Baseball and Other Lessons (Devil's Ranch Book 2) (19 page)

She ran her hands over her belly and smiled.

“I love you, little man,” she whispered.

She needed to remember to buy a camera so that she could take photos, since she figured years from now she’d probably wish for them.

Absently, she pressed play on the CD player on top of her dresser, not remembering what she had in there.

The opening strains of Evanescence’s “My Immortal” powered through the bedroom. Mix CD it was.

Jenn walked back into the bathroom, added some bubble bath to the nearly half-full tub then massaged her lower back as another cramp hit her. She mentally reminded herself to drink more water. Maybe she was a little dehydrated, considering how much she was peeing these days.

She stepped into the tub, sank down into the warm water and vanilla-scented bubbles and closed her eyes. Oh, this was heaven.

Until it wasn’t.

As she lay in the tub the pain in her lower back got worse and worse, and she started experiencing abdominal and pelvic cramps that at first felt like she was getting her period, but then began to feel like her uterus was ripping itself apart.

She struggled into a sitting position, looked down. The water in the bathtub had turned pink.

Oh, God, what was happening?

She pressed her legs together and clutched her stomach, fighting against what her intuition told her was going on but that her brain refused to accept. She was at twenty-three weeks. There was no way this could be happening.

Maybe she’d cut herself and hadn’t realized it, and the scab had come off in the hot water.

Except the pink had gotten darker, despite how tightly she pressed her legs together. Beyond the pain in her back and abdomen was a pain even deeper, one that stole her breath and made her vision go black at the edges.

She watched, blurrily, as the water turned from pink to red, and then she could look no more, could no longer focus on the red in the bottom of her bathtub.

Another wave of pain tore at her, tore her apart, and through the haze of blood and tears she could only think one thing.

I wasn’t supposed to have met you yet.

Chapter Thirteen

As Jenn tearily spoke,
Matt’s world dropped from underneath him. Everything he’d ever known tilted on its axis, throwing him off-balance.

Jenn had been pregnant? With his baby?

There were so many questions, thoughts and emotions running through him he didn’t even know where to begin.

Then he looked at the woman in front of him, at her tear-streaked face and the pain that seemed like it was as fresh today as it had been ten years ago, and he knew where to begin.

Without a word he bent at the knees, put an arm behind Jenn’s legs and another around her waist and picked her up.

“Matt! What are you doing? Should you be carrying me considering your head injury?”

“Shh. Just give me a minute.”

He carried her back to the living room, where he sat on the couch with Jenn draped across his lap. He tucked her head so that it was against his chest. He rested his chin on top of her curls and tightened his arms around her. She sniffled.

“I shouldn’t have sprung all that on you like that. It was unfair.”

He could argue that not telling him about the baby in the first place was unfair, but he wasn’t going to pile on to her misery. Instead, he rubbed her back and asked, “Did you ever tell anyone about the baby?”

She shook her head. “You’re the first person other than my doctor, the principal and the HR director.”

Ten years later, and he was finally the first person she’d told. The irony was not lost upon him.

“I’m sorry you went through that alone.”

“It’s my fault, Matt. I had a million chances to tell you, or Chase, or my parents. Someone, anyone. I just never did.” She glanced up at him. “I should have told you. I’m so, so sorry I never did. I just didn’t know how you would react. And then in my head it became not telling you because I didn’t want to throw you off your game and jinx the rest of the season, or I didn’t want you to think I’d lied that night about being on the pill and was trying to cuckhold you.”

“You were scared.” He understood scared. He’d been scared back then, too, and probably would have been even more scared had she told him about the baby. Hell, he hated to admit it but there was a good chance he would have wondered if she’d lied to him in order to trap him, or blamed her if he’d suddenly tanked that season.

The fact that she’d known him that well, even back then, kind of floored him.

“I was plenty scared, but that doesn’t excuse me keeping your baby from you. I knew I shouldn’t, that it was wrong, but like I said, I just kept making up excuses.”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Jenn. We were both young and in a situation that definitely complicated matters.”

She glanced at him. “You’re being much more level-headed about this than I thought you would be.”

“What did you expect?”

“Yelling. Cussing. Disbelief. Wanting to run away from me as fast as you could because I’m obviously off my fucking rocker.”

He snorted. “You’re not off your rocker. If anything, I’m just glad I finally got it out of you.”

She rested her head on his shoulder again, her fingers tracing the letters on his t-shirt. “How is it you know exactly which buttons to push?”

“Why do I get the feeling no one’s ever tried before?"

Her fingers stilled briefly before resuming their path. “It’s hard for people to try when you don’t let them get close enough to do so.”

Her quiet admission made his gut clench with recognition and a little bit of guilt, wondering if he’d been the one to make her that way, if it had been the baby, or something else altogether.

Matt swallowed before asking his next question, not sure if he should but curious nonetheless. “So after the…bathtub…what happened?”

Jenn drew in a shaky breath and exhaled on a ragged sigh. “Luckily, I’d taken my phone into the bathroom with me, so I grabbed it and called my OBGYN. She told me to get to the hospital as soon as possible, to call an ambulance if I needed to. I made myself get out of the tub and towel off, put on some sweats and a t-shirt. I couldn’t look at the tub, and every movement was just awful. I was having contractions, which made it hard to drive.”

Matt closed his eyes, pain for their baby and the woman in his arms ricocheting through his body.

“I got in my car and drove to the hospital. They got me checked in, took me up to labor and delivery.” She laughed, the sound tinged with a hint of disbelief and anger. “It was hell, being up there and hearing the sounds of other women having babies, the cries, the joy and laughter while knowing that the odds of my baby surviving were slim to none. They told me the actual delivery didn’t take long, but it felt like forever.”

She pushed back a sob. “He didn’t cry. They tried, but in the end he was stillborn.”

Jenn’s body shook with sobs, and Matt wrapped his arms around her tighter, horrified at the thought of Jenn going through that alone. He kissed the top of her head.

After a few minutes the sobs quieted and Jenn continued. “I knew he wasn’t alive, but I needed to hold him, to know that the past five and a half months hadn’t been a dream. I needed to know he was real. He was perfect, Matt, fucking perfect. They ran some tests on him and me. I think the most horrible part was that there wasn’t anything really wrong with him, he was just too little to survive and they said the shock of premature labor had caused him not to live. Most of the time when you miscarry it’s because there’s something wrong with the baby, a chromosomal abnormality and the mother’s body realizes that and miscarries. In this case, it was because I have what’s called an incompetent cervix. I mean, no shit, obviously it’s incompetent—the stupid thing couldn’t even hold a baby for forty-one weeks.”

“Forgive my ignorance, but what does that mean?”

“How much do you know about babies, women’s bodies and childbirth?”

“Nothing much beyond the fact that childbirth seems extremely painful.”

Jenn’s smile was wobbly. “Well, time for a brief biology lesson, then. When you’re full term, the cervix basically does this thing called dilating and effacing which is a fancy way of saying it gets soft and the opening gets bigger, which allows the baby to come out. With an incompetent cervix, it dilates and effaces much sooner than it should. Sometimes, if it’s caught soon enough, you can get stitches to strengthen it and keep the baby in utero until it’s full term. We never had any reason to think mine was weak, and I hadn’t had really any symptoms that would cause my OB to worry, so by the time we knew it was too late.”

“So, uh, I have no idea how to ask this without sounding incredibly morbid, but…”

Jenn answered without him having to finish the question. “I had a ceremony with just me and the preacher from our church. Luckily, he respected my privacy and didn’t ask a lot of questions, just offered counseling if I needed it.”

Matt swallowed. “Would you…would you mind taking me one day?”

Jenn nodded. “If you want to, yes. It’s probably well beyond time that you met him.”

“Did you name him?”

Jenn pushed herself out of his lap and stood before him. She pulled up the hem of her shirt, eventually revealing a small tattoo on her rib cage, just below the curve of her left breast.

Tyler.

One word, so simple and yet…Matt swallowed the lump in his throat and fought the stinging sensation in his nose and eyes. Moved and saddened and a little angry, he leaned forward and pressed a gentle kiss on the simple script before pulling away.

Jenn’s skin was covered with goosebumps and he couldn’t help but notice that her nipples were hard. His dick twitched in response and he forced himself to ignore the physical reaction.

Now was so not the time.

“You gave him my middle name.” His voice was rough even to his own ears.

Jenn nodded and pulled her shirt back down, covering up her breasts and their baby’s name. “I had to. He was half of you and half of me, and considering I’d been a chickenshit, I think it was my way of acknowledging you without drawing too much attention.”

Looking up at her with her eyes rimmed with red and still brimming with tears, Matt made a snap decision on what he told himself was gut instinct alone. He lay down on the couch and patted the cushion beside him. “Join me?”

He could see the war in her head playing out all over her face. Usually Jenn was much better at hiding her emotions, but he guessed that the emotional upheaval tonight had weakened her usually strong defenses.

While he had no plans on taking advantage of those lowered defenses, he also wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Tonight could be a turning point in whatever this thing was going on between them.

He knew the moment she caved, could tell by her slumped shoulders and the way she nervously played with the hem of her shirt. Slowly, as if he was a feral animal that might bite, she lowered herself to the couch and then finally lay down beside him, her back pressed to his front. He immediately wrapped his arms around her, unwilling to let her go now that she was here.

Jenn sighed and began to relax against him.

“So what were you watching when I barged in?”

“
Pitch Perfect.”

“You can keep watching it if you want to.”

“You do know what this movie’s about, right?”

All he knew about it was that the pretty hot Anna Kendrick was in it and there was singing. “Doesn’t really matter. If you want to finish watching it, watch it. If you want to talk, talk. If you want to sleep, sleep. I’m up for whatever.”

Unfortunately, he was most definitely getting up for whatever with her backside pressed against his crotch.

Down, boy. Think about nuns. Old nuns.

That did it. Kind of.

“I’d just started it. Are you okay just starting over from the beginning?”

Chick flick it was. Which was totally okay as long as he had Jenn pressed up against him with her armor down. He would watch a thousand chick flicks with singing if it meant she was his.

Now where the hell had that thought come from?

Matt mentally shook himself. “Sure. It’s whatever you want.”

She glanced over her shoulder at him, and he could tell she was trying to figure out if there was an angle. There wasn’t.

She didn’t say anything, though, just leaned forward, grabbed the remote off the coffee table and started the movie over from the beginning. When it began with a bunch of dudes wearing red velvet jackets on stage dancing and singing “Please Don’t Stop the Music,” he knew he was a sucker.

#

“So let me get this straight—chicks actually enjoy and laugh at vomit humor?”

Jenn hit STOP and snuggled back up against Matt on the couch. “Of course we do. We also laugh at fart jokes.”

“Seriously?”

She turned so that she was on her back, looking up at him. “Wait. You mean to tell me the biggest ladies’ man I’ve ever known doesn’t realize we women laugh at bodily functions and base humor?”