Baseball and Other Lessons (Devil's Ranch Book 2) (18 page)

#

Matt was pacing like a caged animal, and Jenn could feel his frustration pulsing in the air around them. Her hands pressed into the wall behind her. She had to restrain herself from clawing, trying to escape into the drywall and insulation.

She didn’t want to have this conversation. Didn’t want to tell Matt her truth.

Because it wasn’t pretty.

It was awful and beautiful and painful. Oh, so, painful.

She closed her eyes against the sting of tears and the frantic pounding of her heart that almost always accompanied her memories. She drew in a shaky breath, and moments later Matt’s body was against hers. She wanted to sink into it and lose herself in him.

God, she wanted to lose herself. Her memories. Her truth.

His hand gently cupped her face, and his voice was just above a whisper when he asked, “What is it, Jenn? What happened?”

She shook her head. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t tell him.

His lips gently landed on her forehead, her nose, her cheeks. Feather light, like a blessing. Or maybe a curse. She didn’t know anymore.

She felt like she didn’t know much anymore, other than that ever since Matt had been injured she felt like she’d been losing herself. Some days it seemed like the very fabric of who she was and the life she’d built was being torn apart, the stitches slowly, painfully ripped out one by one, to the point where she couldn’t hide and hold all of her pieces inside anymore. They were spilling out, one by one, messily leaving behind emotions she’d thought she’d long buried.

“Jenn,” he whispered. Just her name. But it sounded like a plea and a prayer, an invitation she’d never intended to accept.

She opened her eyes and held Matt’s gaze with her own, the stinging in her eyes now a river, a flood that threatened to sweep them both away. “You want my truth, Matt? You want to know why I’m angry and bitter and why I try to keep you at a distance despite—yes—wanting you?”

She gulped in a huge breath of air, made sure she had his full and undivided attention, and told him her truth.

#

Del Rio, Texas, Ten Years Ago

Jenn mentally counted back the days. Once. Twice. Three times.

Fought to stuff down the panic that threatened to take over.

Six weeks.

She glanced at the stick resting on the counter of the bathroom sink, afraid to fully focus and actually see it.

Just do it. Just get it over with.

Slowly, she reached out a shaking hand and gingerly picked up the white plastic.

Two pink lines.

She swallowed down the panic-laced bile that burned the back of her throat, checked the instructions one more time and barely managed to lean over the toilet in time.

Once her stomach was turned inside out and the heaving had finally stopped, she curled into the fetal position on the floor, the pregnancy test still clutched in one hand and the instructions in the other.

Minutes or hours later, she wasn’t sure, Jenn pulled herself up off the floor, gently set the pregnancy test and instructions in the trashcan and walked into the living room of her tiny one-bedroom apartment. She’d been scrimping and saving since she was in college for the down payment on a house (thank you, full-ride scholarship and dual credit courses), and she was realistically a couple of months away from being where she wanted to be for that, especially considering she was just about to wrap up her first full year of teaching.

I can’t raise a baby, a child, in this tiny apartment.

She sat on her couch, more exhausted than she could ever remember being. Mentally and emotionally she felt wrung out, confused, scared shitless and yet filled with wonder. She rested the palm of one hand on her stomach, rubbed her still-flat belly.

There’s a life in there.

It wasn’t how she’d planned it. She wanted children, but they hadn’t been in the plan for right now. Not yet.

And there was that little fact of not being in a relationship with the baby’s father.

Yeah, that made things slightly more difficult.

She didn’t know how she was going to tell Matt. She expected him to be pissed, and she couldn’t blame him. After all, she wasn’t exactly happy about the current situation, either.

But still, there was a life under her hand.

Her thoughts swirling in her head and her eyelids heavy, Jenn lay down on the couch and pulled a throw over her body. With her palm still pressed against her belly, she fell into a hard, dreamless sleep.

The next morning she woke up mentally refreshed but with a hell of a crick in her neck. Slightly more at peace with her current situation, Jenn spent her Sunday making plans, looking over her finances and finally getting in touch with a mortgage broker her family had known since she was a kid. If she was going to have this baby, she was damned sure going to do so in a house with a yard in a good part of town, even if she had to pinch a few more pennies.

The following weeks were a whirlwind of activity, but a month later she’d found the perfect house—a small, two-bedroom, one bath with a fenced-in yard in a good neighborhood. Even better had been the price. A fellow teacher’s mother had recently passed away, and she had decided to sell the house rather than try to maintain the upkeep on it since she and her husband owned a home already. She’d approached Jenn before even looking for a Realtor to list it, and had offered Jenn the house at a price well below appraisal. It needed a little bit of work, but she could handle having new floors put in, repainting the walls and bringing in a plumber.

A few weeks later she was a homeowner.

As contractors came in and out of her new house, replacing the 1970s shag carpet, painting the walls and fixing the plumbing, Jenn wrapped up the school year and enjoyed her little secret while packing up her apartment in her spare time. So far, the only person who knew about the baby was her OBGYN, and she was content to keep it that way.

She still hadn’t figured out how to tell Matt, but she’d watched every Wranglers game she could, especially if he was the starting pitcher. Even though it was early in the season, he was already on pace to have an All Star year. Every time he stood on the mound Jenn would rub her stomach and whisper, “That’s your daddy up there.”

Sometimes, her stomach would bubble in response, but she knew enough to know that the feeling was probably just gas since it was still too early to feel the baby moving.

Her OBGYN had set her due date at December 20. A winter baby. Possibly a Christmas baby.

Matt wouldn’t be playing baseball then. In fact, he might even be home.

The thought would slip through her mind, unbidden, and she knew she needed to tell him. She just didn’t know how.

“Oh, by the way, remember how I told you I was on the pill and it was perfectly fine to not use a condom that night? Yeah, so, apparently your little swimmers are just as competitive as you are and decided hormonal birth control was no big deal.”

Somehow she didn’t think that would go over too well.

So instead of asking Chase for Matt’s phone number (which was going to be awkward as hell), she kept putting it off, secretly growing her baby and telling people who asked that she’d simply thought it was time to buy a house and she’d been presented with an offer she couldn’t refuse. It wasn’t really lying if it was telling part of the truth, right?

She couldn’t imagine how Matt would react. Anger. Disbelief. She couldn’t blame him for feeling any of those things and more, considering she’d been the one to tell him it was okay to have sex without a condom. In all fairness it should have been okay—she’d been on the pill since she was a teenager to regulate her periods, and the failure rate was something like less than one percent.

In other words, she shouldn’t have gotten pregnant that night.

But she had.

She would often think back to the days before that night, trying to remember if she’d accidentally forgotten to take a pill or had taken one late. She couldn’t remember that happening—she took it like clockwork every morning as soon as she woke up. She hadn’t been sick or on antibiotics, either, so that excuse had to be thrown out the window.

No, this had been a fluke of Mother Nature. A fluke she was quickly falling more and more in love with. She’d cried at her twelve week checkup when the doctor had listened for the baby’s heartbeat the first time. She could hear it lightly whooshing through the machine. It was the most miraculous, wondrous thing in the world.

Sometimes it was hard to believe that for those first few disbelieving hours, she’d wanted to rail against the world and fate. Once she’d woken up to the dawn of a new day, she’d done so with an overwhelming feeling of love and protectiveness towards the life growing inside of her. No, none of this was ideal, but she was pregnant and would soon be responsible for another human being, and she was damned sure going to be the best mother she could be.

Which meant she should probably tell the father.

A few times over the next week, she picked up her phone to call Chase and ask him for Matt’s number. She always chickened out right before the first ring.

In a matter of weeks the floors had been replaced, the paint had dried, the plumbing had been repaired and Jenn was ready to move into her new house. Seventeen weeks after that wonderful, heart breaking night with Matt, Jenn moved out of her apartment and into her new house, effectively closing the door on her past and opening the door to her future.

She still hadn’t told anyone but her OBGYN about the baby. The fact that she hadn’t started to show yet definitely helped her to keep the secret a little longer. She’d remembered her mom showing pretty early with all three of her younger siblings, so she’d asked her doctor, worried that something was wrong with the baby. The doctor had smiled her kind smile and reassured Jenn that her baby was doing just fine.

Over the summer break she discreetly bought a couple of items for the baby’s room—a crib and a car seat on a trip to San Antonio, unisex baby clothes that she told people were for a friend if they asked.

A part of her wanted to shout from the rooftops and share her news. The other part enjoyed knowing something no one else was privy to and feeling fascination as her baby began to move and become more active.

There was still that pesky little fact that she still hadn’t managed to tell Matt.

At twenty weeks she went in for a full ultrasound, and gripped the edges of the exam table as the sonographer took picture after picture of her growing baby. Finally, towards the end of the exam, the baby moved and they got a fairly clear look at the sex.

She was having a boy.

Somehow that only seemed fitting, and already she could form a picture in her mind of what he would look like. He would have her red hair and Matt’s hazel eyes. He would be athletic like his uncle and father, and share her love of books (not that Matt was a mental slouch).

He was probably going to be a handful. She was definitely going to love every minute of it.

She also mentioned to her doctor that she’d been having some mild back pain and abdominal cramps. Her OBGYN assured her that was normal—her body was going through a lot of changes, after all—and that they only needed to worry if the pain and cramps were accompanied by vaginal bleeding.

She left feeling reassured and excited, yet determined to finally tell Matt. She went home and tried to muster the courage to call Chase and get Matt’s number.

Three times she picked up her phone.

Three times she set it back down.

Instead of calling Chase, she sat on the couch and looked at the black and white picture the sonographer had printed out for her. Her baby.

Every time she thought to call Chase to get Matt’s number, she allowed herself to get distracted by something else. Lesson plans. Baby names. Making the two and a half hour drive into San Antonio for maternity clothes, since her normal clothes had finally gotten too snug and the school year would be starting in a week. The back pain and cramps would come and go, but they never stuck around long and she hadn’t experienced any bleeding, so she didn’t worry too much about anything other than how to tell Matt.

She also needed to tell her principal and human resources, considering she would be going on maternity leave over Christmas break. Somehow, telling them during the in-service week made her baby feel more real, more concrete.

She was going to be a mother.

The first couple of weeks of school flew by. She still hadn’t told her family, Chase, Jo, or most importantly Matt. She went home at the end of the second week of classes, determined that tonight would be the night that she would call Chase and get Matt’s number. She couldn’t keep putting it off.

But first, she needed some music and a bite to eat, maybe a bubble bath since her lower back had been cramping on her all day long. Sure, she was used to being on her feet for a good portion of the day, but she’d never taught while pregnant and she guessed her body was telling her to take it easy.

She thought about eating something first, but a bubble bath sounded better. Her lower back cramped again as she bent to turn on the taps, and she stood up and massaged the offending tissue with her fingertips. Jenn walked into her bedroom, disrobed and looked at herself in the mirror. The curve of her stomach was more prominent now, but still somewhat hideable with loose shirts and dresses. A few people had asked questions, but for some reason she’d just brushed it off as weight gain.