He’d had sixty seconds.
I waited while he took another sip of his drink and scrubbed his hands down his cheeks, blowing out a breath so hard his chest heaved with it.
He was so damn handsome. Probably not something I should have been thinking about, but I could barely take my eyes off him. He’d worn a simple black and red flannel shirt and jeans, but that shirt molded to the curves of his chest and his broad shoulders like it’d been painted on him.
He stared at the wall next to us like it was the Sistine Chapel, and he wanted to memorize every beautiful stroke before he faced me again.
“I don’t… I don’t even know what to say or ask right now.” He huffed a laugh, but it was cold, full of nerves and he ran his hand through his mop of thick hair again before taking his beer into his hand. He gestured to the ginger ale in front of me with a dip of his chin. “The soda. You said you haven’t been feeling well?”
“Yeah.” I cleared my throat. My palms were clammy and cold despite everything else in me feeling like it was about to explode. I hadn’t expected it to be this hard. “All day. Not so much now, but I’ve found things that help, I guess.”
“How long have you known?”
Garrett had a wicked switch when it came to his anger. Almost always totally laidback, that trigger could be flipped with no warning when someone he cared about had been hurt or mistreated. I’d seen it happen, with men who wouldn’t leave me alone in a club, an ill-timed grab of my ass as I walked by. Never, in the years we’d known each other, had I saw the beginning of that anger directed at me.
Now, his jaw twitched and veins appeared on his forearms as he curled his hands into fists. “How long have you known?”
“Six weeks,” I rasped. “I was sick almost as soon as I got off the plane after…”
“North Carolina. When you snuck out on me.”
Damn it. Tears blurred. An arrow to my heart couldn’t have hurt worse than the accusation. He had every right to be mad at me. Every right to be upset and his body practically vibrated with that anger. And worse, there was disappointment in his eyes as he looked at me.
“Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “I was sick for two weeks, the first round of antibiotics didn’t work, so I needed to go back and then I figured I didn’t have my period from all the stress of that.”
I wasn’t embarrassed to talk about the female body or cycle. My mom had raised me to be empowered and confident and she’d always shared everything openly and honestly. But I couldn’t remember a time when Garrett and I had talked about periods. He gave a slight flinch when I said it, which made nerves that had turned down to a simmer rush back to the surface.
If we couldn’t talk about this…
“Anyway. I just figured it’d happen. But then I started getting sick again and was so tired.”
“And you didn’t call. As soon as you knew, you didn’t tell me.”
I shrugged. Lame. I knew it. But what was I supposed to say? I’d been scared. Sad. Horrified we were the ages we were and this had still happened. In between bouts of puking almost all day long for a week while I tried to figure out a way to cope, I’d cried so hard my stomach hurt, and it’d taken every ounce of courage to call my parents and tell them.
They loved Garrett. Always had. They loved him still, but they did not love hearing we’d shacked up for a night and he’d knocked me up.
Worse, they didn’t love I didn’t call him right away either.
“I needed time,” I admitted. To figure things out. Figure out what I was going to do. Figure out what came next.
And I’d thought I’d done it. I was online preparing to book a flight out to Vegas when that first picture of him and Nadia popped up.
As if I summoned her, his phone lit up again with a phone call, her name bright white, a beacon highlighting my mistakes and regret and I couldn’t stop the flinch of pain seeing her name caused.
He grabbed his phone, fisted it, blacking out her name and declining the call, and glared at me.
“I don’t know what else you want me to say.” My chin wobbled.
Six weeks ago, I could have gone to him and things would have been different.
Now? He was with someone. “I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Yeah. So am I.” His voice was guttural, cutting me to the core as he shoved out of the booth. He threw down another twenty to add to the cash already on the table and barely glanced at me. “You’ve had time to process this. I’m asking you to give me that. I can’t… I can’t sit across from you and think straight. Not right now.”
I understood. I totally understood. It didn’t stop his words from slicing my heart open and causing me more pain than I’d ever felt.
I bit my tongue to try to stop the tears.
“I’ll call you,” he finally said. His dark eyes scanned my face and if he saw the pain in my own, if he cared, he didn’t show it. “This time, answer it.”
Garrett Dubiak, the only man I loved, the father of the baby I was carrying, spun on his heels and walked away from me after looking at me like I was a stranger.
And I was pretty sure he took my heart with him.
4
Garrett
The game played in front of me. Ice dust flew in the air, skates stopped on a dime. My eyes tracked the puck through the cage of my helmet, but all of it was a blurry whir. I was distracted. Moving slow.
Hell, I was playing so damn poorly, the center for the Chicago Storm, and my old teammate, had paused for a second and asked if I was okay.
It was that obvious, and if he could see, my current team could tell too. Based on the clenched jaw of our coach’s face every time he glanced my way, he definitely wasn’t happy.
How could I be expected to focus?
I’m pregnant pregnant pregnant repeated through my mind. Every swish of the skates danced to the tune bouncing around in my brain.
Pregnant
Pregnant
Pregnant
I was going to be a dad. A father.
By a woman who lived two time zones away from me. How in the hell was I going to be able to be the kind of man and Dad I wanted to be?
Fuck.
The buzzer sounded, signifying the end of the second period, and I skated off the ice as fast as I could in all my gear.
I threw my helmet into the locker in the visiting room. Down the hall was Chicago’s locker room. There’d be leather couches, the logo on the middle of the floor. The lockers would be gleaming, filled with the stench of my former teammates’ body odor I could recognize them by on scent alone. They’d been my brothers. And if I needed anyone now, it was them.
Not that I didn’t like the Vegas guys, but three months didn’t compare to seven years.
“What are you going to do?” André asked, taking the seat next to me.
I squeezed my eyes closed and rubbed them until dots speckled my vision. “Not talk about it now.”
“Then figure out a way to push through this, G. We need you out there.”
Fuck. For a moment, I considered telling Coach to put him in. We were up by one, but I’d only been lucky to save a few shots on me during the first period because my defense kicked serious ass. Dominick Masters and Max Mikolajczyk were behemoths on the ice. And our third line was beastly.