Page 67 of His Bittersweet Regret

That’s exactly what I was afraid of. She had mentioned him asking her out, before she gave birth to our son, but I hadn’t taken it as seriously then. Opal was no longer pregnant with another man’s baby. She was no longer pregnant. Period. Her body had seemingly snapped back to its pre-pregnancy shape, for the most part, and if she didn’t have those dark smudges under her eyes, she would look just as gorgeous as ever.

I never thought about what I’d do if Opal started dating. While we were split up, before I knew she was pregnant, I figured what I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me. My mind immediately thought that if I was having trouble dating other people, so would she. Then again, my brain forgot to factor in the part where our breakup hadn’t been her choice. It had been mine, meaning I broke her heart and she hated me.

What if she started dating Joe? What if they decided to get married and create their own family with my son in the mix? I went to check on my boy, more nervous than ever that I might have truly pushed Opal away for good. If I hadn’t, my family’s behavior certainly hadn’t helped push her back in my direction. If anything, the way my mom had treated her, that would have sent her running far away if she’d had somewhere to run to.

Almost an hour later, I was in the middle of changing a particularly nasty diaper when Opal came through the door laughing at something.

“I’m serious,” a man tried to convince her. “You should have seen it. I was standing there with my hands up, and…” Joe finally noticed me sitting there on the floor with a shitty diaper sitting beside me and a baby wipe midway between the dispenser and my son’s ass. “Oh, hey man. How’s it going?”

He really tried for casual, knowing exactly who I was and that he’d walked through the door making my ex-girlfriend let loose and laugh like I hadn’t seen her do in almost a year.

“Joe,” I deadpanned and continued to clean my son up while keeping one eye on what was going on.

“Thanks so much for shopping with me and then helping me in with all this,” Opal gushed.

“I told you before, glad to help. You already know that I understand how tough it can be to be a single parent without help.”

I cleared my throat to indicate that she had plenty of help. Opal blushed, but Jo seemed put out by my interruption.

“Anyway,” Joe carried on like I wasn’t still sitting there in the middle of the floor with my son. “Would it be possible to get a babysitter Friday night? If not, you can always bring the little guy along. I don’t mind.”

“Oh,” she thought for a moment. “I’m not sure. I’ll check with Bethany and see if either she or her mom are free.”

Were they really setting up a date right there in front of me? Fuck!

“Great.” He leaned in and kissed her cheek, but pulled away as his phone beeped. He pulled it out and shook it in the air. “Gotta go, duty calls. Let me know one way or another and I’ll be here Friday at five with my phone off so we don’t have any interruptions,” he confirmed before heading out the door. Opal moved behind him to shut the door and lock up before turning with her hand pressed to her cheek, right over the spot where the asshole had kissed her.

She was in a completely blissed out daze before Austin’s squeal for attention pulled her back to present. Her cheeks pinked in embarrassment when she realized I had been watching the whole thing play out.

“Was this some sort of revenge?” I asked quietly.

“What? That’s ridiculous, Marsh.”

“Is it? You never dated before, now you’re suddenly making plans to go out on a date with some guy while I’m sitting right here to witness it.”

She huffed. “I never dated before because I was pregnant and also heartbroken at first.”

“And now?”

“Now, I’m no longer pregnant or heartbroken. I’m just a struggling, single mom who thinks it might be good for me to begin moving on.”

I couldn’t look at her. Instead, my eyes stayed trained on my son. Our son. Maybe the only thing we would ever have linking us together again. “Can you…” I tried to get out as I stumbled back from where Austin was lying on the mat on the floor. The minute I got to the bathroom, I heaved up everything I’d eaten that day. It took me a few extra minutes to get my shit together enough to go back out to the living room.

“That happened to me the day I came home to find you’d cleared out any trace of yourself from the apartment we used to share,” Opal said, forcing me to look up and find her sitting there on the floor with Austin, waiting for me to come back out.

“What happened?”

“The vomiting,” she replied without an ounce of emotion. “Funny thing, I thought it was just morning sickness, but judging by your reaction, maybe it truly was the first stage of grief.”

“Grief?” I asked. It felt like I was swimming in a fishbowl full of sludge. Nothing was processing the way it was meant to.

“Yeah, Marsh. You probably never really experienced it because in the back of your mind, I’ve always been an option to come back to. From where I stood when you left me, my whole future – the one we’d planned together – was wiped out completely without any hope of getting it back.”

“We can have it back.” Opal didn’t look as though it would be easy to convince her.

“How do you imagine something like that might be possible? You wanted to use your mom and dad as the reason for why you left me. So that one day, neither of us would have regrets about being the only people we’d ever had a relationship with. What about now?”

“What do you mean?”

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