“I can’t keep this baby. I’m going into law school in September, I’ve already been accepted,” she informed him, one hand resting on the taut skin of her belly. “I’m going to put her up for adoption. I thought you might want first dibs on her.”
John stared. At first, the words didn’t make any sense to him at all, swirling around in his head in a muddled mess, not seeming to make sense, not quite. Like the language she spoke was close to English, but not quite there.
And then, it sunk in, and his gaze darted up to her face. She wasn’t joking. For a moment, he had thought that she must be, but why? He had met this woman once and had apparently been so drunk that he barely remembered her.
“It’s mine?” he realized, and the blonde woman gave him an offended look.
“Believe it or not, that was an unusual night for me.” Her tone was almost prim. “A group of my friends dragged me out. But I don’t make a habit of sleeping with random losers I met at a bar.” A smirk touched her thin lips. “No offense.”
“None taken,” John said back, without irony. His fingers twitched, and he had the sudden urge to reach out and cup the swell of her stomach. “Look, I always use condoms. Even when I’m drunk. So how …?”
“They’re not one hundred percent,” she retorted sharply. “And it could have broken without either of us noticing.” She was glaring now, and it couldn’t be fun for her to hear his doubts, but at the same time she was making some rather remarkable claims, and he wanted to be sure. “Look, there’s a blood test that they can do on me to see the baby’s paternity. But you have to buy in.”
“Fine,” John replied. He did need to know. If there was even a chance that he could have a baby, he wasn’t going to just ignore that. “We’ll go tomorrow if that works.”
She nodded, collected her coat again, and turned to leave. John reached out, hesitating only briefly before touching her shoulder. It still felt a bit surreal, the whole thing, but he had to do what was right.
“Give me your number,” he requested. “You can have mine, too. I know you probably want nothing to do with me, but just in case we need to touch base. It’ll be easier if we can just text.”
They exchanged phones, and John input his name and number in her phone, while she did the same in his. He couldn’t help but glance down curiously since he hadn’t remembered her name before, and he gave a bit of a smirk when he saw it.
“Madison? Is that your real name?” he asked, and she shot him a dirty look that spoke more clearly than words could. Madison. It suited her. The rich, smart young lady, probably from a good family, who didn’t want her life destroyed by one bad decision.
“I’ll be in touch with a time to go get the test done,” Madison told him, and then she was gone, walked right out of the door and disappeared just as fast as she had appeared in his life.
A baby. There was a baby, and the baby might be his. She said it was, and John hadn’t gotten any sense that she was lying. She probably was a sorority girl who had, as she put it, gotten drunk and hooked up with some loser.
Now that she was gone, he found himself wondering a few things. Like how she had found him. If he remembered correctly, and that was a big if, he had brought her back to his crappy old place. And if she thought he was such a loser, why was she willing to potentially leave her kid with him?
All of that faded away, though. He would ask her tomorrow. At the moment, he was a little bit more worried about what Brett would say about all of this. Brett, who had given such a lukewarm response to the idea of marriage and kids.
He was going to find out.
Brett was supposed to be off work now, but John had learned already how that went. It was a very rare day when Brett actually got off when he was supposed to, and John couldn’t wait. He needed to figure out how his lover, or whatever Brett was to him now, thought about all of this.
So he would go and drag Brett out of the office if he had to.
This was the biggest thing that had happened to him in a long time, perhaps ever, and he wanted to share it with his best friend. So he grabbed his own winter gear and headed out, still trying to make sense of all of this.
