From the Heart: A Valentine's Day Anthology Page 16

  What the hell was I supposed to say? ‘Well, I told him I was pregnant, he blamed me and then walked out?’ Actually, there was pretty much no other way to explain it. That was the basic gist.

  “Please,” I said. “Now is not the time.”

  “Well… will he be back to take you home?” Kara asked. “Because if not, we’ll have to…”

  “I don’t know, Kara. I don’t know anything. If he’s not back here by nine, I guess I’ll have to figure something else out.”

  Since Dec had driven my mum up to York for my graduation, we were reliant on him to take us home too, but if he’d really gone, we had problems. We couldn’t take the train back with my boxes, and I wasn’t sure Kara or Lucas’ parents would have room with all their stuff loaded into their cars.

  Suddenly losing my appetite after having taken only two bites of toast, I put the plate back down on the sofa and took my coffee up to my room. I hadn’t meant to be so snappy with Kara but I truly wasn’t ready to talk about things yet. It didn’t feel right to do that until Declan and I had worked a few things out. He was entitled to freak out, of course, but I wished he’d done it differently. I wished he hadn’t wandered off because that was more of a worry to me than if he’d just slept downstairs. He’d physically removed himself from the situation and that made me nervous.

  In my room, I placed my cup on the bedside table then went to my wardrobe to take out the last few items of clothing that remained. I threw a pair of jeans and a vest top onto the bed for me to wear, and the rest I folded and started putting into my suitcase.

  An hour and a half later, after I’d showered, dressed, and finished packing, Declan still wasn’t back. Kara and Lucas were being picked up by their parents at nine thirty, and Dec and I were supposed to collect my mum from her hotel at ten. Kara, Lucas and I stood in our hallway, surrounded by the last of our belongings, all of us staring from the door to the boxes to each other in a constant loop.

  “Has he called you?” Lucas asked. “Or have you tried calling him?”

  Crap! I’d left my phone in my bag in the living room when we’d got home the night before and I hadn’t checked it yet. Somehow, I highly doubted he’d called though. Declan never called when he was trying to figure something out.

  “I was too busy getting my stuff together,” I said. “I’ll check.”

  Surprise, surprise. When I pulled my phone from my bag – no missed called and no texts.

  “Call him,” Kara said.

  “What’s the point?” I asked, turning to her. “You know as well as I do how this is going to go.”

  She gave a small, sympathetic smile that made my insides hurt. In spite of her lack of knowledge of the situation, I knew she hurt for me, and it triggered my own pain to trickle back in.

  “You want me to try?” Lucas offered.

  I nodded. “Please.”

  As he passed, he gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze and I went back into the hallway and sank down on the stairs. Deep down, I knew he wouldn’t have gone back to Southampton without me and my mum; he was a commitment-phobe, not an asshole. What hurt me was knowing beyond all doubt that in spite of my plea, he would shut me out. Not just take a break to think, but shut me right out, as if he was the only one having to figure things out.

  I put my head in my hands and let out a long, frustrated growl, and I heard Kara’s footsteps walking towards me. She sat beside me on the stairs and wrapped her arm around my shoulders.

  “What’s happened, Eden?”

  Before I could answer, my phone beeped to tell me I had a new text message. My heart began to race at the thought it might be Dec, and I lifted my head to check. What I saw on the screen only made my heart beat faster, but it was accompanied by an intense twist in my gut.

  The photo message showed Dec lying down, asleep, with a blanket partially covering him, his left shoulder and part of his chest exposed. The text beneath read: I have something of yours.

  The message was from Meg.

  I fought the tears in my eyes as I tried to come up with a rational reason why he could have been at her place. She only lived a few streets over from us, but… why would he have gone there? He couldn’t possibly have been that messed up to have purposely sought her out, because that would have, in fact, made him a complete asshole. But he was with her, and he did have his shirt off.

  Without a word, I handed my phone to Kara, and just as she gasped at the message, the front door opened and Declan walked in. He looked awful, like he’d had no sleep. His hair was messed up, and the clean, crisp shirt he’d worn the night before was creased. When his eyes found mine, the tears began to fall because his expression was blank. Like he didn’t know me. Like we hadn’t shared the most amazing seven months together. He looked at me the way he always looked at me when he was pretending I meant nothing to him.

  Except, maybe he isn’t pretending this time. Perhaps your little revelation has cut off his emotions. Enough for him to have spent the night with Meg.

  I wanted to say something, anything, but my mouth had gone so dry, I couldn’t get anything out. Didn’t even know what I wanted to say. It was like my own emotions had disappeared with Dec’s, leaving us both vacant shells. No. If I was a vacant shell, I wouldn’t be able to feel that sickness in my stomach, the thumping in my head, or hear the voices in my mind telling me I was stupid for even trying to have a relationship with someone who was so out of touch with anything that slightly resembled genuine feelings. He loved me… he had loved me, but that wasn’t a lifetime commitment. A baby? That’s a lifetime commitment, and one he hadn’t prepared for. Neither had I, but I didn’t run away from it, as much as I wanted to.

  “What the fuck, Declan?” Kara thrust my phone towards him and his eyes widened on the screen.

  He shook his head and looked up at me. “Don’t freak out over this, Eden.”

  The sickness inside me began to crawl up my throat, almost ejecting at his words.

  “Don’t. Freak. Out?” I stood up, trying to keep control of myself when all I wanted to do was knee him in the nuts. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  Again, he shook his head and handed my phone back to Kara. “Which of these boxes are yours? I’ll start loading them in the car.”

  My eyes flicked towards Kara as hers flicked to me, utter disbelief on her face, and Lucas rejoined us in the hallway. The silence was deafening, the atmosphere cold, almost dangerous.

  “That’s what you want to talk about right now?” I asked, keeping my voice steady. “Boxes.”

  He refused to look at me when he nodded. “That’s the only thing I want to talk about right now.”

  “You don’t want to explain why you had your shirt off at Meg’s? Why you even left last night? And why you stayed with her instead of coming back?”

  “I did come back. I’m here, aren’t I?”

  My feet carried me quickly down the stairs and I stopped directly in front of him. I put my hands on his shoulders and shook them, just hard enough to force his head from the floor. “Don’t do this, Declan. I asked you last night not to do this, but here we are.”

  A flicker of the real Declan, my Declan, flashed in his eyes as he looked at me. For a moment, I saw all the love I’d seen there before I told him I was pregnant, and all the confusion he felt since he found out. But it vanished in seconds and he shrugged me off. “You said you’d give me time to think.”

  “And you had to do that half naked at Meg’s?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Oh, you’re gonna!” Kara said, and the fact that she’d waded in told me exactly how angry she was on my behalf.

  Kara and Lucas never got involved with my relationship with Dec; it wasn’t worth ruining our long friendships over. But she knew something was seriously wrong, and the photo from Meg had flicked her bitch switch.

  “Great.” Dec gave a sarcastic laugh. “I leave for five minutes and now everyone’s against me? What did you do? Tell them what a dic
k I am for not jumping for joy about being a dad?”

  The silence returned, shock rendering the air still. I stared up at him, trying to convey with my eyes that, yes, I thought he was a dick… for revealing the one thing we were both still trying to get our heads around.

  “What did you say?” Kara asked, and as Dec’s eyes moved to her, he realised his mistake.

  “Shit. Eden-” He reached out for me but I stepped back.

  I wasn’t upset that Kara and Lucas had found out, I was upset that it had happened this way. While we were all busy getting ready to pack up. While everything was such a mess.

  “The fact that you still don’t understand that you come first for me, and that you don’t get that the only person I wanted to talk about this with is you tells me everything I was scared of is true. You really don’t trust me, and you would rather bury your head in the sand than deal with what’s happening. I don’t know what the hell happened at Meg’s last night, but right now, I don’t even care. I told you before I wouldn’t keep going through this shit with you, and I won’t. If you want time to think, that’s fine but don’t you dare look at me as if this is my fault, as if I’m finding this easy. And don’t act like you spending the night at the house of someone who has wanted you since she first set eyes on you is okay.”

  With my pulse pounding in my ears, I turned away from Declan, my head down to avoid the stares of my friends, and went to the kitchen. The loaf of bread I’d made my toast from sat on the table, but the toaster and the coffee machine were both gone. I suspected Kara and Lucas would bin it before we left, but I grabbed a slice and ate it dry, hoping it would go some way to settling my stomach and easing my headache.

  Chapter 4

  The food didn’t help. Nothing helped. My head continued to ache, and the atmosphere in the house was so tense, we all just sat around watching the clock until Kara and Lucas left. Once they’d gone, it was just me and Declan for fifteen minutes before we had to leave to get my mum. We stood in the hallway, leaning against opposite walls, neither of us speaking.

  As much as my head hurt, it didn’t compare to the ache in my chest. I stood by the things I’d said, but that didn’t mean I liked them, or that I didn’t care about the possibility that something had happened between Dec and Meg. In fact, the thought of it was eating away at my insides, along with the shitty way he’d been acting towards me. This wasn’t him. When we started dating, I’d accepted it was a part of him. That he wasn’t good at talking things through, and he was especially bad at being vulnerable or feeling so completely out of control of a situation, and when those things happened, he needed to back away to figure things out. To get himself to a place where he felt more comfortable. Since we’d been together, that side of him had barely made itself known. We were happy. He was the same guy I’d always loved, insecurities and all, except now he loved me too, and it was better.

  But now? We were strangers.

  “Nothing happened with Meg.”

  I glanced up at Declan where he stood, his back against the wall and his feet forward, toes close to my bag that I’d dumped on the floor while we waited.

  “Nothing?” I asked.

  “I was walking. I needed to walk. I just planned to walk around the block a few times to clear my head, but as I was turning out of what I now know is Meg’s street, she got out of a taxi and called out to me. I guess I looked… I don’t know… stressed. She said I should go back to hers for a drink, and I wasn’t thinking clearly. We went inside, she got me a beer, she asked what was wrong. I didn’t tell her anything, but it wasn’t too hard for her to figure out that we’d had an argument. She made a… suggestion that I could ‘use’ her to make myself feel better. I told her it wasn’t going to happen, but she still said I could crash there. I know that was stupid, but I wasn’t ready to come back.”

  That sounded pretty much exactly like Meg. I had no idea when it became okay to attempt to screw over your friends, but on the plus side, I wouldn’t have to see her again once I left York.

  “Why was your shirt off?” I asked.

  He lifted his head to look at me. “Because it was hot as fuck last night, and I couldn’t exactly take my trousers off. I couldn’t trust her not to help herself to the goods while I was asleep!”

  My lips twitched at his words, followed by a laugh I hadn’t meant to let out, and the atmosphere lightened just a little.

  “Well, she has been trying to get her hands on them for a while,” I said, sighing.

  “She never stood a chance, Eden.”

  I heard the subtext in his words; read it in his eyes. Nobody stood a chance. But it only made my heart heavier because that might not be enough for him. Not compared to the bombshell I’d dropped on him. Would he be like my dad and dump all responsibility? Would he give me money for the baby in the hope that he wouldn’t have to have any further involvement? Would he be a weekend dad? Or could he talk me into adoption, keeping us together but knowing nothing would ever be the same?

  “We should go,” I said, quietly. “Mum’s probably already waiting for us.”

  **

  The journey home was awkward to say the least. The only conversation was small talk, and I could see Mum’s eyes seeking mine in the rear view mirror, trying to decipher why the air felt so tense. I never once met her eye, and I knew I was in for some severe grilling when we got home.

  When Dec pulled up outside our house, I told Mum to go in ahead because, in spite of how awkward it was, I couldn’t get out of the car without any mention of the forbidden topic.

  “I have to tell her when I get inside,” I said, shifting my knees to the side and turning towards him.

  Declan nodded. “I’m not ready to tell my parents yet. Do you think it would be okay if you asked her not to contact them yet please? I just… I have to think before they get involved. You know what they’re like.”

  Boy, did I. They were actually pretty decent people, but for some reason, Declan was like the runt of the litter to them. Nothing he ever did was good enough, and if they found out about this from anyone but him, there’d be hell to pay.

  “I can do that.” I was fairly confident once Mum calmed down that she could manage that if I asked her to. Of course, the upcoming shitstorm I faced had to be extinguished first. My mum wasn’t intimidating on a day to day basis, but this was the only thing she had ever begged me not to do. Get pregnant too young and/or outside of a very stable relationship. The only good thing was that at least uni was over. It wasn’t going to ruin anything in that area. But things would be a struggle if I decided to be a mum.

  “Thanks,” Dec said.

  “What will happen now?” I reached out and gently turned his face to mine so he had to look into my eyes. “When you go home, what will happen? When will we talk?”

  “I’ll call you this evening.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  I gave him a tight smile, and he leaned forwards and placed a single, soft kiss on my lips. “I do love you, Eden. I just need some time, okay?”

  I nodded, his words filling me with a warmth I hadn’t felt in almost twenty-four hours. “I love you too.”

  Declan helped me take the boxes and my suitcase into my house, and with another slightly chaste kiss, he left me in the kitchen with my mother who had an expectant look on her face.

  The conversation that followed was one of the most harrowing of my life. There was shouting, crying, apologising, and hugging. Mum was disappointed in me more than anything. And I think disappointed in herself because she felt like she hadn’t made it clear enough just how hard it is to be a parent, especially with the added possibility of having to do it alone. The truth was, I really had done everything right. I was unlucky. I was one of the few who still got pregnant in spite of using birth control correctly and now I had to figure out what to do. In the end, Mum said she would support me whatever my decision – no pressure. I guess in some ways it made it easier that she’d been in my positio
n. She understood everything I felt, everything that would probably keep me awake for quite some time.

  Declan didn’t call that night. He didn’t call the next morning, either. The only person who called was Kara, and she told Lucas to go find something to do so I could go over and talk to her. Just me and her. Just me and her hadn’t happened in a while, and as I sat on her brand new squishy sofa in her and Lucas’ new flat, holding a cup of tea, I was grateful to have this time together. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Lucas there, he was as much a friend as Kara, but this felt like a girl thing and I needed it to be that way.

  “So… have you called Dec?” Kara asked, tucking her feet up underneath her.

  I shook my head. “I tried once. No answer. He asked for some time so I’m giving it to him. I’m… angry, hurt, upset, disappointed that he didn’t call when he said he would, but what good will it do to push him?”

  “You could go and see him.”

  “If he’s not answering the phone to me, I doubt he’ll open the door. And also, as much as I need to talk to him, why do I have to do all the running? He promised he’d call and he broke that promise. I think I just… I have to accept that he’s done with me.”

  Kara untucked her legs and shuffled closer to me. “You can’t know that until you speak to him.”

  “Maybe not. But his silence says a lot. It always has.”

  Inside, where everything ached… it seemed like I should be crying, sobbing over what was probably the end of my relationship and a future that was nothing like the one I’d planned. But it was like my emotions were on hold. Even though I’d felt constantly sick, and every thud of my heart seemed to puncture my chest, I couldn’t get the tears to fall. It was like I was resigned and trying to deal with whatever happened next.

  “Have you made any decisions about what you want to do?” Kara asked gently. “About the baby?”

  Blowing out a breath, I rested my hand on my stomach and said, “I think I have, and then I consider something else, and something else, and I chase myself around in circles. I never… I never considered an abortion. Right away, I didn’t feel like I could do that, but I’m also not sure I can handle having a baby yet. There’s so much involved. It goes beyond just thinking about sleepless nights and how I’m going to support us both. How would I hold down a job and make sure my baby was taken care of, and didn’t feel like I was abandoning them? That was how I used to feel. When Mum was working every hour, and I was always at my nan’s house. I didn’t understand that she was working so she could take care of me... not for a long time. What if my own child never understands that? What if I become a stay at home mum and try to survive on handouts? If I did that, what was the point of getting a degree? It just feels as though being a single parent would be a constant uphill struggle, and even if I tried, I still might screw it up.” I paused, wearily rubbing my eyes. “So I thought about adoption. Okay, maybe eventually it would come down to the same thing. A child wondering why I didn’t work hard enough to keep them. To keep us together. But hopefully they’d have a great life with parents who could give them more than I can. And then I think… could I really do that? Carry my baby for nine months, only to give it up at the end? Maybe then abortion would be better. I just don’t know, Kara.”