AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The moment she slipped from the room and left us to our own devices, though, reality came crashing back down like a cartoon piano. It was as if a switch flipped inside of me, erasing all of the glee and stamping it down into the ground.
Twins.
Exciting, thrilling, and…fucking horrifying. Not only was I going to be giving birth, but it would be to two babies, doubling the chances of complications, doubling the risk ofhemorrhaging, doubling the work out the other end. And Adrian…
Adrian had fully expected me to be okay with raising them mostly alone, with his help and his money where needed, purely because he wrongfully assumed I was the one who had gone to my father about us.
Adrian expected me to get through the pregnancy without him.
Adrian expected me to handle giving the babies to him when it was his turn.
Adrian expected me to…
“Hey, hey, are you okay?”
Blinking, I realized that my breathing and my heart were too fast, my eyes were unfocused, and my free hand was shaking. Adrian sat on the edge of the bed beside my hip, one hand gripping mine and the other resting against my stomach from where he’d pulled my top back down. His brows were furrowed as he looked down at me, his mouth parted just slightly, and I could feel the worry in his gaze, could feel the way his eyes searched mine for signs of a problem.
“Aves,” he said softly. “It’s okay. I know it’s overwhelming, but we can handle two.”
I stared at him, barely hearing his words over the thudding of my heartbeat in my ears. He didn’t get it, not at all, and the damage was so destructive here that I worried there was no path to recovery, no path to righting this. “Yeah,” I said flatly, turning away to look out the window as I tried to steady my breathing. “Overwhelming.”
He lifted his hand from my stomach, reaching forward between us and brushing a strand of hair from my face so gently that I wondered if he was worried I was made of glass. I flinched. “Look, I…I know you’re probably scared, and honestly, I’m scared too. But I’m not going anywhere…”
“It’s not about the goddamn twins, Adrian,” I snapped, my voice beginning to tremble as I forced myself to look at him. This felt wrong, like I was marking a day that should have been celebrated as one to be forgotten, like I was ruining a moment we’d had. But I hadn’t spoken to him in weeks and I felt as though I were backed into a corner with an impossible decision—be with a man who clearly couldn’t trust me, or go through all of this without him by my side. “It’s about you. It’s about this. It’s the fact that you didn’t believe me when I needed you to the most. It’s the fact that you thought I could do that to you.”
He didn’t move his hand from where it rested on my cheek, but I could see the rest of his body recoil, could see the flicker of shame that crossed his face. His throat moved as he searched for the words, his head falling just slightly as he exhaled. “I was wrong. I know that, and I’m genuinely so sorry,” he said. “I should have trusted you. I…”
“But you didn’t.” I steeled my gaze. I was tired of sobbing, tired of breaking down, tired of feeling the things he’d put me through over this. Showing my anger was different, though, and storming Dad’s apartment showed me that I could at least be somewhat level headed in my anger. “You didn’t believe me. You were fully convinced that I was capable of hurting you like that. And I can understand, to a degree—you’ve been hurt, horribly, and that’s awful and a lot to process, but Jesus fucking Christ, Ade, you were so up your own ass that you were happy to leave me to deal with this alone.”
He closed his eyes and hung his head, waves of black hair with streaks of gray falling forward. “I never would have made you do it all alone,” he said softly. “I’m sorry, I know I said that before but I can understand how you would have worried about that regardless.”
He lifted his head again, looking me dead in the eyes as he squeezed my hand.
“I was an idiot. I’ll shout that from the fuckin’ rooftops if you want me to,” he continued. “Please, just let me make it right. However that looks for you, I’m willing to…”
“I’m not sure if you can make it right,” I said, and it hurt to admit, hurt to speak the words that gave life to what I was feeling. “How am I supposed to trust that you won’t think the worst of me again? How am I supposed to carry on when I’m being held to a standard you’ve created in your mind that I couldn’t possibly live up to? Things won’t always be certain and as it stands right now, all I know is that when things get hard, you don’t believe me.”
His hand slipped back, my ear falling into the space between his thumb and forefinger. His chin tightened as his lower lip wobbled slightly, measured breaths raising his shoulders up and down. “All I can give you is my word until I can show it.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but the sound was cut short, choked as another lump filled my throat. “I want to believe that,” I said hoarsely. “I do. But something broke in all of this, Adrian, and I don’t know if it can be fixed. I don’t know if it can be put back together.”
His face fell. Every line that marked his skin loosened in a worried defeat, but a moment later they were back, determination setting in his gaze. “I’ll fix it,” he said. “I will figure out a way to fix this, Ava, because I am not going to give up on this. Not on us, not on the twins, not on you.”
The ache in my chest spread outward as I sat there, caught in limbo somewhere between the love I still felt for him and the walls I’d been building to protect myself.
But then Sadie was coming back into the room with the photographs in hand, and whatever sense of realness we had at that moment faded away, slipping back into oblivion with the rest of it.
Chapter 38
Adrian
Much like his penthouse, David's office seemed so dark that it devoured everything in its presence.
Leaning against his desk and dressed in what could best be described as an almost pinstripe suit, he observed me as if I was someone new, as if I was something to balk at for simply striding in unannounced. But I came with a goal in mind and I wasn’t going to let his irritated gaze and white-knuckled grasp on the sides of his desk keep me from that.
Because there, almost hidden in the shadow of him as she sat in his desk chair with her auburn hair swept up into a messy bun, was my reason for this. For everything.
Ava: I don’t think he’ll want to talk to you.
