Page 53 of Indulgence
“What can I do? Where is Matteo? Should I call him?”
His name on her lips was gut-twisting. Matteo has always had this way of making things all okay for me. Not this time. He wouldn’t be the one to make this all better. At least not with how hurt I felt.
My voice was buried underneath my sorrow so I only managed to shake my head.
“No?” She was understandingly surprised. “Okay, should I call Norah? This definitely sounds like a crisis of some kind.”
I nodded, and in the next moment, she unwrapped her arms from around me and stood to head to the kitchen.
A minute later, she returned with a mug of coffee for me and her cell to her ear. “Code Red. My house. Natalie is here, and it doesn’t look good.”
* * *
“Oh, girl.”Norah rubbed my back. “I am so sorry.”
Putting everything that happened from last night to this morning into words was a monumental feat. By the end, I felt as if I were in a fog bubble, and my life was just some tragic train wreck that I couldn’t look away from. We were that couple who broke what wasn’t broken by trying to fix it.
I cut my narrowed gaze to the side table, to where my phone vibrated like crazy. Even though I’d asked her not to, Penelope had plugged it in while we waited for Norah to arrive. It was filled with text messages and missed calls from Matteo.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?” Penelope asked. I knew she has been dying to ask that for a bit but was holding back. “You guys should probably talk.”
Scooping up the phone, I flipped the button on the side that would silence the ringer and dropped it on my lap. “I can’t.” I was too stuck in a pit of despair, unable to move passed the very real fact my husband, the love of my life, the father of my children, could potentially have a baby with a total stranger.
The texts started popping up on the screen.
Matteo: Natalie, please come home.
Matteo: Please, I need you.
Matteo: Just please tell me you’re ok.
Norah was sitting flush against me, so we saw the messages at the same time. She cursed under her breath.
“What?” Pen asked.
Norah squeezed my leg and gave me a sad smile. “This feels like an impossible situation. Matt wants her to come home. I can feel the desperation in his texts, and I want to tell her to go home. But”—she turned her attention to me—"I don’t know if I’d be able to be around Derek in a moment like this either.”
I wanted to go to Matt, but I couldn’t soothe him when I felt the most exposed and vulnerable I’d ever felt in my life. His arms around me would only rub my wounds raw.
What would everyone say if this baby was our reality?
How the hell would we explain this to the kids? To my parents?
All I kept seeing was a movie playing in my head of Matt sliding in Brooke. His face when he came. Her face when he walked into the kitchen shirtless this morning. Her with a big pregnant belly. The two of them holding a little baby they shared. Him leaving me for her. It was like watching some TV drama characters fall in love.
Penelope’s voice interrupted my day-mare. “This is Matteo we’re talking about here. He would never do anything to hurt you, Natalie. I get that this sucks, but you aren’t going to actually leave him over this, are you?”
The image of him smiling down at a baby . . . over Brooke’s shoulder had another sob barreling up from my chest. “How am I supposed to stand around as he has a child with another woman?”
“You don’t know anything yet,” Norah stated as she rubbed her hand on my leg. “Don’t start planning for the worst.”
That was easy for her to say. I wiped snot from my nose with the back of my hand and didn’t think twice about it. “How can I not? He came inside her, Norah. He fucking came in another woman without wearing a damn condom.”
Pen moved from the smaller sofa to our larger one and pressed against my other side, leaving me sandwiched between the two of them. “She said she was on the pill. Let’s all just pray that everything is fine, and in a few weeks, you can put this all behind you.”
It didn’t seem as simple as she made it out to be.
Chapter Twenty-Five
