CHAPTER8
ZEKE
The joke bringsa genuine laugh from her, but I’m reeling. It’s a damn storm I can’t sort out.
MS. That’s serious and shit. Or is it?
I jam my fingers into my hair, then grab the hood of my sweater and flip it up.
Questions pile up in my mind faster than I can organize them as the lack of knowledge I have on MS becomes apparent. Then there’s the fact that this beautiful woman carrying a baby that I helped her make has a dirty mouth. Her mind is on fucking, and it sends me in all sorts of directions I cannot go.
Jess fills my mind, and I stand abruptly, needing to go to her—to talk to her. It’s going to eat me alive if I don’t. I have no clue what to say or what we’ll do. I need to tell her everything before she hears it anywhere else.
But this is Raston. I’ll be surprised if she hasn’t already heard.
Standing in the middle of my brother’s apartment, it’s clear that I can’t let Nova leave. We have so much to discuss and decide, and to do that, I need to make sure Jess is aware of where I’ll be focusing my energy.
A burst of nerves rolls through my stomach. If there were any way to avoid all of this, I’d have come up with it by now. If finding excuses to duck out of emotional conversations was taught in school, it would have been the only class I ever passed.
“Are you okay to stay here?” There’s nothing confident about me right now—my tone, posture, and thoughts. I scramble to straighten myself out, to wipe the expression off my face. “I kind of need you to, now.”
“Why?” Nova says with a challenging smirk and a sparkle in her blue eyes.
She’s got me cornered, and the racing in my chest is proof. I feel the same as I did when I went bungy jumping in the canyon with Skiz. Mind racing, lungs pumping, terror zipping along my nerves.
“With the MS and the winter thing, and the van and the baby and the…” I’m babbling like an ass. I grasp at any reason I can find to keep her on this couch.
“Are you worried about me?” she asks, lips quirked with the smug satisfaction that she can read me like a damn book. I want to touch her face, cup her cheek in my palm because I know how perfectly it fits there.
Jess.Jess.Jess. I crush my eyes shut for a moment, then refocus on Nova.
“No. I mean, yeah. Of course. Yeah, I’m worried. I want you to be okay. I want…” I stare at her stomach. “I want you both to be okay.”
I clear my throat, the feeling of vomit burning the back of my tongue. She reaches for my hand, and it flips my emergency off-switch because suddenly, I’m calm.
Nova tugs on me, and I help her stand, the smell of her shampoo reaching my senses, making my mind hazy again. “Thank you, Zeke. I wasn’t sure how this was going to go. I appreciate how amazingly understanding you’re being. I was scared to come here. To tell you.”
The vulnerability in her eyes and her trembling hand in mine help centre me. A sense of pride swells through me. For the first time in maybe my entire life, I did it right. I didn’t fuck it up.
Not yet, anyway.
“I’m trying so hard.” It’s a desperate response and the only one I have. I swallow the instinct to run, to hide in my fear, and let it whisper to me that it’s only a matter of time. I’ll mess this up because I always do.
“I can tell. And yes, I’ll stay here for a bit. It will take some time for us to figure out how to manage this. We have a lot of decisions to make. I know what’s it’s like to be stuck in the middle of toxic parent relationships, and I don’t want that for our baby.”
The words kick the floor out from under me with the force of them:our baby. I’m not sure if I’ll have a heart attack every time someone says it, but it can’t be good for my health for my chest to pound like this.
A parent. I’m going to be a parent. The reality of it swirls around me, hammering me with memories of my family. Xan was my parent. Gord is a parent. The people who made me, though? They’ve never felt like parents at all. We spend more time taking care of Mom and bailing Jason out of trouble than they’ve ever spent caring for us.
“My parents are shit, too. We can do better.” In my case, it won’t take much to be better.
“I want us to be friends,” Nova says, and I try to ignore the pang of disappointment at the wordfriends.
Her hand in mine is comfortable, but then Jess pushes to the front of my mind. I drop Nova’s hand like it’s on fire.
“I have to go talk to my girlfriend.” I stretch my fingers out to shake the sensation of Nova’s skin on mine. She quickly crosses her arms, her cheeks flushed with shame. We both feel guilty about Jess, but I’m not sure that makes it any better. “You’re good here? Do you need anything?”
“I need my van. I have a cat, and he’s going to be pissed I’m not back. Can you grab it for me?” She weaves around me.