She frowned, looking thoughtful. “You know, that doesn’t exactly answer my question, but… Angela, could you be pregnant?”
I jerked at her question and stared at her with wide eyes because that came out of nowhere. “What? What makes you think that?”
“I don’t know, maybe because I’ve never known you to get emotional over anything? Like when you decided to leave Stuart, for example, I don’t think I saw you cry even once. Not even when… we all turned our backs on you. Also, you realize you ordered tea, right? I’ve never known you to take anything besides coffee. You used to say you hate tea because it reminded you too much of your mom.”
I looked at the mug in front of me. “I could have just had a change in preference…”
She snorted. “After more than a decade? Somehow, I don’t think so. Didn’t you say you met a guy, and you’re getting emotional? It could be your hormones. It was like that for me when I got pregnant.”
I nibbled on my lip, starting to feel a little worried.
“If that’s true, then my situation is even worse. Casey, the guy I was with, is one of my students. He’s practically a kid!”
Her blue eyes widened with amused, but shocked, interest. “Wow, Angela. I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“That isn’t the problem here,” I moaned out with misery, a nervous hand at my throat. “And anyway, I had PCOS. It’s always been hard for me to get pregnant. I think things between Stuart and me spiraled when we learned that. Besides, I was only with Ben for a couple weeks. I can't be pregnant, right?”
She shrugged, the amusement gone now, replaced with concern. “It only takes the one time. There’s only one way for you to find out. Let me know when you know for sure and I’ll come to see you later.”
We finished up with our drinks and went our separate ways. I had a lot of free time, but she had work to get back to. The moment I walked out of the café, I went looking for a pharmacy. I was worried about what I would find, but this wasn’t the kind of thing I could afford to waste time on.
There was one not too far from the hotel, and after buying the pregnancy test, I hurried back. In the hotel room, I did the test, and it was a long few minutes before I got the results.
Two small pink lines declared the test was positive. I was pregnant. I felt like crying again and dropped lifelessly onto the bed. It wasn’t until Casey mentioned it, but I realized I’d been crying a lot more recently when the last time I remembered crying was at Mom’s funeral. So, it was the pregnancy.
What was I going to do?Chapter Twenty-One
BenI stared at my phone, feeling both annoyed and frustrated. Angela wasn’t answering my calls, and when I texted, all she said was that she was away and didn’t know when she would be coming back.
Fuck!
My restless mind thought back to that last time I saw her in her apartment. Maybe I’d gone too far, making a spare key without her permission and letting myself into her home when she wasn’t there. She had been acting strange, though. I didn’t think it was all in my head that she was ignoring me, and it was unlike her to blow up at me the way she did just because I was reading her book without permission.
I didn’t think it was enough to warrant her being so mad at me, though. Something must have happened before she came home to make her suddenly want to back away from me. She’d been so happy when she left the hotel that weekend, everything was still okay, so something else must have happened.
The most frustrating thing was there was no way for me to find out what the problem was when she wouldn’t talk to me. Fuck, she’d already left school grounds, and I had no idea where she was because she wouldn’t tell me! She had the GPS on her phone off, and while there were other ways to track her down, I was trying to hold myself back. It would be bad if I made her even more angry at me. She might not come back at all if that happened. She’d left LA because of her ex, hadn’t she? There was nothing to stop her from leaving again.
“Dude, what’s been going on with you?”
I blinked and looked up. “What?”
“Class ended already, and we’ve got swim practice after this. Are you coming or what?”
“Um, can you tell the coach I won't be able to make it? I need to do something.”
My friends looked at me oddly as I got up and headed out of the room. Spring break had ended already and we’d all gone back to classes. Angela had been out for a while, and she hadn't come back after spring break, so I was starting to grow worried. I went to her office, and found the substitute that took over her classes while she was gone.