Page 21 of Floored

My belly fluttered until his words sank in a little.

A month.

It had been a month.

"Holy shit," I whispered. Frantically opening up my calendar app, I scrolled back to the little dot on my calendar of when I'd gotten my last period. Five weeks. I should've gotten my period.

I was late.

The kind of late that was really, really bad.

"Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, holyyyyyyy shit."

I scrambled from the bed, tossing my phone away from me with fumbling fingers, and speared my hands in my hair when it clattered to the floor.

"I'm just late because of stress," I insisted. To myself. Because I was alone.

In a foreign country.

And possibly pregnant.

From a one-night stand.

My eyes burned. My nose tingled. My hands shook dangerously. This could not be happening.

I mean, it could happen. I remember him using a condom. But with a groan, I knew that my birth control taking had been ... hit or miss ... those first couple of weeks while I adjusted to the time difference.

Claire had been telling me for years that I should set reminders on my phone for my medication. But past advice coming back to haunt me was not what I needed.

What I needed was a freaking pregnancy test. As I leaned down to find my phone where it'd dropped on the floor, I knew I needed to call ... I didn't know. Claire. Isabel. Finn ... no, not Finn, he'd be terrible in this situation. Plus, there was the whole in medical school and has a new girlfriend thing. Paige. No. She'd hop on a plane and make me pee on a stick. As I mulled over my options, I noticed that the screen on my phone was on the news app, and before I could navigate away from it, I caught a glimpse of a sports headline, the top portion of someone's very familiar face in a picture.

Hey, Jude, Don't Let Me Down it proclaimed, a nod to the Beatles song. My hand was shaking so badly as I tried to scroll down to see the picture even though I knew—oh my sweet baby Jesus in the manger, I knew—by the messy dark hair and the eyes it was him.

My other hand covered my mouth as his face came into full view. In the shot, he was mid-kick, muscular leg swinging toward a ball suspended midair. His face, just as stupidly hot as I remember, was frozen in concentration, his muscular body covered in a blue and white uniform. Maybe if I wasn't freaking the fuck out, I would've thought about how insane it was that the guy I'd been text flirting with all day—the guy I'd slept with after making fun of the sport that employed him—was apparently a professional soccer player.

Football.

Whatever.

The hysterical laughter bubbled up in my throat, unbidden. I thought of his face when I said how boring the game was. I thought of his texts, telling me he'd been too busy playing football to text me sooner. Pretty soon, I was hunched over, wiping tears from my eyes because I couldn't stop the sounds coming from my mouth.

That was when it happened.

The head spinning.

The nausea.

My stomach roiled slowly, unpleasantly, and I barely made it to the bathroom before I puked.

7

LIA

"It's fine. It'll be fine."

I'd said it a thousand times since I hastily packed my shit and hopped back on a train to Oxford. Sorry, Brontës, but I needed to be back in my own flat if I was going to find out I was carrying a little baby soccer player inside my body.

I groaned. Also for the thousandth time.

---