Page 60 of Good Guy Gabe

She doesn’t. She hums, brief and low, and looks back out that fucking window.

“I’m sorry. I know it was stupid. I was ridiculously irresponsible. I didn’t know if I had a condom in the truck, and I just said the first thing that popped into my head. I was going to tell you, I swear, but then I got all up in my head about how you were perfect for me. Youareperfect.”

I should stop talking, I know this. I need to let her talk even if she doesn’t want to. But the words keep coming out of me the second I pause and silence fills the cab again.

“I got scared that you were going to realize how much better you are than me, how much more you deserve, and I . . . I didn’t want to hurt you, but then I saw the nursery and got it in my head that you wanted a kid and would be as happy with a surprise pregnancy as I would be. If we talked about it, we’d end up getting bogged down in waiting a year to get engaged and then waiting another year to get married and then waiting still another year to start having kids, and why do that if we could have a kid now? This was for us.”

Dead silence. Absolute silence.

This wasn’t for us. I told myself it was, I calmed myself with that, but it wasn’t.

“I’m an asshole.”

I’m so relieved when Joss finally responds that it lessens the blow of her words. “You were supposed to be the good guy. I felt terrible letting you into my life without telling you why I’m so hated in Wilmington, and it was so hard to respect your opinion that you didn’t want to know when you really needed to know, but I did respect your opinion. I respected you. And I told myself that you’re a good guy. I didn’t have to worry about you doing something so horrible because you’re agood guy.

“The lie should have been the worst part. Or . . . how massive the fallout from it would be. This isn’t just a lie, this is my entire life. This is a human being, their whole life too. Like, lying about a crime and someone else going to jail for it.”

I taste vomit in my throat at that. I’ve never done anything worse than throwing back beers in high school or driving a little over the speed limit.

If one of my sisters came crying to me that a man she’d had sex with lied about a vasectomy and got her pregnant, what would I do? I don’t know, but I’d be pissed. I’d probably beat the guy up, and I can count on two hands the number of physical fights I’ve gotten into off the field and outside of the usual scuffles with teammates.

“The worst part isn’t the lying, and it’s not the fact that you’ve taken it upon yourself to rewrite my life or that you’re forcing me to bring a child into the world based on some ridiculous assumption about why there’s a nursery in my home.”

“That’s why I stopped having sex with you after—”

Joss interrupts me with a voice dripping with venom. “I know that.”

It has me wanting to shrink away. I have this ridiculous urge to curl up at her feet like a bad dog who’s being punished for doing what he knew was going to upset his master but did it anyway. I want to whimper on the floor until she caves and remembers that she loves me.

Because that’s what you do with dogs. Because they’re dogs.

I am not a dog.

“Do you understand how much that hurt me?” she continues after a harsh breath, the hatred breaking into something more raw and far more devastating. “I had just bared my soul to you. I told you what my husband had done, how ashamed I was for not knowing anything about it, how badly the town shunned me, how Ilost my baby, and then you refuse to touch me again? Do you have any concept of how dirty you made me feel?”

It’s a sucker punch. My heart constricts in my chest as I white-knuckle the steering wheel. I don’t know how I can apologize for that. I don’t think I can. But I can’t let her feel like that. “Can I hold your hand?” I ask, my voice reedy.

She pans her head, tilting slowly. “Are you for real right now? No, Gabe, you cannot hold my hand. You cannot touch me. You are going to drop me off at my place and get very far away from me for a long time.”

Silence falls between us as I hyper-fixate on the traffic light we’re sitting at, only three blocks away from her doorstep. I have three blocks to fix this. I can’t possibly do that. I wasn’t ready. I should have been, I know that, but I got so comfortable that I lost sight of this possibility. It was never going to be in the car, driving home from the airport, after she just met the entire family and every single one of them, even dad, made it very clear I could not fuck this up, that Joss is too good for me to throw away with something stupid.

It was never going to be while she was pregnant with my child.

That’s where my brain sticks as I navigate through the intersection. I can’t leave her. No matter what happens between us, we’re going to have a kid together. I’ll be devastated if I lose her, but she can’t remove me from her life entirely. “You need me. The baby—”

“There was a moment when I was flat broke in a way that’s practically inconceivable now. I was scared that even if I earned money on my own, it would still get taken away from me. And at that moment, I would have done anything,anything,to raise two babies by myself. I did do everything I could. So if you think that it would be an issue for me now, you are sorely mistaken.”

I tell myself to keep my frustration bottled up inside. I’ll be back home soon with people and weight room equipment I can beat the crap out of. Joss has every right to be upset, and we say things we don’t mean when we’re upset all the time. This is a conversation we can revisit tomorrow.

But I can’t do it. I can’t keep my mouth from moving. “If you think you’re keeping me from my child, you have lost your goddamn mind.”

Joss doesn’t say another word. She doesn’t have to. It’s fifteen seconds before I’m pulling the truck up to the side door. She hops out before I even have it in park. I start to open my door, and she says, “I will call the cops if you get out.”

“I’m getting your bag for you!” I snap at her.

She slams the door hard enough that I keep my ass in the seat, glowering at her reflection in the rearview as she drops the tailgate, half-climbs into the bed, and yanks her bag out. She doesn’t bother to close the tailgate before marching to her door and letting herself inside.

I sit there, waiting to make sure she gets up the stairs okay before I pull out and park on the side of the road to close the tailgate plus sneak around her property to make sure there wasn’t any vandalism while we were gone. Before I can do anything, though, she throws her door open and yells, “Hey Gabe?”

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