Sincerely, The Puck Bunny (Totally Pucked #2)(23)

“Yep.”

“What about the cream?”

“Got that too.”

The weight on my shoulders, and well, my entire body in general, causes me to huff. Everything hurts and I do mean… everything. I’m hurting in places I didn’t even know existed until now.

“Maddison, you’ve checked everything at least three times. I think you’re as prepared as you can possibly get,” Tyler, my best friend, says as he walks into the room holding the items I asked for.

“I’m thirty-nine weeks pregnant, Ty. Being over-prepared is the best possible thing I can be.”

He looks at me with sympathy before pulling me in for a hug. As much as he can with a ginormous basketball belly between us. It’s moments like this that I am more than thankful for both Tyler and Kyle. Without them, there is no way I would’ve made it through… all of this, alone. They’ve sacrificed their newlywed bliss to be here for my pregnancy, and it means everything to me.

“How about you try relaxing before you literally pop?” Ty chastises me. “You’ve been overworking yourself. Take a moment to sit and relax.”

It’s all becoming so much more real as the clock ticks on. I’m getting nervous and anxious and honestly… I’m afraid. Just as any first-time mother would be. Except my situation is nothing like what most mothers experience when welcoming their first child, even at twenty-three.

My eyes mist over at the thought. The same one that has plagued me since the moment I saw those two pink lines and realized that my life was never going to be the same.

“Are you crying again?” Tyler asks.

I sniffle and nod. “I’m hormonal, Ty. Cut me some slack.”

The truth is, I’ve accepted what happened and I’ve done my best to move forward and prepare for my sweet girl, knowing I’d be doing it alone. Well, with Ty and Kyle by my side.

And maybe it’s not the complete truth. Maybe sometimes when it’s late at night, and I’m alone, rubbing my belly, thinking about our future, I wish things were different.

Sometimes I wish that I never met him in the first place, the man with the steel gray eyes that seemed to see straight through me, that broke my heart in just one weekend, and continued to shatter it to pieces every day afterwards. But, he gave me my daughter, and in the end, that’s all that really matters. We would be okay, just she and I taking on the rest of the world.

Honestly, Tyler finding Kyle happened at the perfect time, because I needed someone else in my corner. Someone I could trust and lean on. They met shortly after everything happened between us. When I got home from the Brickside, Tyler and I had a long, much-needed talk about the past and my job. There were lots of tears shed, but, in the end, it brought us even closer together. And now? Kyle is just as big a part of my life as Ty is. He’s the level-headed one in our friendship.

“Are you in your head again?” Ty looks at me with pity in his eyes. I hate that look, and it’s the same one he’s bestowed upon me since he found out what happened.

“I’m fine. Just running over my to-do list in my head as I go.”

The look he gives me shows he doesn’t believe me, but thankfully, he doesn’t press. It’s not that I haven’t thought about the man who broke my heart over the last nine months. It was impossible not to, not with his child growing inside of me; it was just that I desperately tried to push him from my mind after everything that happened.

I think back to when I found out I was pregnant.

“Oh god,” I cry, my hand shaking so badly that I can hardly hold the flimsy stick in my hand. “No, it’s just no... there’s no way, Ty.”

His eyes are filled with the same unshed tears that shine back in mine. This is not the plan; this was never part of the plan.

“It was just one night,” I cry. “One stupid, reckless night where I listened to my heart instead of my head, and this is what happens? The one and only time I allow myself a moment of freedom.”

I collapse onto the cold tile floor of the bathroom and pull my knees to my chest as I cry. My cries quickly turn into sobs, so hard that my body shakes against the floor, and Ty drops down to his knees and pulls me into his arms. I sink into the embrace, desperate for some type of connection right now when I feel so utterly used and alone.

“It’s not the end of the world, darling.”

Looking up at him, my eyes clouded with mascara and stinging tears. “Ty, it’s a baby. I’m going to have a baby alone.”

The severity of the situation sinks into my bones and I sag against his embrace.

One night… turned into so much more.

My life would never be the same now.

“You don’t have to be alone, Madds, you can reach out to him,” Tyler says simply. If only it were that easy.

“He doesn’t even know me. It was a weekend fling, never meant to be more than that.”

I groan, a new flood of tears pouring down my face. This is a nightmare. A literal one that I’m unable to wake up from. Only I would have a one-night stand with the most charming, handsome, real man on the planet, but it would all be a lie. When I went to my grandmother’s inn that day, the last thing I expected was to run into Briggs. I mean quit literally, run into him then proceed to knock him over linebacker-style into a heap on the foyer floor.

He was kind and charming, with his dimpled grin, even if he was quiet and somewhat broody all at the same time. It was later that night when everyone had gone to sleep, that I had a small momentarily insane lapse in judgment and brought out a bottle of tequila after seeing him again.