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“I’m pregnant.”
CHAPTER 16: LINCOLN
I glance away from her, my eyes turning to the window for just a beat before her words register.
I do a double take.
Wait.
What?
“You’re…” I begin.
“Pregnant,” she finishes with an emphatic nod.
I try to comprehend what she’s telling me, but it’s like the words won’t compute.
It also sort of feels like my legs are about to give out, and that’s when a rush of emotions hit me.
It feels like every emotion in the book plowing into me all at once.
“I’m going to be…” I try and fail to complete another sentence.
“A daddy.” She nods.
“Holy shit. I need to sit down. No, wait, you need to sit down.”
She laughs as I scramble to reconcile her words with my thought process. Normally I’m a little quicker on the uptake, but Jesus, this news is from so far out in left field that I’m not even sure I’m playing baseball right now.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Are you?” I counter, and that’s when it hits me.
She’s pregnant.
It’s mine.
I’m going to be a dad.
I rush toward her and pull her into my arms before she gets the chance to answer. “Please say you’ll take me back,” I beg as my eyes fall onto hers. I lean down and press a kiss to her forehead. “I will do anything to get you back in my life,” a kiss on her cheek, “by my side,” a kiss on her other cheek, “in my bed,” a kiss on the corner of her mouth. “Move in with me. Marry me. Have more babies with me. You and me and Jonah and our baby. Say yes.” I’m desperate by the end, begging as I hold onto her and she clings to me and we somehow hold each other up as I pray our baby will have the same gold flecks in her eyes that her beautiful mother has.
It's symbolic, I think—us holding each other up. We’ll continue to do that as we move into this next segment of life…the one I hope I’ll get to call the happy one.
“Whoa, boy. Slow down,” she says, putting a halting hand on my chest, and reality plows into me that maybe I’m reading this whole thing wrong and it’s not what she wants at all.
My chest cracks clean in half at her slow down.
She didn’t say she wanted to get back together with me. She just said she’s pregnant.
“I want to be with you, and I want to trust you, and I think you went a long way in earning that back by fighting for Jonah and me. This whole time, we’ve kept saying we’d figure things out, but I think we’re past the point of needing to figure it out and fuck what anybody else thinks because it’s you and me, okay?” She’s talking through her tears, and it’s making me emotional, too. “You and me and Jonah and our baby, and maybe more if it’s what the future holds for us. The rest…I guess we’ll figure it out.”
I laugh a little deliriously at the end of her speech that we’ll figure it out when she just said we’re past the point of needing to figure it out, but she’s right. It’s all anybody can do in this life, isn’t it? We take what we’re dealt and…we figure it out. Somehow, some way. And as long as we can do that together, hand-in-hand, then we can fight our way through anything.
I lower my lips to hers, and she kisses me back with a ferocity that’s both healing and unexpected.
I’m about to pick her up and carry her into her bedroom when the front door opens.
“Oh thank heavens,” Sam practically yells, breaking up our intimate moment with her own brand of sassiness.
