Page 87 of The Love Rematch
“Uh-huh. Okay. Yeah. Uh-huh. Tomorrow. Thank you, Dr. Copeland.”
She hung up and swiveled in her chair.
His heart was in his throat as he knelt before her, waiting. He kept his hands on her thighs to comfort her. It took everything within him not to fall apart, to be strong for her, because he knew by the look on her face, the news was bad. A second passed in silence. It might as well have been an hour. It was the sort of quiet that defied time, sucking in everything around it, until nothing existed outside the void. Finally, when he couldn’t take it any longer, just when he was about to ask, Emily spoke.
“I’m not pregnant.”
He flinched. “What?”
“The tests I took were false positives. I’m not pregnant.”
“How?”
“I’m going back to her office for some follow-up testing tomorrow. I could have a hormone imbalance. But she said the blood test is accurate. I’m not pregnant.”
“So there’s no baby?” he asked dumbly, but he couldn’t help it. His brain was slow. His lips felt fat. They’d spent the past week building a life together that to him seemed utterly perfect, and now, before his very eyes, it was crumbling.
“No,” she whispered, then collapsed into his arms.
He couldn’t say how long he held her, only that at one point she leaned back, looked him in the eye, and murmured, “I guess, this is a good thing, right? I don’t know why I’m crying. It’s—”
She broke off, her voice catching on the words. He gripped the back of her neck and pulled her close again, because he understood. God, she had no idea how well he understood. It was a loss. Even if the baby had never existed, in their minds it had, and now that dream was gone. The plans about getting an apartment together. Gone. The plans about staying in Georgia together. Gone. Talking about names, getting ahead of themselves and looking up baby clothes, picturing a family. Gone. Gone. Gone.
Eventually, they ended up on her bed. Emily curled into his side and buried her face against his chest. He ran his fingers through her hair, trying to soothe her even as his own soul felt ripped apart.
“Will you stay tonight? Will you just stay and hold me?” she asked, her voice on the verge of sleep. “I don’t want to be alone.”
“I’m here, Em,” he told her and she relaxed fully against him. He kissed her forehead. “I’m here and I won’t let go.”
It was the last thing he said to her before she showed up unexpectedly in his life seven years later. Words she needed to hear. Words he wanted more than anything to believe. Words he knew were a lie even as they left his lips.
“The doctor said I wasn’t pregnant, that I never had been,” Emily tells Cooper now. Her voice is oddly detached while Jake feels swept away in an onslaught of feeling. The emotions he stifled for the past seven years surge over him at once, leaving him adrift. “They were false positives. And you would think an eighteen-year-old getting that news would be thrilled, but I wasn’t. I was…destroyed. That might sound silly, to be wrecked by something that never existed in the first place, but—”
Her voice finally catches.
Cooper swoops in and takes both of her hands in his, ever the gentleman. “It doesn’t.”
“I loved my ex with everything I had, so I guess, the thought of losing him to long distance scared me more than the thought of having a family together, no matter how premature. After spending the week dreaming up this new life together, I felt like someone had swept the rug out from underneath me, like I was falling, and he was the only one who’d be able to catch me. But he didn’t. He left instead. When I woke up the next morning, he was gone. And I never heard from him again.”
A look of pure disgust twists Cooper’s face.
Bile rises in Jake’s throat.
“God, what a fucking asshole,” Nina leans over and whispers. Jake has no idea when she came to stand right next to him, but he can’t deny the truth in her words.
He is a fucking asshole.
He always has been.
And that’s why he left. Because that phone call—thatfuckingphone call—was reality slapping him in the face. He didn’t deserve a girl like her. He would never deserve the life they’d been dreaming of, all white picket fences and matching Christmas pajamas. While Emily sobbed in his arms, Jake thought about his parents, about the phone call his mother received at eighteen, about the life she was roped into against her will, about the man she had never been able to escape. But Emily could escape. Emily could get out of this town, and away from his family curse. She could achieve her dreams. She could be so much more. All he needed to do was get out of her way.
It was the second chance his mom never had.
He wouldn’t take it from Emily.
So he held her the whole night, not sleeping a wink. His arms cramped from how tightly he wrapped himself around her. And then, when the sun slipped over the horizon, he snuck out the window. He got into his truck. And he drove until there was no more land to drive on.
“I would never—” Cooper rushes to say, but Emily stops him with a smile.
