“Yes.”
His eyes flared. “You cannot be okay. You just lost the baby, Stephanie. I mean, come the fuck on. You’re human. You’re not—”
“I’m okay.” My heart was pounding. “What do you want to talk about?”
Shaking his head, he started to walk toward the table—to his helmet. He was leaving, and panic took root in the pit of my stomach. I stepped in front of him. “Why won’t you tell me what you want to say?”
“Why?” The hollows of his cheeks flushed. “Because I’m trying to be a decent human being right now, Stephanie. I’m not trying to dump more shit on your head when you don’t need it right now. I’m—”
“What?” I snapped, frustration and confusion swirling in me until it turned into bitter-edged anger. “You’re what?”
“I’m pissed! I’m fucking disappointed,” he shot back, and I flinched. “How could you deal with that by yourself?” He stepped toward me, his hands closing at his sides. “How could you not think that I would’ve—I would’ve fucking dropped everything to be there. I mean, did you even think of me when this was happening? Did it even cross your damn mind that I would want to be there for you? For myself?”
My mouth opened but there were no words. “I . . . didn’t think when I started having the pains. I drove myself to the hospital and I—”
“I get that. Okay? I can understand that part, but you wait until today to ask me to come over via fucking text message, are you kidding— Okay.” He drew himself up straight, drawing in a deep breath as his entire body tensed. “I’m doing this right now. You don’t need this,” he said, stepping around me. “I don’t need to do this right now. Okay? I need to clear my head. You need to clear your head.”
I folded my arms across my waist. “I’m sorry.”
Nick spun on me. “Stop apologizing, Stephanie. What happened isn’t your fault.” He reached out, but my body had a mind of its own. It recoiled from his words, because how could this not be my fault? His hands touched air, and the skin around his lips whitened. “What the—”
“Please just leave,” I whispered. “Please. Just go.”
“Steph—”
“Please.” My control stretched, thinning, and then it just . . . it just snapped. “Why are you still here?”
Nick stopped moving. He might have stopped breathing, and for a long, tense moment there was nothing but silence. I closed my eyes, hearing the helmet scrapping off the table, and a heartbeat later the front door slammed shut.
Chapter 28
Nick had walked out, not on me, I would discover, but had simply left the apartment. He’d called Roxy and remained in the parking lot until she showed up some fifteen minutes later.
I knew this because when she knocked on my door, I heard his motorcycle roar to life.
Roxy stepped in before I had a chance to say one word. “I know what’s happened, and Nick doesn’t want you to be by yourself right now. You shouldn’t be by yourself right now.”
“I’m—”
“Yeah. You’re fine. He said you kept saying that.” Roxy shrugged off her jacket. “You might as well go ahead and close that door, because I’m not leaving.”
There was a huge part of me that wanted to tell her to leave, but I was suddenly too tired to argue. Exhausted to the bone, I closed the door and then walked past her, to the couch. Sitting down, I picked up the quilt and dragged it over me, tucking it under my chin.
Roxy draped her coat over the back of the kitchen chair and made her way over. She didn’t speak as she sat on the other side of the couch, and I didn’t look at her. I stared at the TV screen, not really seeing it.
“I want to hug you right now,” she said, and the muscles all along my spine stiffened. “But you look like you might punch me if I did.”
I shook my head slowly. I wasn’t sure if I was agreeing or not.
She exhaled softly. “I don’t know what to say, Steph, other than I’m so, so sorry.”
Closing my eyes against the burn, I gripped the edges of the blanket. My stomach cramped and it was painful, but in a way, it was no match to the complete and utter devastation I felt. “I don’t get it,” I said after a moment.
“Get what?” she asked quietly.
I really didn’t know where I was going with any of this, but my tongue was moving and words were becoming attached to the pain bubbling up inside me. “I don’t get why it hurts so much. It’s not like I was even that far along, you know? I haven’t even told my boss yet. Maybe I shouldn’t have told anyone. I mean, I was just entering my second trimester.” A sharp slice of pain cut through me. “Actually, I probably wasn’t even close. The doctor at the hospital said that the ba—said that it probably stopped developing a week or more ago.”
And now that I’d said it out loud, things started to make sense. The exhaustion that I felt. The loss of whatever weight I had gained. “There had been signs,” I told her. I was starting to see white spots behind my closed eyelids. “Signs that I was losing . . . it, and I didn’t pay attention to them. I thought they were normal.”
“How would you know? You couldn’t,” Roxy argued. “And I know that miscarrying is common, Steph. It happens, and no one is to blame for it.”
No one was to blame? I wasn’t so sure. Maybe I hadn’t taken the pregnancy seriously. I know I missed taking the prenatal vitamins once. My diet could’ve been way healthier. And what if the baby hadn’t stopped developing, and if I paid attention to the pain last night instead of going to bed, could this miscarriage have been prevented?