“I’m pregnant.”

In an instant, all the noise and all the music has been vacuumed out of the store.

My ears are ringing, my head is clanging, and I stumble back against the wall of the dressing room. Stars circle my vision, turning me woozy and weak. The inside of my chest is a black hole. All I can figure is I’m hearing things, seeing things, and I’ve slipped into my own worst nightmare where I’m tumbling into the endless dark.

Only I’m not sleeping. I’m wide awake in a dressing room in the East Village, and the love of my fucking life has shot a bullet through my chest.

Chapter Seven

Harley

Trey paces from the window to the door of his studio. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. How many times do I have to tell you? I took, like, twenty tests.”

From the door to the window, and back again. He can’t stop moving, can’t stop shaking, and all I can think is that this is the start of the running. This jittery back-and-forth, like a caged animal, is a harbinger. He’s going to walk. He’s going to sprint, and leave me alone with a baby in my belly, and a kid in my life.

“Did you go to the doctor?”

He asked me that already. He asked me that on the way back from the store. He’d grabbed my arm, gripped it so tight his hand was a blood pressure cuff, and then practically dragged me to his nearby apartment.

“I told you. No, I didn’t go to the doctor. Pregnancy tests work.” I cross my arms over my chest, standing firm against the wall. I have no clue where my certainty is coming from, but it’s as if all that prior fear zipped out of me, and now I am resolute.

He shoves his hands into his hair, like they’re bulldozers. More pacing. Past the futon, wearing a tread to the bathroom, then he swivels around and back to me.

“Are you keeping it?”

My brain rattles, tries his question on again for size. But it’s like he’s given the computer a command it doesn’t understand. “What?”

“Well?”

His green eyes are dark, bottomless, and I can’t read them. All the gold flecks that sparkle are blotted out. “How is that even a question?”

He raises his hands defensively. “Because it is.”

“And how can you say it?” I spit back at him. My voice rears up like a viper, hissing. I press my hands against my belly protectively. My eyes follow my hands, and it hits me what I’ve done for the first time. Protected my baby. I’m winded by my own motherly instincts that materialized out of nowhere. “Of course I’m keeping the baby.”

He turns on his heels and stalks over to the window, gripping the windowsill so hard he could crack the wood in his hands. I march over to him, grab his shoulder, and spin him around.

My steely eyes glare hard into his dark ones. “And for the record, it is a baby. It is a he or a she. A boy or a girl. It’s not a fucking it, Trey.”

“You don’t have to get like that with me. It’s not like we’ve even talked about abortion. It’s not as if we sit around and debate abortion, or the death penalty, or anything like that. I mean, I don’t even know if you believe in abortion.”

I scoff, cold and dry. “Believe in abortion? It’s not a religion. It’s a fucking medical procedure.”

“So. Do you believe in it?”

I grit my teeth, wishing I had something in my hand—a glass, a phone, a hairbrush—that I could gun to the floor. “I am not having an abortion, and I want to smack you so hard for even suggesting it. How could you? You want to kill my baby?”

His eyes fall shut, and he rocks back on his heels, his shoulders hitting the window. His body sags, as if all the bones in him have crumbled to dust and he’s only air and tenuous breath. His lower lip trembles, then he licks it once, and swallows. I don’t know what’s going on inside him, and I wish I could crawl up into him, feel his heart, read his mind, and know what’s happening.

He opens his eyes, and then parts his lips to speak, but no words come. His apartment is starkly silent, and the quiet has become a living creature in this room, a shadow animal wedged between us. Then, he whispers, so low I’d need some kind of machine to pick it up if I weren’t staring at his lips, and the words that take shape on them.

“Our baby.”

He pulls me to him, and I tuck my face into the crook of his neck, placing a hand on his chest, his heartbeat wild and terrified under my palm.

* * *

Trey

Two words I never thought I’d say. Not now. Not yet.

But they’re here, levitating in the air between us, another presence in my apartment, and then inside me, an echo reverberating in my cells.

Our baby.

I can honestly say I never thought this would happen. Maybe that makes me stupid, but we were so careful, and I’ve never knocked up anyone before, so it makes no logical sense why it would happen now.

But there’s no point in trying to apply reason. Logic has been factored out of the equation.

So, what’s next? Are we supposed to talk about baby names? Parenting philosophies? What hospital she wants to give birth at, like responsible adults discuss? Or the fact that we’re in college and this is happening? That we’re recovering addicts, junkies, fuck-ups with the worst possible parental role models ever?

I don’t know, I can’t know, and my feet feel unsteady and my breath is thin, but there is one thing I can hold on to—that I don’t want to lose touch with her. She is my rock, she is my hope, she is my every-fucking-thing, and so I don’t let go of her. I cling to her, my chin against her hair, her body gathered in my arms.

We stand there for minutes, our arms tangled so tightly together, our bodies snuggled close as if we can erase the distance and the fear if we’re entwined.

Soon, I pull apart, look her in the eyes, and opt for the naked truth. “I don’t have a clue what we’re supposed to do next. Or talk about. Or if I’m supposed to take you shopping for baby clothes, or touch your stomach all the time. All I know is, I fucking love you, and I’ll do whatever you need.”

Her shoulders seize up, and her eyes well, but she nods, seeming strong, steadfast. That’s my girl. My tough, badass, brave girl.

“I love you too. That’s all that matters, right? We’ll figure it all out somehow. As long as we’re together.”

“We will always be together,” I tell her, locking eyes with her, making sure she knows these words are the absolute truth. They are the foundation of how I live my life now. With her. With the certainty I have in this crazy love that we found in the most unlikely place. “Remember? Staying.”

“Staying,” she repeats, nodding. “Always.”

Then her hands slip up my shirt, and she runs her fingernails across my arrow tattoo. I rub her shoulder and bring my lips to kiss her heart and arrow. It’s like we’re sealing a promise. One that neither of us ever expected to make; not now, not like this.

But what choice do we have?

Somehow we manage through the rest of the day, and when her stomach rumbles in the evening, I laugh.

“Hungry much?”

“I guess so,” she says with a sheepish grin.

“Bet you didn’t know I am amazingly proficient at making grilled cheese sandwiches.”

Her eyes light up. “Ooh! I bet you didn’t know that’s my favorite kind of sandwich.”

I show off the extent of my skills in the kitchen, making her a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner, the melted cheddar drizzling over the crust of the bread.

She takes a bite and rolls her eyes in pleasure. “This is so good I’m going to call it the Cheesy Miracle.”

“That is an excellent name.”

I whip up a Cheesy Miracle for myself, and damn, it tastes good, and it’s almost enough—the dinner, and the banter—to make it seem like we are the same people we were this morning, or yesterday, or a week ago.

Almost.

But not quite.

Because as the hours turn into days, and the week ticks by, I start to feel uneasy, as if I’m living on borrowed time. Because that’s what we’re doing. We’re playing pretend, avoiding reality, talking about sandwiches and saying I love you so much we’re a broken record.

I want to live in this make-believe state forever and ever. But then time does what time does—it marches onward—and reality sets back in. The tape starts playing in my head, a highlight reel looped over and over, and I see myself at age fifteen with my baby brother, Will, dying in my arms when he was only three days old. His tiny chest, rising and falling for the last time. It was hard to pinpoint the exact moment when he left this world. Everything had slowed, all his breaths, all his blood, and he slipped from life to death sometime as I held him, his tiny little body no longer working, his heart no longer pumping blood.

I didn’t even know him, and still, it hurt so damn much. It hurt like someone was shoveling out my heart, scooping out my organs, the metal edges grinding against my bones.

The aching, the awful aching emptiness of those days. Of that life. Of no one to talk about it with. I’ve worked so hard to move on: to live, to love. To not see death in front of my eyes every time someone says words like pregnancy or baby, but now it’s all I can see. It’s the picture I can’t stop looking at.

My mind starts to agitate like a washing machine stuck on an endless spin cycle, as I feel the hope and the happiness and the future draining out of me.

On the first day of her junior year of college, and my final semester, I walk her to campus. Her hand is in mine, and it feels so right to hold her hand, so I know—I fucking know—that I shouldn’t feel as if my blood is on speed. I try to settle my hyperdrive heart. I look down and see her fingers in mine, intertwined. See? It’s all fine, I tell myself. I can do this. I can manage. I can survive all my fears. I don’t have to be scared. We can keep doing what we’re doing.