“It takes ten minutes.”
I set a timer on my phone, and we wait and wait and wait. It’s the longest ten minutes of my entire life, and when the alarm sounds, Abby looks at me.
I try to make my legs move, but they won’t. Because I’m not sure I want to know. If I’m pregnant, my entire world is about to change. So is Lincoln’s. I’m not ready for this. He’s not ready for this. We’re not ready for this. For fuck’s sake, we’ve only been officially dating for one week. We’re in the honeymoon phase, not the baby-making phase.
“You gonna go look?”
“Will you do it for me?” I ask.
Abby squeezes my arm and steps into the bathroom.
My heart is beating so fast, I feel like it’s going to fly right out of my chest. And when Abby walks out of the bathroom and I see those two lines, my throat constricts so tightly I feel like I can’t breathe.
“No.” I push away from the wall, grab the stick, and toss it in the trash. “It’s wrong. That’s a false positive. I’m not pregnant.”
“Oh, Adley.” Abby looks at me like I’m a fragile doll who just broke.
But I’m not fragile, and I’m not broken, and I am most certainly not pregnant.
“I’m not,” I insist. “I’m on birth control, and I take it regularly. I know it’s not one-hundred-percent effective, but this has to be a mistake.”
“That’s why I bought three.”
“They’re going to be negative.”
She nods, but I know it’s just to appease me. “Okay.”
I march into the bathroom and kick the door shut. I rip open the package and lay a towel out on the sink. I tug my pants to my ankles and sit down to pee on a stick for the second time.
“And when they are negative, you’re taking me for that pizza you promised me, and I’m going to have a giant glass of wine.”
“Three glasses,” she shouts from the other side of the door.
Three glasses of wine and a pizza. That sounds pretty damn good. With a deep, cleansing breath, I shove both sticks between my legs and do my business. When I’m done, I set the sticks on the towel, wipe, and pull up my pants.
I’m standing at the sink, washing my hands when Lincoln’s big brown eyes pop into my head. I wonder if our baby will have his eyes. Or maybe mine? There’s a flutter of excitement in my belly, and I close my eyes, imagining a brown-haired, brown-eyed little girl with bouncy curls running through the yard, Lincoln chasing after her. He reaches for her, she squeals, and when I open my eyes and look in the mirror, I’m smiling.
That smile fades when I look at the pregnancy tests. I suck in a sharp breath and blow it out as the tests reveal what I already know.
“Shit,” I whisper. My legs are weak and shaking, and I lower the toilet seat so I can sit down before I fall.
“You okay in there?” Abby asks.
I shake my head as the first tear falls. “No,” I croak, my voice thick and weird sounding.
The door bursts open and Abby takes in the two positive tests on the sink.
“I can’t be pregnant,” I cry, shaking my head. “There are so many things I have to do, like pass that damn test and get a job. Who’s going to hire a pregnant woman?”
“There are lots of places that will hire a p
regnant woman.”
“And what about Lincoln? He’s going to freak out.”
“You don’t know that. Lincoln is a level-headed man. I’m not sure he knows what it means to freak out.”
“I’m having a baby with a man who hasn’t even said he loves me,” I lament. “We’re barely dating, nowhere close to talking about marriage. I don’t even know that he wants kids.” I wipe away another set of tears. They just keep coming, and I’m not sure if it’s because I’m scared, overwhelmed, or secretly happy because even though this is the last thing I want right now, it’s a baby.