He nods, his shoulders relaxing. “Good idea. I’ll go with you. We’ll tell them we need to pick up…”
“Something personal for me. They don’t need to know more than that.”
He nods again, stiffly. “Right. You’re right.”
We dress in silence. I can’t believe I got so caught up in this guy that I didn’t take care of myself and make sure he had a condom. I have never been that person.
But somehow Garrick makes me that person. Which is why I need to keep my distance from him.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Garrick
Kids aren’t on my radar. A fucking relationship hasn’t even been on my radar. I mean, I guess if I think about it, I’ve always wanted a big family like my own, but not until I have my business running on all cylinders, so I can support everyone.
I cannot have a kid now. I just can’t.
Blue’s face is ashen when we walk out of the guest room together. She’s staring at her phone and muttering to herself. At the top of the stairs, she grabs my hand and pulls me back into the bedroom.
She’s strong when she’s determined, and she looks so terrified I let her lead me. She shuts the door gently, peeking out as she does it, like she’s worried someone might be out there watching or eavesdropping.
I take a seat on the bed and she paces. She’s in a dress now, a sparkly red dress for the holiday, with candy cane hair clips in her pink hair, and tall heels on her feet.
I get a bit distracted by the way the heels make her calves pop and her round ass moves as she walks.
“Garrick.” She stops in front of me and I remember things aren’t happy or easy right now. “I’m ovulating.”
I just stare at her. “What?”
“I mean, I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I looked it up and now is about the right time in my cycle for me to be ovulating.”
“Shit.” My heart plummets to my feet like a lump of coal. “But the pill will take care of it, right?”
She looks so sad. I am such a fucking idiot for forgetting the condom. I never, ever do that. I just got so caught up in the moment and I lost all common sense.
Put me back in my childhood home and apparently, the worst, most irresponsible parts of me surface again.
“According to what I found, there’s no pill that will work if I’m already ovulating. All the pill does is prevent me from ovulating so I can’t get pregnant.”
I rub a hand over my face. “Okay. This is okay. We’ll figure this out, Blue. We’ll get through this together.”
“But we aren’t together,” she says. “We don’t want to be together.”
Before I can argue or tell her something stupid, like how she’s the only person I want to be with right now, or that I don’t think fucking her just that one time will ever be enough, she starts pacing again. Neither of those sentiments would be helpful right now.
“This is what we’re going to do. We’ll get the pill and I’ll take it and we’ll wait. We’ll just have to wait and see if I get my period in two weeks or not. Two weeks isn’t that long. We can wait two weeks and not lose our minds, right?”
I hop off the bed, grab her shoulders, and look her right in the eye. “We can wait two weeks. Two weeks is nothing. Let’s get thepill and get back so we can enjoy Christmas, okay? We’ll put all of this out of our minds until we have an answer.”
She sucks in a deep breath. “Okay. Good plan.”
Together, we go downstairs, make excuses and head out to the nearest drugstore. We get what we need and Blue takes the pill right there in the truck.
By the time we get back to the house, it’s fully dark. The house is lit up, as it is every Christmas, with a department store size inventory of colored lights and an ornately decorated Christmas tree in every front-facing window.
“Wow,” Blue says. “I didn’t get this view yesterday. Your parents really take the holiday seriously.”
It’s the first thing she’s said since she took the pill, and I jump on it as the distraction we need. “I think it’s a mixture of loving the holiday and guilt about always having to work on the actual day.”
