Lizzie Blake's Best Mistake (A Brush with Love, #2)(24)
With tears pricking at her eyes, she approached the register.
“Bathroom?” she asked weakly as she watched her receipt spit out from the machine.
With another gentle smile, she was handed a key and pointed toward the back-left corner of the shop. The bathroom was small and gross, dirt smears and footprints marking the old tiled floor, a single fluorescent tube flickering from the ceiling.
Lizzie didn’t care.
She plopped down on the toilet seat, ripping open the first box she grabbed from the bag. She tore open the plastic encasing within, pulling out the ominous white stick. She squinted at the directions for a minute, but the idea seemed simple enough. Hovering over the toilet seat, she pushed her sleep shorts down to her knees, trying to find enough inner serenity to release a stream of pee. After moments of hesitation, she was finally successful, and all that was left was for her to wait the three minutes.
180 seconds.
She made it maybe five before peeking.
She couldn’t be pregnant. This was nothing but a major overexaggeration on her part. There was a highly logical reason her period was four days late for the first time in her life.
After the three longest minutes in history, Lizzie suddenly couldn’t bear to look at the test. She gritted her teeth, clenched her fists, squeezed her eyes shut, until she finally found some willpower to pick up the stick and look at it.
Two pink lines stared back at her.
She checked, then double-checked, then triple-checked what those two pink lines meant.
And slowly, it started to sink in.
Two positive pink lines.
Chapter 13
THE next day, Lizzie stayed in bed. Her mind hummed and swarmed with a hornet’s nest of thoughts, turning into a tangle she didn’t have the energy to unravel. She rotated from crying, to puking, to sleeping, to staring down at her stomach in disbelief. She’d always felt at the mercy of her hyperactive mind, but now she felt a disconnect from her body too, like she was a passive bystander to what it was doing. What it was creating.
Maybe.
Maybe creating.
Because could you really trust five positive pregnancy tests? Trust those blue plus signs and double pink lines growing darker and stronger each time?
She managed to finally find the presence of mind to call a free clinic and schedule an appointment for the next morning, wanting to make the call before Indira got home.
When Indira walked in the door an hour later, Lizzie told her she still felt like shit and would probably go to bed early. Instead, she stared up at her ceiling for the rest of the night, blue plus signs, Rake’s voice in her ear, and the howl of a crying baby chasing one another around her skull.
* * *
AT THE CLINIC the next morning, she sat in the waiting room, her leg jiggling up an earthquake as she filled out the paperwork. After what felt like an eternity, she was ushered into the back by a friendly but efficient nurse named Linda.
The nurse slid behind a computer, typing furiously as she looked between Lizzie’s paperwork and the monitor, the pounding click click clicks filling the room.
“And what brings you in today?” she asked without looking at Lizzie.
“I … uh … I think I need a blood test.”
“A blood test for what?” Click click click.
“For, um.” Lizzie coughed, the words wrapping themselves around her vocal cords and making her choke.
“Let me take your blood pressure,” Nurse Linda continued, seeming to need to use every second to its maximum efficiency. “You were saying?”
“I think I’m, uh, maybe kind of pregnant…” Saying the word out loud was like being punched through the chest and having the fist squeeze her heart.
“Would you like to be tested for STIs too?” Linda asked, oblivious to the avalanche of emotions currently crushing Lizzie.
“Oh fuck, might as well,” Lizzie said, throwing her hands in the air and giving in to the tears.
Nurse Linda finally seemed to pick up on Lizzie’s distress, giving her fingers a moment of rest from their endless clacking. After a brief pause, she handed Lizzie a tissue. Lizzie took it and blew her nose, but all she really wanted from the woman—from anyone—was a hug.
“I just … I just don’t know how this could have happened,” Lizzie said, wiping at another bubble of snot from her nose. “I mean, I know how this happened. Despite the pretty picture I’m painting, I’m not a total fucking idiot. But we did use a condom.”
The nurse gave her a sympathetic shrug. “Condoms break. Or expire. You’re not an idiot.”
“Expire?” The thought had never occurred to Lizzie that she might be toting around expired condoms in the bottomless depths of her purse. She knew it was technically possible, sure, but it seemed like such an improbable outcome that she hadn’t ever given the idea much room in her already-crowded brain.
She dug to the bottom of her purse and fished out the last remaining silver package from the strip she’d used with Rake. She turned it over and over, finally finding those tiny little black numbers. The noise that came from her throat was somewhere between a sob and a laugh. They’d expired three months ago.
“You … keep them in your purse like that? All crinkled?”
Lizzie shot the nurse a pathetic, watery-eyed look before completely crumpling into tears. “Yes, Linda, I keep expired, crinkled condoms at the bottom of my purse—right next to the peanut butter crackers, thank you very much—and then use them to have sex with a random Australian man. I’m. A. Mess.”