Wish Come True (The Blogger Diaries Trilogy Book 3) (22 page)

I plop down on the foot of his bed, pulling my feet up underneath me after I kick off my shoes. I don’t really know what to say. Besides the fact that went better than I could’ve ever imagined… I can’t believe it happened in the first place.
 

I’m pregnant.
 

I’m pregnant with Jason’s baby.
 

Jason and I are going to have a baby… together… that is
ours
.

Josalyn will be a big sister.
 

I’ll be a mother of two.

Jason sits beside me on the bed, putting one of his muscular legs behind me so he can pull me to him. “You want to hear that story I mentioned before we told Pop?”

“Should I be scared?” I ask, still a little dazed over everything. I don’t think it’s fully sunk in yet that I’m pregnant… with Jason’s child… at this very moment. It all feels so surreal.

“Nah, it’s a funny story. Okay, you know the ‘awful girl’ my mom mentioned? My ex-girlfriend, Lainey, the one Chad said he much preferred you over?”

Now
this
gets my attention. I’ve never really asked Jason about any of the relationships he had while I was married to Aiden. Part of me tries to pretend they didn’t exist, but another part of me, a weird, sort of morbidly curious part, wants to know every minor detail of what went on during that time period.
 

“Yes, I recall,” I say sarcastically, and he squeezes me, letting out a chuckle.
 

“Well, she was a bartender up at Slick’s, the pool hall I used to go to all the time. We started dating, and she came over one night. Without going into too much detail, Mom walked in on us.”

My eyes widen and I jerk around to face him with a gasp. “No. Way.” But then a creepy feeling comes over me and I look down and around me. “Oh, God!” I jump off the bed, out of his grasp.

“What?” he asks, a worried look on his face.

“Here? She walked in on y’all… in here?” I say, dreading his answer.

“Well, yes, in here. But you are the only person I’ve slept with in this bed, babe. I swear. I got this furniture after I dumped her ass.” I don’t miss the bitterness that enters his voice on that last sentence. “But anyways, Mom walked in on us—”

“How? Like she just came busting in? And where were y’all? What were you doing exactly?” The questions come out rapid fire, and Jason gives me a funny look.

“You sure you want to know all this? I mean, you are the most jealous woman on the face of the planet. So jealous that even though the entirety of your giant family has blue eyes, yours turned green,” he jokes, but nothing he says will distract me from getting the information I’m now dying to get.

“Yes,” I state with a short, concise nod.

“All right, well come here and relax. You look like you’re about to attack me if I speak the wrong word,” he says, holding his arms open to me.

I make my way back into his embrace and snuggle against him as he restarts his story.

“We were on the floor, because the bed I had at that time squeaked, and she was on top of me,” he says.

“Like riding you?” I ask, biting my lower lip.

“Yeah. And Mom, being Mom, just came busting into the room without knocking.”

“Oh, jeez.” I shake my head. I would be absolutely mortified. Just thinking about it has my face heating up. “So what happened?”

“Well, there was this awkward moment where Mom just stood there, and it felt like a lifetime, but it couldn’t have been more than a couple seconds, and then she turned around and left. And then I heard my dad coming up the hallway, and he stopped outside the door, not looking in, and told us he needed to talk to us out in the living room,” he replied, and I can hear the smile entering his voice. What he’s smiling about, I have no idea. I’m embarrassed for him and this girl just hearing about it.
 

“What was Lainey’s reaction? I mean, was she absolutely dying? I would have wanted to off myself!” I question, my voice pitching higher and higher.

“She wasn’t fazed.” He shakes his head and shrugs.

“What?” I scoff. “What do you mean?”

“Lainey was a bitch. I mean, you know how when a girl does
one thing,
people will be like, ‘Oh, she’s a bitch’, using the term lightly just because she might have made one bitchy move? That’s not the case with her. She was. A. Bitch,” he states, emphasizing each word. “She didn’t just make a bitch-move every once in a while. She just was one. Twenty-four seven. To her core.”

“Wow, sounds like you picked a winner,” I snark.

“Hey, it was a rough time in my life. No judging. Anyways, so, we went into the living room, and Mom goes, ‘Well, this isn’t exactly the way I wanted to meet you the first time,’ and after a little bit of awkward conversation, Lainey left. And finally, I come to the funny part. The part I really wanted to tell you,” he says, his voice rising in energy as he shifts on the bed like he can’t sit still. “When she left, Pop goes, ‘Dang, son, looks like you’ve got yourself a sweller,’ and I was like, ‘What the fuck? What’s a sweller?’ and he said, ‘That girl might look good right now, but if you knock her up, she’s gonna swell right the hell up.’”

I can’t help it. I know it’s so super rude to laugh at someone picking on anyone for their size, but thinking about this super-bitch fucking my man and not even having the decency to be the slightest bit embarrassed about being caught doing the dirty in his parents’ house, I let out a laugh from so deep in my gut that I have to jump up, grab my crotch with both hands, and run out his bedroom door into the bathroom across the hall, barely making it to the toilet before peeing on myself.

When I come back into the bedroom, Jason has a shit-eating grin on his face. “You all right, beautiful?”

“Yep. Have I mentioned I love your dad?” I smile.

“Yeah, but I didn’t even finish my story before you high-tailed it to the bathroom,” he teases.

“The joys of motherhood. I can’t even sneeze without—never mind. Finish your story,” I say, cutting myself off.

“When you came over and brought Josalyn to see us the first time back in January, he told me, ‘See, son, that’s good breedin’ stock there. Definitely not a sweller.’”
 

“Oh, my gosh. You’re dad is hilarious. He just says the sweetest things.” I say the last part in a breathy southern belle accent as I start taking off my clothes, watching Jason’s eyes heat.
 

Before he gets any ideas, I quickly grab my pajamas off his leather couch against the wall and put them on. After our day of travelling, and then the emotional roller coaster I’ve been on since we got back home, I’m suddenly exhausted and would rather he just hold me while we watch some TV and fall asleep.

Taking the hint as I walk to the head of the bed and pull down the covers, he stands, only taking the time to let his jeans drop to his ankles, pulling his feet out of his boots and pants at the same time while lifting his shirt over his head, leaving him in nothing but his briefs.
 

“What?” he asks as he crawls up the bed and gets in beside me when he sees the amused look on my face.

“First thing I’m doing when we move in together is burning all your tighty-whities,” I say through a giggle.

“I like the sound of that.”

“What? Me burning all your old-man undies?”

“No, the moving in together part,” he clarifies, and my face heats.

“I didn’t mean… that just kinda came out. I didn’t mean to assume we’d be moving in together now that I’m pregnant. I just—”

“Babe,” he interrupts my rambling. “Of course we’re moving in together. That was going to happen whether you are pregnant or not. We’ve talked about this.”

We had, on several occasions, but we had never settled on a plan because everything was so up in the air. My life—my family, school, everything—is in North Carolina, and he had never lived anywhere but here in Friendswood. It was never really a question of
who
would move
where
. I always assumed it’d be me who moved back to Texas to be with him, since there was so much more offered in life outside of Fayetteville. I mean, even if I wanted to go shopping at a Hollister I had to drive two hours away to the mall in Raleigh. The only thing keeping me in Fayettenam was the people—mainly my mom and granny. I could always move my credits to a school in Texas. The question was always the
when
.
 

“Maybe this is a sign,” he adds, sliding his arm beneath my pillow and tugging me closer, placing his other hand on my stomach. The feel of his warm palm through my nightshirt radiates through me, filling me up with his loving touch. “Maybe this little miracle was God’s way of giving us a little shove in the right direction, hurrying all this along when only the man upstairs knows how long it would’ve been dragged out.”

“You sure have been talking about God a lot since we got back together,” I point out, and he gives me a contemplative look.

“What do you mean?”

“When we first got back together, you confessed that you thought maybe God sent me back home to meet Aiden so I could have Josalyn for you and me. And now this,” I explain.

He thinks on that for a few moments, and then says, “I guess me finally getting to have you, it’s made me believe He’s got a plan for me. I’ve always believed He put you on this Earth for me. I was just stupid and let you go. And after I put that roadblock in its path, making you take a detour, He’s now set the course straight again and upped the speed limit to hurry us along.”

I can’t help but smile at his reasoning. Leave it to him to explain his renewed belief in God with a driving analogy. Jason’s always had a… different relationship with religion. He believes in a higher power; he just has a problem with organized religion, in the sense that he hasn’t found one that he fits into like a jigsaw puzzle piece. I’ve tried telling him that I don’t know anyone who believes and follows every single, solitary rule of whatever religion they fall into. But he’s bound and determined in his belief that it’s an all or nothing kind of deal.
 

He was raised Methodist, while I was raised Catholic. He still occasionally goes to church with his mom, and he participates in UM Army, a group from the church that spends a week somewhere fixing things for people in need. He did it last year, his first time as an adult leader instead of as a youth, and they went to Athens, TX and Alexandria, LA and built wheelchair ramps onto people’s houses. He said he loved the building part, aiding people who needed it and wouldn’t have otherwise been able to get the help, but said he was super uncomfortable at the end of the day when it was time for ‘all the Bible reading and singing shit’, as he put it.
 

Asking him one time what his biggest turn-off was from the Methodist church, which he had grown up going to every Sunday since he was born, he said, “It’s my African fisherman.” After letting out a laugh of surprise, I asked him to explain.

“My African fisherman. I was taught in Sunday school that the Bible says the only way into Heaven is through Jesus. My teacher said that if you don’t believe in him, then you can’t get into Heaven when you die. Even when I was little, my question was what if you are somewhere you never even heard of Jesus. Like my African fisherman. He’s just a sweet, little old man who spends his days fishing to bring home food to his wife he’s never cheated on, his kids he’s never raised a hand to. He’s been the epitome of a good man his entire life. Never stolen anything or killed anyone. Okay, are you telling me he doesn’t get to go to Heaven, just because he lives somewhere they might never have heard of Jesus before? But some asshole, who has murdered a bunch of people, suddenly finds religion in his prison cell and asks for forgiveness gets to? I don’t fucking think so.”

“Well, personally, I think we all believe in the same person; we just call him something different. I call him God, someone else calls him Buddha, another dude calls him… I don’t know… what’s another one? That turtle…
 
Anyways. All the same dude, different name. Because if you look at the main set of rules in each ‘handbook’—the Ten Commandments in the Bible being ours—they’re all the same. Lying, killing, cheating, all that shit—bad. Kindness, generosity, helping fellow man—good. So getting back to your African fisherman. He more than likely has his own religion, which calls Jesus or God by a different name, but he’s going to end up in Heaven. It’s just going to be
his
Heaven.”

I thought I’d made a pretty damn good argument, but he still wasn’t having it, so I gave up on trying to make him feel better about his little African fisherman.
 

But now, lying in bed with him, his protective hand warming my belly, hearing him talk about us being on the right path God had set for us, it makes me happy he seems to have found a bit of peace with Him. It’s one less thing for my otherwise broody boyfriend to worry his over-analytical mind about.

We watch a little bit of TV, and soon, as my eyes get heavy, I roll over to be the little spoon, and he keeps his hand right where it is all night as we fall asleep.

Two days later, Jason stays home to watch Josalyn and to help his dad with a project in his shop while his mom takes me to Planned Parenthood for a ‘real’ pregnancy test, as she calls it. She wanted to take me to her doctor’s office, but since I don’t have insurance, it would have cost a fortune, so this was the next best option. I had never even heard of this place, but as I read the posters on the wall and the little brochure I picked up when I signed in at the window, checking the box for pregnancy test and paying the $30 fee, I learned it was a place you could get birth control, annual women’s wellness appointments, and STD and pregnancy tests at low cost if you don’t have insurance.