Noah’s face pressed against the thick glass of the lion enclosure, his breath fogging his view. He kept swiping it away every time it became too much to see.
Ten feet behind him, Sophie and I sat on a bench in the shade, my gaze fixed wholly on Noah and hers fixed wholly on me.
“You can’t be serious.”
“Please don’t say anything,” I said quietly. “Especially not to Noah.”
“I won’t. But why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Her lower lip jutted out in a pout, and I could just about make it out in the corner of my field of view.
Noah banged on the glass and I shifted my attention. “Noah, don’t do that,” I called to him. He spun on his heel and looked at me wide-eyed, his curly brown hair sticking up in funny directions from the wind. Without that, he looked so much like his father it was genuinely frightening at times. “If you were trapped in an enclosed environment, you wouldn’t want someone coming up and banging on your glass.”
He shook his head. “I would if they wanted to be friends!”
“The lion does not want to be friends with you.”
“You don’t know that!” he huffed, spinning back around to stare at the sleeping lion again.
I rolled my eyes and refocused my attention back on Sophie once I was positive Noah wouldn’t bang on the glass again. “I’m barely capable of admitting it to myself, let alone other people.”
“You haven’t told him?” she asked. “Liv, you have to tell him. You can’t just waltz around feeling sorry for yourself and assuming that he doesn’t have feelings for you too.”
I shook my head. “If I tell him, then it becomes real. And that opens a whole new can of worms that I haven’t put enough thought into.”
Sophie’s hand motioned for me to continue, and I glanced at it quickly before turning my gaze back to Noah.
“Like, if I tell him and he feels the same about me, then we’d need to discuss what that means. We’d need to consider how confusing that is for Noah when he’s probably already confused about what we are. We’d have to consider if we even wanted to go through with the annulment, and we’d have to think about the possibilities of us being long term and how that would affect both of our lives. And I’m not ready for any of those conversations yet,” I explained, my throat closing in just a little. It wasn’t even that emotional of a topic and I was already getting overwhelmed.
“If you love him, then you have to be okay with having those conversations,” she said, her voice so fucking soft that it nearly sent me into a frenzy.
“I didn’t say that I—”
“You didn’t need to.”
Tears burned at the backs of my eyes and before I could stop them, they welled up in the corners, slipping over the edges far too easily. I wiped them away, but there was no stopping her from noticing.
“Aw, Liv…”
Her arms wrapped around my shoulders from the side as she hugged me, and fuck, why did I want to just let myself cry at the Goddamn zoo? Why did I even want to cry in the first place?
“I’m fine,” I croaked. “Fuck, why am I crying?”
She snorted as she released me. “You on your period? You’re always emotional on your period.”
I shook my head. “No, it hasn’t…”
Wait.
Every part of me froze. It hadn’t started yet. How long ago did I put the emergency tampons in my bag? I thought back, days, days, days — no, shit, it had been a week. A fucking week. I’d done it a week ago after my phone had notified me that I was due to start that day.
“Liv?”
“Oh my God,” I breathed.
I pulled my phone from my purse and frantically opened my period tracker. Sure enough, right there on the screen, it said I should have finished my cycle two days ago. I had never been more than a single day off since starting birth control.
“What do I do? Soph, what the fuck do I do?” I asked, my voice shaking, my hands shaking. I couldn’t stop staring at it.
“Calm down,” she advised, putting her hand over my phone and clicking the button to turn off the screen. “You’re okay. You’re fine. We can go get a test. You’re on the pill right?”
I nodded, forcing myself to look back at Noah to make sure he hadn’t run off. Thank God he was still staring at the lion, even if he was making roaring sounds.
“And you’ve been taking it correctly?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You haven’t missed any, right?” she asked, her hand squeezing mine.
“Maybe one or two? I just doubled up,” I explained.
Her face went white as she forced herself into my field of view. “What do you mean you just doubled up? When was the last time you missed one?”
I blinked at her. “A few weeks ago?”
“Oh my God, Liv. You have to take those exactly as it says or they don’t work. How do you not know that?”
My gaze bounced from Noah to her, the stone in my gut sinking rapidly. “I don’t… I don’t know, I got them to help with my cramps. I wasn’t using them for birth control until recently.”
Noah spun on the spot and started trotting back over to us as Sophie spoke again. “Your parents didn’t—… Shit, no, they wouldn’t have, would they?”
“Livie, why are you crying?” Noah asked, but I didn’t know how to fucking answer him. He hopped up on the bench beside me and wrapped his arms around my waist, burying himself in my side. I knew he was trying to help.
“We’ll go get a test. Right now,” Sophie urged. Her attention turned to the five year old wrapped around me like a monkey. “Liv’s not feeling very well, Noah. Are you okay if we go now?”
“But the Gor—”
Whatever look Sophie gave him was enough to calm his complaints.
————
We picked up a box of ten tests and an unhealthy amount of McNuggets on our way back to Damien’s house. I hadn’t checked with him regarding having Sophie over, but I didn’t give a shit at this point.
Not when all of the ten tests were laid out in front of me on the bathroom counter, each one showing two bold red lines.
The faint sound of cartoons drifted in from downstairs and mixed almost harmoniously with the gasps for air through my tears. This wasn’t how anything was supposed to happen, this wasn’t what I’d imagined for my life. But it all made sense now — the nausea, the smells, the hormones. I was an idiot for not noticing.
“It’s okay,” Sophie cooed, her hand rubbing small circles on the top of my back. A string of snot slipped from my nose and fell disgustingly into the bathroom sink. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
“It’s not okay,” I sobbed, leaning down to put my head in my hands. “This isn’t how any of this was supposed to happen. I got drunkenly married in Vegas, fell in fucking love with a man twice my age, and now I’m pregnant with his Goddamn child when he very clearly told me he didn’t want another.”
I didn’t care that I’d said it. It was out there, I couldn’t take it back, couldn’t un-speak love if I tried. And going off of what Sophie had said earlier, it was already obvious.
“He might change his mind once he knows,” she said softly. “It’s okay to do things differently than you thought you would. Things don’t have to go to plan.”
“I’m not telling him,” I croaked.
Her hand paused. “You have to tell him.”
I shook my head and wiped the bubbling snot from my nostrils. “I don’t. I’ll break my own fucking heart if I have to.”
Her jaw hardened as her lips pressed into a thin line. “You can’t do what his ex did to him, Liv. That’s not fair and he’s not done anything to deserve that.”
She was right, and I hated it.
I couldn’t hide it forever. Even if he wanted to keep seeing me, even if he felt the way I did, I couldn’t conceal a baby bump. And if I told him and he agreed to stay with me, would he even be with me because he wanted to be?
Would he be with me because he felt he had to?
