Me: I have two more days here. I’d like to have a rough outline of my project done before I leave, but someone keeps distracting me.
Jude: Ah, yes. What a prat. Don’t worry, I need to go kick a ball for three hours anyway.
Me: Someone punishing you?
Jude: That mouth of yours, American …
I bit my lip. This was something we’d danced around. I snuggled back under the covers and let the sensation wash over me. By this point, it had been over three weeks since I’d seen him, and based on the amount we’d texted since I’d arrived in Haworth, I’d see him again when I got back, if we could manage it.
Me: Yes, I remember how much you enjoyed it, Brit.
Jude: Immensely. Wish I could’ve enjoyed it again upon waking up.
Jude: And because I have horrible time management skills, by the time I work up a more polite way to ask, I’d like not to wait another month before I get to see that lovely mouth in person.
Me: I think we could manage that.
My belly fluttered until his words sank in a little.
A month.
It had been a month.
“Holy shit,” I whispered. Frantically opening up my calendar app, I scrolled back to the little dot on my calendar of when I’d gotten my last period. Five weeks. I should’ve gotten my period.
I was late.
The kind of late that was really, really bad.
“Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, holyyyyyyy shit.”
I scrambled from the bed, tossing my phone away from me with fumbling fingers, and speared my hands in my hair when it clattered to the floor.
“I’m just late because of stress,” I insisted. To myself. Because I was alone.
In a foreign country.
And possibly pregnant.
From a one-night stand.
My eyes burned. My nose tingled. My hands shook dangerously. This could not be happening.
I mean, it could happen. I remember him using a condom. But with a groan, I knew that my birth control taking had been … hit or miss … those first couple of weeks while I adjusted to the time difference.
Claire had been telling me for years that I should set reminders on my phone for my medication. But past advice coming back to haunt me was not what I needed.
What I needed was a freaking pregnancy test. As I leaned down to find my phone where it’d dropped on the floor, I knew I needed to call … I didn’t know. Claire. Isabel. Finn … no, not Finn, he’d be terrible in this situation. Plus, there was the whole in medical school and has a new girlfriend thing. Paige. No. She’d hop on a plane and make me pee on a stick. As I mulled over my options, I noticed that the screen on my phone was on the news app, and before I could navigate away from it, I caught a glimpse of a sports headline, the top portion of someone’s very familiar face in a picture.
Hey, Jude, Don’t Let Me Down it proclaimed, a nod to the Beatles song. My hand was shaking so badly as I tried to scroll down to see the picture even though I knew—oh my sweet baby Jesus in the manger,
I knew
—by the messy dark hair and the eyes it was him.
My other hand covered my mouth as his face came into full view. In the shot, he was mid-kick, muscular leg swinging toward a ball suspended midair. His face, just as stupidly hot as I remember, was frozen in concentration, his muscular body covered in a blue and white uniform. Maybe if I wasn’t freaking the fuck out, I would’ve thought about how insane it was that the guy I’d been text flirting with all day—the guy I’d slept with after making fun of the sport that employed him—was apparently a professional soccer player.
Football.
Whatever.
The hysterical laughter bubbled up in my throat, unbidden. I thought of his face when I said how boring the game was. I thought of his texts, telling me he’d been too busy playing football to text me sooner. Pretty soon, I was hunched over, wiping tears from my eyes because I couldn’t stop the sounds coming from my mouth.
That was when it happened.
The head spinning.
The nausea.
My stomach roiled slowly, unpleasantly, and I barely made it to the bathroom before I puked.
LIA
“It’s fine. It’ll be fine.”
I’d said it a thousand times since I hastily packed my shit and hopped back on a train to Oxford. Sorry, Bront?s, but I needed to be back in my own flat if I was going to find out I was carrying a little baby soccer player inside my body.
I groaned. Also for the thousandth time.
Maybe I’d just had a bad breakfast. Or lunch. Or tea.
My pace picked up as I booked it from the station back to my place. Yes. I liked that train of thought.
And honestly, I had to stick with it because as I approached the building that I would call home for a few months, I knew I absolutely had to convince myself it was true until I was safely ensconced behind locked doors and out of sight.
Have you ever seen someone fumble with a bottle of champagne? The really big expensive ones that would probably kill someone if you used it as a weapon. Molly got one for a party once, some fancy Amazon shindig for work that we were all invited to. She struggled to open it, and because it got jostled, the bubbles were angry, looking for a place to go once the pressure was released.
Once she got the cork off, oh, did they explode.
I imagined that happening inside my poor body. I could hardly pay attention to any aspect of my surroundings, wearing veritable blinders the entire time I left Haworth, the entire time I was on the train staring blankly out the window, and the entire time I hoofed it back to my flat.
So much pressure was building in me that the moment that cork came out, holy shit, I was going to erupt like a hormonal Vesuvius. Tears. Snot. Splotchy skin.
Somewhere, in that part of me that hated putting labels on shit like this, I knew exactly what this was.
Panic.
It felt like bottled panic.
Even putting a name to that emotion had my skin vibrating at a dangerous frequency as I took the steps up to my flat. My teeth clenched. My fingers curled into tight balls.
As I hit the top step, my breath sawed in and out of my lungs like I’d just run a freaking marathon. Alishiya was coming out of her apartment with a polite smile on her face. I knew the moment she saw all that angry, bubbling panic because her eyebrows bent in concern.
“Are you all right?”
Tight-lipped, I gave her a, “Mm-hmm,” in response because honestly, I couldn’t handle anything besides that.
She didn’t push, which I would thank her for later. She must not have three sisters and a mama bear mother figure because holy hell, if I was at home right now, they’d be all up in my face.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.