“Pip.”His pacing stopped.“It’s Jimmy Kincaid. Send over a half’n’half… yeah, me and Izzy. No, at Bobby’s place… thanks.”Hanging up, he walked to the fridge and snatched a beer. With an impatient huff, he stormed back toward the living room.
There’s a reason why we were always best friends. The very same reason he had to save me a billion times when we were kids; not because I’m a klutz or dumb, but because I’m curious.
Not once in my life have I minded my own business as far as he’s concerned. So naturally, I followed him into the hall.“Where are you going?”
“Shower. My wallet’s on the counter if the pizza gets here before I’m back out. Pay for it. Don’t eat all the bread. I want some.”
And with that, he was gone.
To shower.
To be naked.
In the same house as me.
Instead of following him upstairs and dropping my fat girl jeans at the door like I wished I could – the fear of rejection was strong – I huffed and went back to the living room to wait.
I sat on the comfortably worn-in couch and stared at my almost empty tub of ice-cream until eventually, Jimmy came back downstairs in a pair of Bobby’s sweat pants.
That was it.
As in, he was half naked.
I’ve been looking at Jimmy since I was too young to know what the flutters in my belly meant. But in all these years, I’ve never openly ogled him. We’re supposed to be family. Brother and sister. Best friends.
Not oglers.
And yet, there I was.
He stopped in front of me with a shirt in his hands and a soft smile on his face.
We didn’t speak. I didn’t cry. We simply stared at everything our lives were supposed to be, and Bean sat between us, proving that the original plan would be no more.
Eventually, the doorbell rang, Jim put his shirt on, he threw money at Pip’s son, and he brought pizza and bread back to the couch.
“Alright, Bubs. It’s time to fix this.”
There was nothing to fix. I was edging toward the second trimester in a pregnancy that was never supposed to happen, but a pregnancy I would never terminate.
“We’re best friends. Always were. Always will be,”he continued.“I’m not gonna go along with this radio silence shit anymore. So, we have to fix this.”
I shrugged and played with my nails.“I don’t see how we can. I broke us, but I won’t change what happened.”
Like I’d hit him, his head snapped back.“You wouldn’t change it? You’d still date Ben if you had a do-over?”
“I won’t abort my baby, Jim. I won’t undo him. If I could erase Ben, I would. But I won’t erase my baby. So yeah, whatever all that means. I broke us. I can’t make it better, so you can go if you want. Go back to your house. I’m fine here alone.”
His jaw ticked dangerously as he watched me over cooling pizza.“I won’t lose you over this, Bubs. We can still be friends. Like always.”
“Friends. Yeah.”
We didn’t actually fix anything that night, but we did eat pizza and pretend everything was okay. Then we did it again the next night. And the night after that. A week in, we stopped with the awkward silences each morning that I came downstairs to find Jimmy asleep on the couch. By the end of the month, except for the glaringly obvious belly growing between us, it was like we were the old us again.
Unavailable, a little tense, but we were able to smile while in the same room again.
It all looked so ideal on the outside. Surface friends. Smiles. Jokes. Happiness.
But I was still in love with my best friend. And every day that my belly grew, my shame grew with it.Look what I’d done to us. Look what I’d ruined.