Provocative (Tempting Book 3) (5 page)

T
rue to his word
, Nathan took me to see the movie of my choice—an action flick with lots of sweaty dudes because I knew Nathan would enjoy it too—and then to dinner at our favorite pizza place.

When the waitress took our drink orders, I tilted my head to the side. “You didn’t get a beer?” Every time we came to this restaurant, Nathan ordered the same beer—a beer from a local brewery up north.

“I’m driving,” he said simply, reaching across the table to grab my hand. Nathan was always affectionate, but after the ultrasound earlier that day, he touched me more often than usual—as if the connection between us was magnetic, and he felt compelled to have his hands on me as much as possible. I wasn’t complaining, but even as I was finally accepting the pregnancy, I was still very much scared of who we were going to become over the course of the next thirty-one weeks.

The doctor had been close when he’d guessed I was ten weeks along, but the ultrasound measured me just over nine weeks so that was what we went with.

“I could drive,” I said, pressing the pad of my thumb against his.

“It’s fine. I don’t need to drink to enjoy myself.”

“You look like the cat that ate the canary,” I remarked, sipping on the ice water the waitress had dropped off first.

“I’m happy,” he said simply. His entire face looked so at rest—like he’d just walked away from a massage. And it struck me how little we did this—going out to eat, like an actual date.

“I can’t remember the last time we had a date.”

He rubbed the edge of his nail over my palm. “It’s been a while, definitely.” He looked apologetic then, as if he was realizing just how busy he’d been the last few months. “We should do it more often.”

“We won’t be able to when the baby comes along.” I sipped my water in an effort to hide the way that made me feel. “No grandma to babysit.”

Nathan paused his fingers’ small movements over my knuckles. “I suppose we should discuss how and when to tell our families.”

Our families. Our fucked up, still-in-the-dark families. My sister Celeste didn’t even know where I lived since I moved out of my tiny apartment. My mother didn’t call me as often, electing to devote her time to Celeste and all of her many accomplishments. They’d all expected me to go home for the summer and when I hadn’t, they didn’t appreciate my deviation from their plans.

As far as Nathan’s parents went, they didn't even know Nathan had a girlfriend. Neither one of us had been particularly eager to reveal our relationship to our parents. And now we would not only introduce one another to our families but also include the fact that we were making our own family.

It was enough to give me hives.

“What’s going on?” Nathan asked as I stared at my water like it held all the secrets in the world.

“Do you really want all of it?”

He nodded. “Tell me. I’m with you in this, we’re going through all of this together.”

I exhaled and then nodded curtly. “First, I don’t know how I’m going to do this, to be pregnant while in school. The baby is due in May, right when finals are.”

He nodded. “I know it’s not the best option, but if you’re worried about going into labor while finals are happening, would you be open to taking the next semester off and picking back up in the summer or the fall?”

It was something I’d thought about, of course. But what the hell was I going to do for four or five months—sit around and wait? “I’ll be bored out of my mind just sitting around, waiting for the baby to do a tumble roll out of me. You’ll hate me,” I pointed a finger at him, “which brings me to my second concern.” I looked down at my stomach. “How is this going to change us?”

He leaned across the table, and the scent of his cologne gently surrounded me. “I’m not a fortune teller, Adele. But I don’t think any new parent knows how the baby will change their relationship with their partner. Having mutual love and respect, and open lines of communication between us is important—and the one thing we can nurture over the next seven months. I can tell you this,” he said, his voice firm and his eyes serious, “I love you. I’m happy that we’re doing this together. I wouldn’t choose anyone else over you to have a baby with. We may not have planned this, but we didn’t plan to fall in love either.” His hand squeezed mine, as if he wanted to remind me he was here—as if I could even forget, with his eyes so searching, his mouth saying the words I didn’t know I needed to hear. “And what we have between us is more than enough for a baby.”

“I’m scared,” I whispered. “I don’t think I’ll be a good mom.”

“You will. Because we’ll be together. You’re not your mom, nor are you your sister. We might have to curb some of the foul language,” he said with a warm smile, “but we’ll figure it out, together, as it comes.”

“I need to get another insurance plan—my school plan doesn’t cover pregnancy.”

“We’ll call someone this week, and I’ll pay for it.”

“No.” I shook my head. “When you paid for my appointment at the doctor’s office, I felt like a child. I need to be able to pay for my own health insurance, because…” I didn’t finish my sentence, too afraid to say it.

“Because what?”

I pressed my lips together and shook my head.

Nathan’s eyebrows drew together and his lips flattened. “Adele, talk to me.”

I ripped the bandage off. “Because if I rely on you, and things don’t work out…”

His face softened. “Adele, I’m not going to abandon you. Ever. You’re mine, as much as I’m yours. And, if something unexpected happens and you decide,” he swallowed and paused, “to leave me, I will still take care of you. Because I love you, and because you’re carrying a part of me. I want you safe, protected.”

“I’m not going to leave you,” I said on a rush, feeling a strange flood of feeling behind my eyes. “But if you get sick of my bullshit—” I sucked in a breath. “Listen. My father left my mother after she had me. It’s cliché, but it’s real—I have abandonment issues. I won’t let you abandon the baby, but I can’t stop you from leaving me.” Saying it aloud, laying it out on the table for Nathan to pick apart, left me more than a little raw. I rarely talked about these things, but thoughts had been stewing in my head for a while.

“Adele, look at me.”

Lifting my eyes, my stomach churned. His eyes—the color of the Caribbean ocean—were resolute. “I am not going to leave you. I’m going to take care of you—both of you. We’re going to do this, together.”

His confidence was staggering.

The waitress interrupted us to take our orders and the moment she walked away, Nathan leaned back across the table and clutched my hands in his again. “I can tell you until we’re both blue in the face, but we’re in this together. You have nothing to worry about.”

Surprisingly, I believed him. And as we ate, and Nathan fed me from his plate, encouraging me to eat to my heart’s content now that I wasn’t vomiting every twenty minutes, I believed in us.

M
y new obsession
started innocently enough. I was walking through the aisles of the campus store when I saw it. A tiny white onesie with the Harvard crest in maroon, and the school’s name in block letters above it. It was so small, the snaps along the bottom and the tiny short sleeves that seemed like nothing could be small enough to fit through them.

So I bought it. The 0-3 months’ size. And I tucked it into the bottom right drawer of my desk. That one thing on its own would have been fine, but the next day, I was at Target because Adele was craving a certain kind of cookie that only Target had. And I wasn’t going to say no, given that she was feeling so much better and wanted to eat again.

The baby section wasn’t anywhere near the cookies, but I wandered over there anyway. Rows of diapers and bottles and toys. Bath accessories and brushes. Pacifiers and baby gates. And just to my right, an entire row of blankets. I had a moment, a brief searing moment of disappointment that I felt like Adele wouldn’t have even wanted to be here looking with me. The one time I’d attempted to talk to her about which room would become the nursery, she brushed me off with a panicked look in her eye that I couldn’t forget.

My hand reached up to feel along the edge of a light gray blanket. It was so soft. Large enough that you could wrap it around a newborn to make sure it was warm and comfortable when you’d hold it. I took it off the display rack and spread my hand across it, feeling a hot rush of love for a dinky little kidney bean that I’d only seen on the screen once.

I was about to put it back when an elderly woman grabbed a blanket off of a display hanger just next to me. She smiled when she saw what I was holding.

“First baby? Or is it a gift?”

I cleared my throat, suddenly embarrassed that she’d all but caught me fondling a blanket. “It’s our first.”

The answering sigh that she let out was full of nostalgia, enough that it made me smile in return. “Well, congratulations. How far along is she?”

“About eleven weeks now.”

“Plenty of time to prepare then.” She nodded at the blanket I was still holding. “Those are nice, but your baby will get older and probably still drag that around. My grandkids all like the blankets that have animals or some such on them. Just a tip.”

“Oh, sure. Of course.”

She wished me luck and walked off, leaving me staring at the wall in front of me again. We wouldn’t know the gender for a while yet, and Adele and I hadn’t even discussed whether we’d be finding out. With that in my head, I wandered a few feet until I found a gray, white and yellow blanket with simple drawings of monkeys and giraffes on it.

So I bought it, tucking it in next to the onesie in my desk drawer. And every new thing that I put in there, I told myself that I’d bring it home and show it to Adele. That maybe she’d see the tiny items and get the same rush of happiness that I did when I imagined our tiny, perfect child with them. With the small stuffed bear, with the blanket or the onesie. With the hooded towel that looked like a yellow duck.

After a week of adding new things, the drawer was full. And I still hadn’t shown her any of it. It was hard enough for Adele that her stomach now held the smallest curve to it. I’d never seen her caress her stomach. Not like I did when I curled around her in bed. Like maybe the baby could feel the heat of my hand keeping it warm, or hear my voice when I spoke to Adele.

The other night, she’d fallen asleep on the couch, and before I carried her upstairs, I’d knelt in front of her so I could spread my hand over her stomach.

“I know we won’t meet for a long time, little bean,” I’d whispered, not wanting to wake Adele. “But I love you already. And thanks for not making your mom puke anymore.”

What I’d wanted to say was that Adele would love the baby too, if she didn’t already. That she’d come around, that she’d be excited the closer we got to her due date. But there was something in me that felt like it would solidify if I spoke that out loud. Like the universe would hear my doubts, hear my suspicions about how she was feeling about this pregnancy, and manifest them into something worse. Because no matter how apprehensive she might be, and I couldn’t even really blame her, Adele would be a fucking awesome mom. She’d be fiercely protective, and she’d never make our child question whether it was loved.

That was just about the only good thing about the failures of our own parents. We’d never repeat their mistakes.

My phone buzzed on the surface of my desk, and I blinked a few times, firmly caught up in my train of thought. Then I shook my head when I saw who it was from.

“Dick,” I muttered to my phone before I tossed it aside. Elias was Diana’s younger brother, and I hadn’t seen him in months. Not since the last time he showed up unexpectedly, probably just for the sole purpose of making my life hell. I knew exactly where Diana’s camera was, so it wouldn’t take me long to grab it. In truth, I probably could have put my foot down and told them no. She had been my wife, and they had more than enough of Diana’s things that they could build a six-foot-tall shrine if they so desired.

But she’d been theirs first. Their first born child and only daughter, and she was gone. They’d had to stand next to me in a beautiful cemetery about forty minutes from where I was sitting and watch her shining mahogany casket get lowered into the ground. I pinched my eyes shut, thinking about the tiny items in my desk drawer. It made my skin crawl, even attempting to imagine if something that awful would ever happen to my child. I’d never been able to imagine it from that vantage point before, as a parent losing a child.

The last time I saw Elias, he’d thrown every verbal punch he could manage in a short span of time. If it had been a boxing match, he would have knocked me the fuck out in the first round.

“I’ll remind you for as long as it takes me not to miss my sister so much that I feel like someone’s ripping my goddamned heart out of my chest.”

And he’d said it like I hadn’t felt the exact same way for years. Until Adele. Adele gave me a life to live, instead of just surviving my days like I’d been doing for almost four years. Elias had stopped by that day to make sure I still suffered. To make sure that her memory still bled through the walls of my house. That I still missed Diana like an ax to my skull. And the sober truth was that it didn’t feel like that anymore. It was more like a low, steady hum underneath everything in my life. It didn’t gouge at me anymore, not like it used to. It used to be so bad that a single good memory of Diana would spiral me into a panic attack.

If they wanted her camera, they could have it. It was the least I could do for them, to give them something to hold in their hands when their grief overwhelmed them.

So I blew out a breath and picked up my phone, typing out a simple
okay
in response. Now that I was thinking about Diana, a heavy brick of guilt settled into my stomach. I’d never even thought about her in all my excitement about the baby. I glanced at my watch and tapped my fingers against my desk for a second, considering whether I should let Adele know what I was doing. But I didn’t want to upset her, given that we never really talked about Diana.

I grabbed my keys and my phone and locked my office door behind me, praying that no student had a pressing need while I was gone. By the time I pulled my car into the entrance of New Calvary Cemetery an hour later, with a bouquet of white roses on the passenger seat next to me, I knew I was doing the right thing.