Page 36 of Worth the Wait
But Freddie caught it. And fuck, he’d take that as a win.
Cause he was gorgeous. Literalsex on legs. When he wasn’t sulking as if the world owed him a medal and hadn’t delivered.
“You staying the night?”
Nathan looked up, and something in the way he chewed on his lower lip set Freddie’s nerves humming. As if he was trying to gnaw away a scar. Or stop himself from saying something that would leave another. Freddie’s stomach twisted. He knew that look. Knew it the way he knew every mark on Nathan’s face, every breath between words when he was about to bail. And suddenly he felt sick.
This was it.
He was gonna pull out of the Ibiza trip.
Freddie had been stashing every quid he could from his shifts at TGI Fridays, stuffing it in an old pencil tin at the back of his sock drawer, careful to keep it away from his mum’s eyes. Nathan had been doing the same. Pocketing the barely there “wages” his dad tossed him for working at the garage, plus whatever he made under the table collecting glasses at the Wetherspoons by TGI’s, the shifts his dad didn’t know about cause he always told him he was crashing at Freddie’s those nights. Which, technically, wasn’t a lie. Even if after those shifts, they’d take the long way home. Past the seafront, through the quiet back roads of Worthbridge and share a bag of chips under the orange streetlights. Sometimes they’d walk all the way to the pier, where the shadows were deeper, the world a little quieter. And sometimes…
Well. Sometimes things got a little handsy. A little breathless.
But that was new. Still fragile. Secret.
Two months, three weeks and four days.
Not that Freddie was counting.
So it wasn’t just the holiday he was afraid of losing.
It wasthis. Whatever the hell this was. Whatever it was becoming. And how easily it could break with one sentence.
Nathan drew in a long breath, as if it might brace him from the impact of what he was about to say. Then when he spoke, his voice was low, flat. “I can’t go to Ibiza.”
Freddie rolled his eyes. “Yes, you can. You’re eighteen, Nate. You’re a fucking adult. If he kicks you out, you come here. You know Mum’ll have you.”
But Nathan was already pacing. Dragging one hand through his hair, the other hanging useless by his side. He paused in front of the Kasabian poster on the wall, eyesfixed on it as if it might give him an answer, before he finally turned to face Freddie.
“Katie’s pregnant.”
Freddie flinched. “What?”
“Katie.” Nathan hung his head. “She’s pregnant.”
“What the fuck’s that got to do with—”
Nathan lifted his gaze. “It’s mine, innit?”
The words dropped like a stone in Freddie’s chest. Heavy. Irrefutable.
He opened his mouth, but nothing came out, heat rising through his chest like panic. Grief. Another rabid thing he didn’t have the vocabulary for yet. His knees weakened and for a second, he genuinely thought he might slide down the door and curl into a ball.
Instead, he stayed frozen, staring past Nathan into the space between them. Then he blinked hard, forcing himself to come back to the moment. He bit his lip, suddenly aware of how familiar that action was. How Nathan had done the same when he walked in.
“How can you be sure?” Freddie asked.
“That she’s pregnant?”
“Yeah.”
“She showed me the scan. Been to the doctors already.”
Freddie swallowed. “And… you sure it’s yours?”
“I shagged her, Fred. You know I did. Three months ago.”
