Shatter (True Believers #4)(45)
Author: Erin McCarthy

“Thanks, Jessica,” he told her.

“Call me if you need anything.”

I nodded, and shuffled with my five pounds of fleece out to the car. In the driveway I paused for a second, startled by how black the night sky actually looked. “There’s so many stars out tonight,” I said, staring straight up.

“It’s beautiful,” Jonathon said, but when I glanced at him he wasn’t looking at the sky, but at me.

My heart thawed a little. “You said once that I got a raw deal,” I whispered to him. “But the truth is, you’re the one who got the raw deal. You never wanted any of this and you’re stuck with it. But you don’t have to be if you don’t want to. Not anymore.”

He shook his head. “How do you figure I was shafted? I got a gorgeous and sweet woman. That doesn’t sound like the short straw to me.”

“I’m really confused,” I said, trying to be honest, but my thoughts not translating into words. “I feel really sad.”

“So do I. Come on, let’s get in the car and go to bed.”

We went back to my apartment and when I walked in, I saw that he had been there already. That he had changed the sheets on the bed. “Is this . . .” I picked up the sheet he had folded and set on the counter.

“Yes.”

I held it to my chest, which might seem gross and more than a little dysfunctional, but it seemed right. Necessary. I wanted to feel it against me, to hold it against my heart. “I wanted this baby,” I said, because it seemed important to let him and the baby know that. That while it had caught me off guard, and scared the shit out of me, I had wanted this baby and now I would never get to hold her. I ached for a weight to the sheet, for the solid feel of a living, breathy infant, her mewling yawns, and jerky hands awe-inspiring.

The blanket fell off my shoulders and I closed my eyes and kept them closed, tears trickling down my cheeks, even when Jonathon wrapped his arms around me from behind.

“I know,” he whispered, his lips brushing the side of my head. “I know. I wanted it, too, and it hurts.”

“It hurts a lot.”

We slept spooning that night, my arms around the pathetic little sheet bundle, his arms around me.

When I woke up, he was gone.

* * *

I didn’t know how to deal with Kylie. With her grief. Hell, with my grief. She was avoiding me. And I was avoiding her. I did try, in a way that would allow her an easy out. So when she always took it, and gave me excuses or suggested alternate times she knew I wouldn’t be free, part of me was relieved.

There was something so intense and intimate about what we had been through, how I had seen her, that was too much. I had held her hand in the hospital twice now, I had cleaned up her puke, her blood, our baby. We shared a bed, a shower, a seat in the waiting room, fear, and tears. I needed the space, the time to avoid all of it for a few days.

A few days that turned into fourteen.

I hadn’t meant for that to happen. I had just wanted to take two, three days tops to sort through my emotions, to tell my mother and father and Devon that Kylie had a miscarriage and deal with their various reactions. Which were as predicted. Horror and sorrow from Mom. Relief from Dad. Sympathy from Devon, who understood my own conflicted feelings.

Go underground, study, work, exhaust myself so I could sleep, that was the plan. I was okay with her avoiding me for a minute. But then I wasn’t okay with her avoiding me because I started to think that maybe she meant to permanently avoid me and I didn’t mean for her to take that way out. I didn’t want any out from anyone.

It had been two weeks and she still didn’t have a minute to see me? She couldn’t meet me at the coffee shop? What the f**k? But I was willing to accept that it had everything to do with her depression, and nothing to do with me. I refused to believe that it had something to do with me, because that would suck.

Except my delusions couldn’t continue when I saw a short video she uploaded on Saturday night that featured her, Jessica, and Rory in pajamas dancing suggestively. Or really, more just shaking their asses and laughing.

She didn’t look particularly depressed.

At one point she turned directly to the camera and winked. The expression on her face made me both hard and annoyed. She looked f**king flirty and hot as hell. But damn it, why did she look flirty and hot?

And why was she winking at some unknown cameraperson on a Saturday night when I sitting alone in my apartment watching a horror movie? I might as well just move my furniture into my mother’s basement right then.

Screw this. I wasn’t sitting there worrying about her health, emotional and physical, when she was having a twerking slumber party and had been blowing me off for two weeks straight. I called my friend Miranda. “What are you doing? Want to go out?”

“Like, go out how?”

“Let’s go to a bar and shoot some pool.”

“Are you serious? Darwin Does Dive Bar? I love it.”

“I’m game.” I was. Turning off the TV, I stood up. “Can you meet me there in half an hour?”

“You okay?” she asked curiously.

“Of course I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be okay?” Because that didn’t sound defensive at all.

“It’s just you haven’t been interested in the bar scene in like a year.”

“Sometimes you have to change it up. What place did you have in mind?”

“There’s The Church, but it’s a g*y bar. Do you care?”

“No. I’m not going to hit on anyone.” I may have been put out with Kylie but I wasn’t looking to replace her.

Even if she didn’t want me. Which she obviously didn’t.

“Okay, see you in twenty. And Darwin, walk, don’t drive. I have a feeling you are going to tie one on tonight.”

“Pfft.” I had no idea what she was talking about.

Ninety minutes later, I did. She was right. I had walked in, sucked down my first rum and Coke and went from there. It wasn’t like I set out to get drunk, but I guess emotional volatility and liquor are a frantic combination. They feed off of each other. Miranda and I shot pool and laughed and joked around, and then there came that moment where I realized with perfect clarity that I was f**ked up.

It happened when I went to reach for my fresh drink on the bar and missed it. My hand just skidded straight past the glass. “Shit.”

Miranda laughed and plopped down onto the stroll next to me. “So what’s really going on, D?”