Page 35 of Love You Too

“Do you…have morning sickness? Are you eating enough? Getting some rest? Can I…hug you?”

She nods. “You can hug me. I won’t break.”

Gingerly, I reach for her as I slide onto the lounge beside her. When I envelop her in my arms, she folds into me, and I realize how hard this must have been for her to carry around.

“Okay, so…” I spread my hands wide to indicate just how clueless I am about how to proceed.

“So that’s all the information I have,” she says, nodding from side to side. “For the most part.”

I have no idea what she means by that, and I don’t have the verbal faculties to ask. My only hope is that she’ll continue talking, and some of it will make sense to my brain.

“What happens now?” I ask.

“Um, well…I’ve thought about it a lot and…look, I’m thirty with no relationship on the horizon, and that’s fine. I don’t need to be in a relationship. Right now, it’s the last thing I need complicating my life. But I do know that I want to do this. I want to have this baby. I want to be a mom.” She flinches when she says the wordmom, and it’s the first moment that I feel the air I’ve been holding in my lungs start to seep away.

This tiny sign of her own unease with the situation softens the impact of everything she’s just told me. Now, it feels like we’re in this—whatever this turns out to be—together.

Her forehead creases as she watches me sit here wordless with confusion and indecision. Seeing the tiny cracks in her forward-charging demeanor charms me, this softer side of her personality that isn’t wholly comfortable with the unknown. “Okay, good that you know that,” I manage. “You’ll be a great mom.” Just watching her light up with my dog shows me how much love she has to give. She gives me a small smile.

“Thank you. And you can be as involved as you want, butthere’s no obligation at all. I just want you to know that. No pressure. I don’t want you to feel weird about this.”

Now, it’s my turn to laugh. “Oh, well, good. Because if you wanted me to feel weird, you’d have to lead with something much more shocking than, ‘Hi, Ren. You’re about to become a dad.’” Once I start laughing, it’s a tiny acorn with the will to reach the sky as a full-on oak. I can’t fucking stop.

Trix does the only thing she can—she watches me lose my ever-loving mind and waits for me to finish. But I can’t. I tip my head back as my laughter roars out of me, and I welcome it because it actually feels good. For once, I feel grateful for life’s sense of humor because I couldn’t have dreamed this one up if I’d tried.What the fucking hell?More laughter wracks my body until I’m short of breath.

Finally, I draw in a huge lungful of air and start to calm down. I’m sweating, so I take a long swig of lemonade, feeling the burn of the bubbles on my throat, and turn to Trix. Now I understand why she couldn’t meet my eye earlier.

“Areyouokay?”

“Am I? I dunno. It’s insane, really. The year I finally make team captain and stand at the helm of the worst hockey mess of my career, I’m about to become the baby dad for a woman who likes my dog more than she likes me.”

“Yeah, not the best timing over here, either. But…” She shrugs. “Here we are.”

I reach for her hand and interlace our fingers. “So we are.”

We sit like that for a while, each of us letting our thoughts percolate individually. After a while, Trix squeezes my hand and lets it go, swiveling around to sit up and face me. “Look, I know you didn’t want to be with me, so you obviously never pictured me as the mom of your future child. I have no expectations of you. No pressure. I just wanted to give you all the information.”

Her words send a surge of bile into my throat. She has no idea how hard it was for me to leave her. Of course she doesn’t. Inever gave her a glimpse. And now she has no expectations of me.

“When did you find out?” It’s not the right question or even the right response to what she’s just told me, but I’m having trouble putting my thoughts in any kind of order.

“About ten days ago. I went to the doctor on Monday.” I calculate the days since our hookup and start counting. She completes my thought. “I’m almost seven weeks along.”

“Sevenweeks?”

She shakes her head. “Well, six and a half. It’s weird pregnancy math. It starts at the date of ovulation, so when the baby is conceived, I’d already be two weeks pregnant, which is how it all adds up to forty weeks, which is really ten months, not nine.” She waves a hand. “It’s a whole thing. Bottom line is I haven’t even seen a heartbeat. It’s too soon. So I’m going back in next week.”

“Can I go with you?” The words leave my mouth so quickly that I react with surprise, like I’m hearing them for the first time. Then I double down. “If it’s not too weird for you, I’d like to be there when you hear the heartbeat.”

Trix looks startled, eyebrows rising as her mouth drops open. Then she nods. “Yes, sure. If you want.”

“I do. I mean, I think I do. Yes. Yes, I do.”

I don’t know much about anything else, but this I know for sure—if she’s going to the doctor to hear the heartbeat of a baby that’s mine, I want to be there. I want to hear it too.

“Okay, then. I’ll try to reschedule it for this week.”

“That would be great. I have training every day, but I’ll work something out to leave early.” I have no idea if that’s a possibility. In the ten years I’ve played professional hockey, I’ve never asked a coach to let me miss practice or leave early.

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