes to read the result. Be sure to read the result before ten minutes have passed,” I tell her.

With my hands gripping the counter, my eyes are locked on the stick as the time slowly passes by. S’belle is pacing the room. My foot taps the floor at a hundred miles an hour. When a blue line appears in the square window, I twist toward her. “It’s turning.”

She looks at her watch, the one I finally had fixed for her. “It says wait two minutes. It hasn’t even been thirty seconds. You shouldn’t be looking yet.”

“I’m impatient and never follow instructions. You know that.”

She gives a little giggle. The one that makes my heart flip.

I decide I’ll pick up the instructions to see what the window means.

“I thought you didn’t follow the instructions.”

“Shhh . . . let me figure this out.”

She rushes over to me and pushes her way under my outstretched arms.

I read out loud with her cocooned inside my arms, “If a blue line appears in the square window within ten minutes, the test has worked.” I continue reading the instructions. “A plus sign in the round window indicates a pregnancy result—”

She pulls the folded paper from my hand.

“Hey, let me finish reading that.”

She holds the stick up. It has the biggest, bluest plus sign displayed in the first window.

Every part of my body hums with a kind of happiness I’ve never felt in my life. “A baby?” Shock takes over.

She nods.

“How?” I ask her.

She grins. “Well, the birds and the bees . . .”

I pull her to me and kiss her, soft and gentle. I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe I got a second chance at life.

After a few moments she leans back. “I think this explains my mood swings and my puking. My mother told me taking antibiotics makes the pill less effective. I had no idea—”

I shut her up by putting my finger over her lips. “Shhh . . . I don’t care how it happened.”

Her hands go to my cheeks and she holds them there. “Are you sure?”

I nod with emotion clogging my throat. Is she kidding me?

We stare into each other’s eyes for a long while and then I drop to my knees. She follows my movements as I lift her shirt and kiss the shamrock she wears to never forget our first baby. I look up at her and then glide my mouth to kiss above the gleaming green symbol of remembrance. And this time when I look up again I say, “S’belle Wilde, I love you and I promise you forever.”





CHAPTER 38


Happy

Bell

Seven and a half months later

You might be a little horny were the first words I read when I opened a pregnancy book to a random page many months ago. It made me laugh because the description fit. I had bought Ben two books from Fiction Vixen the day I thought I might be pregnant—the first one The Modern Kama Sutra: An Intimate Guide to the Secrets of Erotic Pleasure and the second Finding Out You’re Pregnant. It was the latter that shared that helpful tidbit with me. Once we both calmed our racing nerves in the bathroom, we went back to our table and decided food to go would be best. I was ready to leave my refuge and go home. I just wanted to be alone with Ben.