Besotted by Rebecca Sharp

Eve

Pregnant.

I didn’t pick up the test that read with lines, afraid I wouldn’t trust myself to see the truth and not believe I was hallucinating and seeing double. I picked up the version that screamed in bright, unmistakable letters: Pregnant.

Me.

The girl with two jobs, a yoga career, no home, and a boyfriend that wasn’t official.

I’d come to Roaster’s early so I could take the test here rather than wait for Miles to head out and do it at the apartment. In fact, I’d left the apartment before he’d even woken up, leaving the door open so that Kona could take my spot in bed. As I walked out, I took note of how the small place had some managed to transform into ours in such a short time.

My yoga gear.

Miles’ family photos.

Kona’s dog bed.

I took note like it was the last time I’d be seeing it—which was completely ridiculous since all my stuff was there. But that’s what fear did—it made everything seem impossible.

“Go home,” Laurel’s firm voice boomed from behind me, and I jumped slightly.

Looking over my shoulder, I caught her concerned and disapproving stare as she propped her hands on her hips.

Eli appeared from the hallway to the back, gently resting a hand on his wife’s hip as she glared at me, daring me to defy her. “What’s going on?”

Miles did that. Put his hand on my hip like he was protecting and claiming and comforting all at once and with the softest touch.

My mind flipped through the scrapbook of moments I’d collected over the last several weeks. Not the big moments, but the little ones. And my chest cavity felt like it was getting smaller.

“I’m really fine,” I insisted, shaking my head. “I don’t need to go home.”

“You have no color to your face, Eve, and you’ve been staring at the espresso machine for the last five minutes even though it’s no longer steaming,” she harrumphed.

Maybe she was right.

My head fell. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m feeling a little under the weather this morning.” And a little pregnant.

“Go home. Make Miles bring you some soup, and just take the rest of the day to relax.”

Rest of the day? Relax?

I almost wanted to laugh if I wasn’t afraid that it would make me vomit. Instead, I nodded and untied my apron from around my waist and hung it over my arm, my shoulders sagging in defeat.

I didn’t want to leave because I hadn’t wrapped my head around my new reality, let alone what I was going to do. I wanted to stay at Roasters and breathe in the bittersweet scent of resolution because I couldn’t even drink a cup of it—which was why my morning latte was tossed in the trash because I’d made it without thinking.

As soon as I let myself out the back of the coffee shop, the sea breeze blew a strand of hair across my face. Reaching up, I pulled out the braid that held the mass back and massaged my head, letting out a small moan. Miles did this for me when I got home from work. He’d tug out my hair and run his thick fingers through it like he was carving the strands free.

Reaching for my phone, I grasped at straws even though it was unlikely to change my situation. I texted my friend, Taylor, who’d had her baby last year, and asked if she could give me the number of her OB-GYN. She’d been pregnant when she moved out here a little over a year ago now, looking for Ash. That was before Larry died. Before Ash opened his restaurant, the Lookout.

And before I’d begun to fall irrevocably for Miles Madison.

A few seconds later, my phone buzzed with a response.

Taylor: Contact: Dr. Lee

Taylor: Call me if you need anything. Even just to talk.

I swallowed down the sudden urge to cry at her sweetness and quickly tapped on the contact card she’d messaged to call the office right away.

Ten minutes later, I pulled up in front of the smaller office building after the receptionist told me to come right over.

I realized that in moments when you were waiting for such momentous clarification, time processed in chunks.

There was the chunk that involved names and birthdates and medical history. There was the chunk that was filled with the suction around my arm, the cold metal against my chest, the needle stick, and the cup. And then there was the current chunk of the nauseating nothingness that made up waiting.

“Miss Williams?” I looked up as a petite, younger Asian woman came into the room. Her long black hair was pulled back in a sleek ponytail and her smile was small, but it carried up into her eyes as she extended a hand and greeted me.

“Thank you for seeing me on such short notice,” I murmured as she took a seat at the desk in front of me.

“Oh, of course.” She nodded and opened what I assumed to be my chart. “Well, I don’t want to keep you on edge, so I will tell you that your tests show that you are indeed pregnant.” She looked up to me and that small smile beamed. “Congratulations, Miss Williams.”

I gaped for several long seconds and still her smile didn’t waver. It was as though she knew that sometimes it took a moment to process these kinds of life-changing events, and she gave me that time almost acting as though it wasn’t passing to alleviate any embarrassment.

“Thank you,” I stammered quietly.

“I see this comes as a bit of a surprise, and I saw on your paperwork that you were on birth control.” Her head tipped down and looked over my chart to confirm.

“I was—I am. I mean, I’ve never put them to the test before. What’s the chance that they are defective? Or that I’m… immune to them? I thought the test had to be wrong. I mean, I took two of them, but still. I just don’t know what happened.”

My tangent plowed forward like a freight train, searching for answers that made no difference to the predicament I was in. But any answer was better than no answer.

“Eve.” Dr. Lee’s voice broke through clouds of my confusion. “Take a deep breath. Of course, those things are possible but quite unlikely. Have you been taking anything else? Any other medication recently?”

“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t take any medication except for a multivitamin. And I don’t like taking pills.”

“Nothing?” Her lips pursed. “Were you sick recently? Or on an antibiotic for any reason?”

I blinked and looked at her like her two heads were focusing on one crystal clear face. “I… I was on an antibiotic for a little cold I had a few weeks ago…”

Oh God.

She nodded and explained, “Antibiotics can make birth control ineffective. There are always other possibilities, but the combination of both would be my best guess as to how this happened.”

“I see,” I answered weakly.

“Do you want to keep—”

My brain whipped to attention and I insisted, “Yes.”

Of all the things I didn’t know, that wasn’t one of them.

“Okay then.” She smiled reassuringly at me. “We have some things to go over.”

The next chunk was comprised of information dumped into my brain and on my lap. I felt like a cup of milk being steamed with every tidbit of pregnancy info until I began to bubble over. It wasn’t their fault. I was sure it was the normal amount of information. But I could only take one uncertainty at a time.

The first was confirmed in that office.

The next would be when I told Miles. As soon as I figured out how to do that…

As I turned on my car, the sudden grumble of my stomach bellowed demandingly with the desire for a hot dog. A life or death desire.

A few minutes later, without much more clarity of thought or action, I stood at the window of the Dog House and waited for my order.

I was going to have Miles’ baby.

I repeated the words over and over in my head as I ate, hoping that the two hot dogs would help me swallow the facts down more easily.

Miles’ baby.

The man who wanted no permanence. The man who’d hardly wanted more than one night at a time was now getting eighteen years in one shot.

I didn’t need him.

There were two sureties that came along with the blue word on the stick this morning. One, I was going to have this baby. Two, I was going to have this baby with or without him.

The crowd on the beach faded into a dull soundtrack as I walked toward the cove, feeling like the silence and seclusion there would help me find a way to muddle through this with enough strength to leave and tell Miles.

Sure enough, it was empty.

The ocean lapped at my toes like a familiar friend coaxing my fears from my worried bones. I thought about calling a lot of people. Laurel. Addy. Gwen. Taylor. But in the end, I settled on Jules, hoping her relationship with Mick might give her enough insight to predict my future.

An unreasonable expectation…

“Hello?” Jules’ voice came through the line like soft sunshine, bright and warm.

“Hey, you busy?” I asked, noting the higher pitch to my voice.

I heard her grunt and huff over a strange sliding and scraping noise. “No, just moving some boxes around the apartment that we haven’t unpacked yet before I head to the gym. What’s up?”

“I’m pregnant.”

I wasn’t subtle or hesitant. I was honest, like a tempest on the open ocean in the night. Thundering truth and crashing with candor.

And Jules… she was the calm waters that met the sand. No matter what I threw at her, she would absorb it and it would be nothing more than a gentle lull by the time her response reached the shore.

Only a few seconds passed, the shuffling stilling on her end of the line. “Where are you?”

“Standing on the beach.”

“Why don’t you sit down?” she suggested calmly. “I’m going to sit down. And then you’re going to tell me everything.”

She was probably right.

I made my way to the line of rocks and sat down. Not on that rock, but a different one closer to the water.

“You’re not going to congratulate me?” I asked quietly, wondering if I’d misread everything and she was disappointed in me.

“Oh, Eve.” Her sigh was pushed out with the full weight of her heart behind it. “Of course, I want to congratulate you… but I don’t think that’s really why you called is it? Because from the sounds of it, I might be the first person you’ve told.”

The lump in my throat grew bigger, like a sponge swelling up with salty water.

“I took the test this morning, and it read pregnant,” I spoke thickly. “I went to see Taylor’s doctor, and they confirmed it.” My whole body shook. “It’s still unbelievable. I was on the pill. I’ve been on the pill for almost as long as I’ve had a period. And then, all because of a stupid cold—a cold that was entirely his fault for making me want to swim in the stupid cold ocean—”

The irony wasn’t lost on me that the whole reason I’d had the cold was because I decided to go swimming in the frigid ocean in the middle of the night just to prove a point. Well, my point just backfired.

“Oh no,” she broke in, and I could hear the zing of the lightbulb going off in her head. “You didn’t realize that antibiotics make them not work?”

Of course, she would know about this, she was going to school for nursing.

“No,” I admitted hollowly. “I never knew. And why would I need to? I never thought I would… until I got married…”

I shivered as the wind wrapped around me, reminding me to stay present.

“I’m pregnant with Miles’ baby,” I murmured, feeling like I took a full breath for the first time since last night. “And he’s going to leave me when he finds out… he’s going to hate me when he finds out.”

And then I broke.

Not when my sister returned a shell of herself. Not when Larry had passed away. Not when I decided I would move out of the only home I’d ever known. Not when I didn’t have enough money for the apartment. Not when… ever… had I cried like this.

“Eve, it’s all going to be okay,” she soothed me. “Miles isn’t going to hate you. He’s a lot of things but not that… never that.”

“Y-You don’t know,” I blubbered, desperately trying to get ahold of my emotions. “He thinks I’m a romantic fool. H-He thinks I’m just so completely in love with him that I-I practically stalked him to get into his life. He’ll think I did this on purpose—that I was so besotted that I betrayed him like this…”

“Are you?”

I choked and coughed on my cries. “A-Am I what? Enamored—”

“In love with him.” My heart stopped. “Are you in love with him, Eve?”

Maybe I hadn’t been waiting for the one this whole time. Maybe I’d been waiting for him.

“Yes.” The word was my rose. My glass slipper. My voice box and my apple. It was the one element of my fairy tale that would harm me but lead me to a happily-ever-after in the end.

It seemed crazy how the answer was surprising to me. I’d liked him for so long—I’d wanted him for so long, I thought love would be obvious. But through it all, loving Miles had snuck up on me like dawn creeps up on the night. Now I realized love was something that happens to you—something that changes you—and wasn’t something to be found.

For too long, I’d been too set on the idea of perfect, that love would come riding in on a white horse to save the day. Instead, love had walked into a bar, homeless, with the only goal in mind of sinking himself.

And I’d been the one to save him.

I hoped.

God, I hoped.

“But I don’t know that he loves me.”

“Oh, Eve.” She chuckled.

“What?” There was a twinge of affront in my tone.

My face was still red and streaked with tears and she was laughing.

“Miles loves you.” I wished her surety could make it true. “Let me tell you something about the Madison brothers. Well, a few things. One, they are as stubborn as they are strong. Two, they, without fail, will give themselves what they think they deserve.”

“I-I don’t understand.”

“I can’t tell you I know the whole story because I don’t. But I know that Miles was hurt pretty badly by an old girlfriend—so badly that he, clearly, felt he didn’t deserve a future or love.”

I couldn’t argue. It was always the one thing that stuck out in my mind—no matter what Amanda had done to him, the last thing Miles always ended with was that he’d been the one at fault for believing her, that it was his judgment that couldn’t be trusted.

He blamed himself.

“And in spite of that fierce resolution to be alone, he still found his way to you. He still chose you, knowing what it would mean.”

“You know about that?” Dumb question.

“Mick called me right after he hung up with his brother,” she confirmed. “I may not have talked to Miles, but I know my man. And I know that from the second we pulled out of Carmel, there wasn’t a day that went by where he wasn’t worrying about his brother and how much farther he was sinking.”

I laid back on the rock and closed my eyes as she spoke.

That was the thing about Jules, when she talked to you, it was like you were the only person in the world and somehow, just by a conversation, she could ease your troubles. Like warm tea and a book on a cold winter day. It was how everyone who met her knew she would make an excellent nurse.

“And then, whether it was fate or folly, the orbit you and Miles kept around your feelings for each other shifted, and Mick worried but not in the same way. He worried with anticipation, like he could see happiness on the horizon for his twin if only Miles were smart enough to head toward it.”

I shuddered.

“I-I just don’t know, Jules. I don’t know what to think. I’m so unsure… and afraid. I’m so afraid I’m going to lose him.” There was no point in denying it. There was no point in pretending that lying to myself about it made me strong.

I. Was. Afraid.

I was afraid because I was human.

I was afraid because I had a heart.

“He loves you, Eve. Even if he’s stubborn and reluctant to admit it—and reluctant to admit that he deserves you. But just remember, every fairy tale has trials. How else are you going to find out that love perseveres?”

A good ten seconds went by, her words dripping through my pores like water through sand.

“Thank you.” It wasn’t enough, but the rest of my thoughts were being bottled up for the conversation I was about to have with Miles.

“Don’t thank me, Eve. You’re my friend. I’m always here for you.”

I let out a long breath. “Okay, I guess I’ll let you know how it goes.”

“Out of all the things to have faith in, love is the surest.”

I groaned. “You know, that was so easy to believe back when it was just a thought. Back before it was attached to a man who was living out of a tent and insisted that forever wasn’t for him.”

But I did still believe it.

“And Eve…”

“Yeah?” I pushed myself up from the rock and sunk my feet into the water again.

“Congratulations.” Even through the phone, her smile was contagious.

“Thank you.”

The sand shifted under me like a giant hourglass, reminding me that time was always moving and life was always changing. But even though the little tiny grains might rise and fall below me, didn’t mean I still couldn’t stand through the shift. There was a balance between the changing tide and the steady sand. And in that balance, I found my breath.

And held onto my belief in my fairy tale.