I could feel Will watching me, and I had no idea what I was going to say. How I was going to explain Eddie showing up.
“Aud?” His worried voice and his hand on my shoulder made me turn around.
“What’s wrong? Did your mom call?” I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t find my voice. I’d lost it somewhere.
“Seriously, you have to talk to me. I know you have some shitty stuff in your past, but you can trust me. You know you can trust me. I’m not going anywhere. Even if you try to break up with me, I’m always going to be there for you. No matter what. I’m your friend first. So talk to me.” He’d begged me so many times to trust him, to tell him, to talk to him.
I just . . . I couldn’t.
“I need to sit.” Will walked me a few steps backward and I collapsed on the bench. Ruined. This whole thing was ruined, and I’d been the one to ruin it.
Will rubbed my back in circles as the noise of other people hitting fake home runs and celebrating echoed around us.
I took off the batting helmet and rested my head in my hands. I’d cried earlier when Will had surprised me, but now I couldn’t.
“I fucked up, Will. I fucked everything up. Why did you have to fall for me?” I’d asked myself that so many times.
“It’s okay. Whatever it is. Remember how cool I was with the whole Eddie thing? I’ve told you. Whatever it is, I can take it.”
I always thought his words would break my heart, but somehow it still beat in my chest. The traitor.
“I just want you to be happy,” he said.
“I know you do.”
He sat with me as I breathed in and out and tried to figure how I’d made such a mess of everything. I’d tried to do what I thought was right, but it had been very, very wrong.
“Audrey?” Eddie’s voice hit me light a lightning bolt. I stood without intending to and walked toward him, completely ignoring Will.
Eddie already had tears streaming down his face and my traitorous heart stopped completely.
He reached for my hands when I got to him.
“I’m a match. I’m a match.”
I fell into his arms and finally, finally broke.
What. The. Fuck?!? She’d run to him like he was her long lost love, returning from the dead. It was almost like a movie, minus the soundtrack and the slow motion.
I just watched as he said something to her and she threw herself on him and started crying. He cried. They cried together.
Obviously, there was much more to this story than the two of them sleeping together once. Was this what Aud said she’d screwed up?
Was she—? Were they—?
I stood and watched, unable to move, unable to go toward them and confirm the fears that had worked their way into my mind.
No, it couldn’t be true. She wouldn’t cheat on me. It wasn’t possible. No, no, no.
I waited for hours or minutes. I wasn’t sure which. It felt like both.
I watched as Eddie brushed the tears from her eyes and held her close, rubbing her back.
I watched as she held onto him as if she was lost in the ocean and he was her life preserver.
I watched as girl I loved shared a moment with someone who wasn’t me.
Every time I heard the sound of a bat meet a ball in the cages around me, I pictured one of those bats hitting my heart and smashing it. Over. And over.
Audrey finally moved away from Eddie and looked over her shoulder, searching. She found my eyes and I waited.
She said something to Eddie and he let go of her. As she walked toward me, I wondered what she would say. How she would tell me. And how I would survive it.
“I . . . I have something to tell you,” she said, wiping her eyes again.
“Yes. You do.”
He was a match. The words kept repeating over in my head constantly. Eddie was a match and Emily was going to be okay. They’d already set up an appointment for him to take some further tests before the donation could go forward, but everything was in motion.
She was going to live. My daughter was going to live and everything was going to be okay. After Eddie and I cried and he told me everything that was going to happen, I realized that I’d completely abandoned Will and he had no idea what was going on.
I turned around to find him and when I met his eyes, I realized what this looked like. I’d just been upset about screwing something up and here I was, running and hugging and crying on a boy I’d told him I’d slept with.
Shitfuck. The hurt in his eyes was palpable as I walked toward him. I had to tell him what was going on so he didn’t get the wrong idea. I wished I wasn’t the idiot who put it there.
“I . . . I have something to tell you.” A lot of somethings.
“Yes. You do.” His voice was tight, and his jaw clenched so hard that I wondered if he was going to damage his teeth.
“We should go somewhere else. Somewhere quiet,” I said. The noises were starting to grate on my nerves.
“So you can tell me that you’ve been cheating on me with this asshole?” He threw his arm out and gestured to Eddie. Great. Now I was hurting both of them.
“I didn’t cheat on you, Will. The truth is a lot more complicated.”
Will laughed darkly.
“Yeah, whatever, Audrey. It’s really obvious what’s going on here.” He started to walk away, but I grabbed his arm to stop him.
“Just let me explain,” I said, as he kept walking, dragging me along.
“I don’t want to hear it,” he said, still walking.
“Eddie got me pregnant in high school. I had the baby and gave her to my aunt to raise but I never told him about her and now she needs a bone marrow transplant and we just found out Eddie is a match.” There was no easier way to say it. A guy passing by stared at me and then turned and whispered to his friend.
Will stopped walking and faced me slowly, his eyes wide in shock. He opened his mouth to say something, but no words came out. I’d never seen him speechless before.
“W-what?” he finally stammered.
“Please, let me take you somewhere so I can explain. Please.”
He just nodded.
“Okay, wait here.” I put my hands up so he wouldn’t go anywhere and I went and grabbed our things, including the truck keys and then took his arm and started walking toward the door.
Eddie also opened his mouth to say something as we walked by him, but I shook my head. I’d call him later and we could talk.
I got Will out to the truck and shoved him in with the balloons. His eyes were still wide and he seemed to be broken. I knew what that was like.
“You’re going to be okay. I’m just going to drive us back to school and we’ll talk. Okay?” He didn’t respond.
“Will?”
“Uh-huh.” Finally, a response. That was something. I turned the truck on and gunned it out of the lot, driving as fast as I could without breaking any major laws. I got us back to campus and parked in the lot near the dorms. Will hadn’t said anything as we’d driven back, but he was blinking and breathing, so I had hope that he’d snap out of it soon.
He got out of the truck on his own, and leaned on the door and looked at the sidewalk.
“You have a baby?”
“Yes. A daughter.”
He nodded and thought about that for a second.
“That’s what your scar is, isn’t it?” He’d finally put two and two together. I always wondered if he would. But what college guy would be familiar with a C-section scar?
“Yes. She was breech, so I couldn’t have her naturally.” Looked like we weren’t going to make it back to my room. We were going to be doing this right here.
“How old is . . .”
“She. Her name is Emily. She’s sixteen months old. A year and a half.” He made a choking noise and coughed a few times.
“Choked on my own spit. Holy shit, Aud. Holy fucking shit. Holy shitfuck.”
“I know. It’s hard for me to believe and I lived through it. So
metimes I still wonder if it was real and then I look down and see the scar and I remember. Come on upstairs with me and I’ll tell you the whole story. Whatever you want to know.”
He peeled himself off the truck and met my eyes.
“This was what you were hiding from me?”
“Yes.”
“Why would you hide this from me?”
Now I was the one who had trouble with words.
“I don’t know, Will. There were a lot of reasons. I wanted to forget about it. Thinking about giving her up was so painful, still is, that I just wanted to pretend that it didn’t happen. And then I didn’t know how to tell you and then I got it in my head that you wouldn’t be able to deal with it and then she got sick and everything got so twisted and tangled up and I couldn’t see my way out. And now here we are.”
He nodded again and walked toward me.
“I want to know. I want to know everything.”
“Okay,” I said.
Daughter. The word exploded in my head like a bomb. Audrey had a daughter. She’d had a daughter. She was a mother.
Of all the things I’d thought she could be hiding from me, this had never crossed my radar. But now that I knew, I felt like an idiot. How could I not have considered that her scar could have been from having a baby? I mean, I wasn’t that bad at science, and I was fucking taking anatomy right now.
She walked with me back up to her room and I tried to organize my thoughts. She’d given me a lot of information all at once and I didn’t know if my brain could process it, or if it would overload and break down.
I’d gone from thinking that my girlfriend was cheating on me to finding out she’d had a kid I didn’t know about and had been hiding her from me. I didn’t know which question I should ask first. So I asked them all at once, but they came out like gibberish.
“Daughter? How can you have a daughter? Did your parents know? Why did you give her up? Why did you decide to have her? Is Eddie the father? You said she was sick? Why did you hide her from me? Did you think I would leave you? Why?”
“Whoa, Will. Slow down.” She unlocked her door and let me in. I collapsed on her bed, unable to stand and think at the same time.
“I’ll answer everything, just not all at once. How about if I just tell you what happened and then we can have a question session after?” She sat next to me and I realized how tired she looked. She’d used makeup to cover the dark circles under her eyes. I should have noticed.
“The part about me cheating on my boyfriend with Eddie was true. I just didn’t tell you the part where we didn’t use protection and then I got pregnant. At first, I thought about not having the baby, but then I really thought about it and I couldn’t imagine not having her. But I also knew I couldn’t keep her. It was . . . it was a bad time. And then my parents found out and totally freaked. We had a huge fight about it. They told me there was no way was I taking the easy way out and having an abortion, which almost made me want to get one anyway, even though I’d already decided to keep her. Their plan was to force me to marry my current boyfriend and move into the basement, but I couldn’t do that. So I talked to my aunt, because we’d been close. She told me that she’d take her, and that’s what I agreed to do. My parents basically stopped talking to me at that point and I was pretty much on my own. I thought about telling Eddie, but then I didn’t. Looking back, maybe I should have. He’d said he might not have been able to handle it, but I think he would have.”
Will stared intently at me as I talked. I’d never told anyone this story before. I’d had Maria around when I’d told Eddie about everything and she’d been able to take over the narrative.
I continued my story, and a few times it felt like I was talking about someone else’s life. Not my own.
When I got to the part about Emily getting sick and Maria calling me the, words started coming out so fast, I could barely breathe between them. The relief in explaining everything to Will was so sudden and so extreme that I almost started laughing. And crying. I wanted to do both.
Finally I got to the part about Eddie being a match for her and I broke down again, but this time Will held me. I got the rest of the story out, and then it was finally over.
I’d told him. He knew the truth and now I had no more secrets. I was naked and bare and vulnerable.
“I’m so sorry for lying to you, Will. I don’t know what I was thinking. It was such a stupid idea and then it got out of my control and I didn’t know what to do.”
“It’s okay.” I looked up at him from where I’d had my face buried into his chest.
“What?”
“It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. I love you. I told you, it doesn’t matter.”
“But it does. I don’t want you to say you’re okay with this now and then always wonder if I’m hiding something from you again. I don’t ever want you to throw this in my face when we have a fight. I can’t live that way.” I couldn’t.
He shook his head back and forth, his hair whipping around.
“That’s not going to happen. Do you know how relieved I am that you weren’t cheating on me? That this was the thing you were hiding from me? This I can get over. I mean, I’d find away to get over you cheating on me. It would probably take some time, and probably a lot of sexual favors, but I’d do my best. But this? You having a daughter and giving her up so she could have a better life? How on earth could I hate you for that? It’s just crazy for me to imagine you would have thought that I wouldn’t be okay with that. Is that how you see me?”
No, it wasn’t. It had been my own insecurities that had prevented me from telling him.
“It’s my fault. I hated lying to you and I thought about telling you, but then I was afraid you’d get mad at me for not telling you and I was just so afraid of rocking the boat, or having something change. We were doing so well and I didn’t want it to change.”
He kissed my forehead.
“It’s going to be okay now. Everything is going to be okay.” I was out of words for the moment, so I just let him hold me.
“I’m sorry for ruining Sex Partner Appreciation Day,” I said as I lay on Will’s chest and listened to his heart. I had a headache from crying and my mouth was dry, but I didn’t want to move from my current position.
“You didn’t ruin it. Things got a little complicated, but that’s life. I’m just sitting here and trying to imagine you with a daughter. It’s kind of crazy to think about.”
“Well, she’s not my daughter, really. I mean, she’ll know who I am and I plan on seeing her grow up, but Maria is her mom.”
“I bet she looks like you.” He shifted and ran my hair through his fingers. “I hope she gets your hair.”
“I have a picture of her. Do you want to see it?” He smiled and nodded and I went to get the album from the drawer in my dresser. I’d been so afraid of him finding it just a few hours ago, and now I was showing it to him. Things changed fast sometimes.
“Oh my God, she’s gorgeous, Aud.” Will stared at the pictures of Emily. She was smiling in nearly every one.
“She’s walking and talking. She calls me A-wee.”
“That is so cute,” he said, flipping the pages and laughing at the one of her at her first birthday, her face smeared with frosting.
He sighed and the happiness fell from his face.
“What is it?” He shook his head and just kept going through the album.
“No, tell me.” I pulled the album away from him so he’d have to look me in the face.
“It’s weird, okay? I just . . . I just wish that I’d been there. That I’d somehow met you in high school and that she’d been our daughter. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but she’s a part of you and I want to be a part of her, too.” His face was red with his confession.
“It’s stupid,” he muttered under his breath.
“No, it’s not stupid. I understand what you mean.”
“I’m not saying I want to have a kid. Like, definitely not right now. I don
’t even have a job. I’d definitely have to get a job.” Shit, even thinking about how much money it would require to take care of a child made my head hurt.
“It’s okay, Will, we’re not going to have a baby right now. I’ve made sure of that.” We didn’t use condoms every time we had sex anymore, but I knew she was on the pill now, so I’d never worried that much about pregnancy. I guess I should have, though.
“But if it did happen, I’d be there for you. You know that, right?” He held my face and the intensity in his eyes was palpable.
“I know you would. And I think Eddie would have too. I just freaked out and tried to make the best decisions I could on my own. I couldn’t ask my parents for help and I didn’t know who else to talk to.” But now I had him, and soon I’d probably have Lottie and Zan and the rest.
“Since all this happened, I’ve been talking to Maria a lot. It’s nice to have someone in my family that doesn’t think I’ve ruined my life.”
He laughed, even though it wasn’t funny at all. “Your parents are fucking crazy.”
“Amen,” I said.
“Can I meet her? I mean, not right now. But I’d like to meet her someday. If that’s okay.” He stumbled over his words.
I couldn’t help but smile.
“I’d love for you to meet her. She’d fall in love with you. Like I did.” I had no doubt she’d adore him.
“And I’d fall in love with her. I love every part of you, and she’s a huge part. I love her already.”
I had no idea he’d take it as well as he did. But that was Will. He took everything that I could throw at him, no hesitation. That was how he looked at life, though. It was so different from how I lived.
Once we’d covered all the Emily ground, I realized I still hadn’t finished giving him his presents.
“So, should we try and salvage Sex Partner Appreciation Day?” I said. Will’s eyes fluttered open.