Page 33 of Room 1212

“Thanks.” Right before I hung up, though, I was struck by a sudden craving. “Oh! Wait! Can you send up a couple pickles on the side? Or like, six? You know what, just send the whole jar.”

“Yes, sir,” they said, as they’d been trained to do, but I swore I could hear them trying not to laugh.

“Thank you.” I was distantly aware that pickles didn’t really pair well with strawberry waffles, but I didn’t care. I remembered my mom saying pickles helped to calm an upset stomach, so maybe it would help mine.

When there was a knock on the door, I dragged my ass out of bed and opened the door. I probably looked like absolute shit, but I couldn’t seem to bring myself to do anything about it. I was wearing the same rumpled pajamas that I’d been wearing since I first got here, and I knew my eyes were probably red and puffy from crying.

I immediately recognized the man in the hallway as the same from last time I’d visited here. “Hey, I remember you,” I told him. “Patrick, right?”

“Yeah! You remembered.” He gave me a wide grin, but as he looked me over, it slipped a little. I could nearly smell the pity coming off him in waves—or maybe that was my own BO. “I brought your food up for you.”

I stepped aside so he could push the cart into the room. He unloaded the food onto the table for me—including a water pitcher filled with pickle spears. “Sorry, the kitchen only has, like, industrial-sized buckets of pickles, and I didn’t think that was quite what you meant, so I hope this is okay.”

I could smell the dilly brine from here, and my stomach gave a hungry gurgle. “Yes, it’s fine, thank you.”

“Is there anything else I can get for you?” he asked politely.

I chuckled. “No books for me to sign today? Not that I blame you. I’ve heard my new book is total shit,” I said, saying what he was probably thinking.

He blushed bright red. “No! I just didn’t want to pester you. And I actually thought your new book was really good…”

I waved him off; I wasn’t interested in being lied to. “Thanks for the pickles. I’m hoping it’ll help my stomach. I’ve been a bit stressed over the new release,” I explained.

“Oh, that makes sense,” he said, chuckling. “I thought, ‘waffles and pickles, that’s weird.’ I almost wondered if you were pregnant.”

“Oh gods, no!” I gasped out. “Geez, can you imagine? Me! A dad!”

He stood there for a moment, smiling tightly. “Right? That would be… bad…?” We stared at each other awkwardly, not sure what else to say. “Okay, so… bye.”

I closed the door behind him, sighing and shaking my head.Yikes! Pregnant! That would’ve been devastating. But as I sat down at the table and stabbed my fork into my waffle, the gears in my brain started turning. Nausea… Pickles… My mood swings… I mean, maybe I was just due for my cycle. That could cause some physical discomfort, and even weird cravings.

But as I chewed my food, I barely tasted it. My mouth still full of strawberries, I fished a pickle out of the brine with my fingers and shoved it straight in with the waffle, doing some mental math as I counted back in my head. “No, that can’t be right,” I mumbled.

I needed a calendar.Now.

Abandoning my food, I dashed over to my suitcase and dug through it until I found my phone. I powered it on, and it exploded with sound as the home screen lit up. Voicemail messages, texts, emails, all my social media accounts alerting me of all the posts I’d been tagged in. I ignored them all and went straight to my calendar. I had more important things to worry about than my shitty book.

Flipping back through the months to find my last cycle, I paled. That couldn’t be right. It was three months ago. Maybe I just forgot to track the last one. I gnawed on my lip, knowing that was a lie.

“I can’t raise a child,” I blurted. “Look at me! I’m a mess!” Not only was I an emotional disaster, but my lifestyle didn’t leave any room for a baby. Sometimes I forgot to eat or shower because I was so deeply immersed in writing. And when I went on tour, I was gone for weeks at a time. It wasn’t that I didn’t like babies—I mean, there was a reason I wrote them into every book—it was just that it would be terribly irresponsible of me to bring one into the world. And this was the absolute worst time for it! I might have just flushed my entire career down the shitter. For all I knew, I wouldn’t even have the income to support a baby!

“Pfft! I’m not pregnant. I can’t be. We were careful, we used condoms—mostly.” I was adamant in my denial. And I would prove it, but first, I needed a pregnancy test.

This wasn’t the type of thing I could just walk into a store and buy—especially now! My name was being smeared all over the damn place this week, and the last thing I needed was to be cornered to talk about the reasons I’d had for changing my writing style. And just my luck, people would see me buying a pregnancy test, and then the speculation would start, saying that it must’ve been the hormones. Like I was drunk or something, my decision-making process impaired in some way.

What I needed was a disguise. Like when Drew took me dancing.

Thinking about Drew was like a punch to the gut. Here I was worried about how a baby would change my life, and not once did I think about him. What was he going to say about all this? He’d probably be excited. He seemed just the type to want loads of babies. We hadn’t talked about having kids, because we weren’t even in a relationship. It was just sex. I’d been doing my damnedest to keep him at a distance, and now look where we were!

I didn’t want us to end up like my parents. I could see it all now. Drew would want to raise the baby, but not only that, after his omega dad had abandoned him, I had no doubt that he would want to build a family with me. And if I let him, he would move in with me, marry me, try to make a future. But I’d seen firsthand how relationships like that worked, or rather, how they didn’t. He would stay with me out of obligation, but in the end, his resentment would get the better of him. He would learn to hate me.

I shook my head to clear it. I was getting ahead of myself. First things first.

I dug through my suitcase and layered up on clothes so that it looked like I was overweight. Then I pulled on a hat, threw on some sunglasses, and called it good. As an added bonus, I hadn’t bothered to shave for the past week, so I looked extra scruffy. I found a little family-run convenience store down the street and bought a test, and I was back in my room in under 20 minutes.

And three minutes after that, my life was over. Turned out, I was just living another cliché.

Fuck.I’m pregnant.

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