“I think I might have gotten a girl pregnant.”
Whatever Brett had expected, it wasn’t that. It could never have been that, not in a million years. Maybe he should have, but he just had never let himself think about any of the women that John had taken into his bed for a one night stand.
After all, why should it bother him? It had happened in the past, and from what Brett had understood, it had been long enough ago that it was hardly a threat to him. Or so he had thought. He had apparently been wrong.
“You …” Brett’s voice was weak, so he cleared his throat and tried again. “You got a girl pregnant?”
“I think so. I have to go get a paternity test.” John stopped pulling Brett’s unresisting body around, now that they were safely in the shelter of an alley which ran behind the rows of small shops. “In April. Before you and I started …” John’s voice trailed off, and Brett waited, wondering what term John would put to it, but he was disappointed. “You know.”
“Oh,” Brett whispered out the word, and he literally had no idea what to say to this man, his best friend, the man he loved. Even if they hadn’t slept together, Brett didn’t think that he would have known what words to use. Was he supposed to congratulate John? Sympathize with him? He just didn’t know what steps he was expected to take.
“Is that all you have to say?” John demanded, and Brett gave a helpless little shrug. The truth was, it was about all that he could get out just at the moment, such a huge shock to his system after already having seen John and Sidney together just a few minutes ago. The universe, it seemed, was determined to push it in Brett’s face that John wasn’t gay, wasn’t even maybe bisexual. What John was doing with Brett, Brett wasn’t sure, but it certainly wasn’t falling in love.
“What do you want me to say?” Brett finally managed. In truth, he felt sick to his stomach, and all of the exhaustion that he had felt before returned, only doubled. He really was losing John. The signs were all there. Assuming, of course, that he had ever really had him, which he was starting to think was not the case.
“I don’t know. I hoped that we could talk. Figure out what we’re going to do,” John said, and then, just when the faintest glimmer of hope was starting to be born, that maybe John still saw a future with Brett—if he ever had—John dashed it. “I mean, is there room for a baby in your house? Or am I going to have to move out? Madison doesn’t want the kid.”
Madison. The kid. Move out. There was so much in one sentence, so much to utterly destroy anything that Brett might have thought was going on, any future that they might have. John was going to have a future with a kid, probably with hordes of women, who, Brett had noticed, couldn’t seem to resist a handsome man with a baby. This would actually probably be good for John’s love life.
And maybe he would find the woman that he would settle down with and marry. Not this Madison, whoever she was, and probably not Sidney, though who knew? That would just make everything that much more amazing, to have the man he loved hook up with the woman who had definitely helped to make Brett’s life a special kind of hell with her selfishness.
“I don’t see,” Brett told him, with his voice as deliberately chilly as he could make it, “what any of it has to do with me.”
And then, before the tears could run down his cold cheeks, before Brett could utterly lose it, he pulled away from John and stepped out of the alley, head down, shoulders bowed, more defeated than he ever would have thought possible.
Christmas miracle? No. The only miracle that might happen, maybe, is that he and John might be able to retain their friendship. And he was starting to think that that particular possibility wasn’t all that strong.
