Page 44 of The Alternate Captain
“Fuck no. We’re done for good. Not that we were official or anything, but she played the pregnancy card.”
I’m forced to swerve back into my lane, narrowly avoiding causing a collision on the motorway.
“What the fuck?” I say, catching Ffordey in my rear-view mirror, who’s staring back at me with his jaw on his knees. “When she called you at the hospital, you told me it was over.” Kelly had entered the room during the argument which interrupted the conversation.
“It is over. And before you ask—she isn’t. Or wasn’t.”
“What’s the deal then?”
Bettsy sighs heavily. “So, a week after I got to my Mam’s, she called me and asked for three hundred quid. Usually, I’d hand it over but—”
“Wait, wait, wait,” I say, holding my hand up to stop him from talking. “What do you mean you’d hand it over? Have you been giving her money? Like money for sex?”
“No. It was nothing like that. It was just, you know, for her to get her hair done or whatever. But yeah, she’s never asked me for that much typically, so I asked her what she needed it for. She told me she was pregnant and needed to get some things to make her pregnancy more comfortable or something.
“Now, I may be slow on the uptake sometimes, but I remember her having her period because... actually, forget it. Anyway,” he clears his throat, “I know that finding out you’re pregnant that soon after your period is not usually how it works.”
“How the hell do you know that?” Ffordey asks.
“It is basic biology. It’s all about a woman’s cycle,” Bettsy says. Ffordey looks baffled, but I have a decent knowledge of this stuff, too, because of a stunt Sarah pulled back in the day. I’d spent all day googling it.
Bettsy continues. “Basically, I called her out and asked her if she was defying mother nature, because I get that these things happen, of course, rarely. She sent me a picture of a pregnancy test. Positive. But I noticed straight away it wasn’t even a picture she took.”
“How?”
“Because it was the first one that came up when I googled ‘Positive pregnancy test picture.’”
“Well, fuck me,” Ffordey says.
“After dragging it out for another two days, she finally came clean and I told her I wasn’t interested in seeing her again.”
“That’s it?” I ask.
“That’s it. I don’t want to associate with someone who lies about that. Even if it means I wank myself off three times a day.”
Christ. I’ve heard enough after that.
We pull over at the service station to grab some lunch and I check my phone. There are a few messages from Ryan and Liam, giving me info on their flight time since I’m picking them up, and one from Kelly, which I can’t open quick enough.
Kelly
You left your hoodie here.
Johnny
Look after it for me.
Kelly
I’ll pass it to Mike to give back to you.
Yep, she hates me.
Disappointment trickles through me. Maybe it was only me who thought our kiss was something else. Until now, a kiss held no significance.
“Earth to Johnny,” Bettsy says. “I think you’ve got a slow puncture.”
But something that’d usually piss me the hell off doesn’t make me falter at all, because the speck of emotion I allow myself has already been spent on Kelly.
