Loved Either Way, page 37
“No, go back—why, yeah, I guess, like that?” Delaney asked. “You don’t believe me?”
Delaney had done a lot of things she wasn’t proud of over the course of her lifetime. Lying to Gracen was not one of them, nor would it ever be.
“I just—”
“I made rolls, too,” came a new voice in the rear hallway of the downstairs. Malachi’s figure darkened the other side in the halo of light spilling out from the dining room attached to the kitchen. “So let it never be said that I can’t cook.”
“Let it never be said again,” Gracen added under her breath with a giggle.
“I still heard that.”
“And I totally meant for you to, babe,” she returned.
Delaney nodded at Malachi. “Could I just take a bowl and some rolls up to the apartment with me?”
“Sure,” Malachi said, giving Gracen a look before he turned the corner back into the dining room.
Gracen, on the other hand, looked hurt. “You don’t want to stay for supper tonight? It’s not because I asked if you were happy, right? I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, or anything.”
“You didn’t. And I am happy,” Delaney assured. “I don’t understand why you think I’m not, though.”
Her friend shrugged under her oversized, wool cardigan. “I mean, most times, you seem happy. Sometimes, though, I check on you throughout the day or notice when you get quiet, and I wonder if you are happy because you just don’t look like it.”
“I didn’t know I had to be mindful of my expressions when I think I’m alone,” Delaney said.
Only a little defensively.
Gracen didn’t miss it.
She cocked an eyebrow high. “Really?”
Delaney sighed. “Sorry—that was mean.”
“Yeah, you do that sometimes to protect your feelings.”
Nothing could be simple, right?
“Maybe being here makes me aware of things I don’t have,” Delaney said, focusing on the hangnail on her thumb instead of her quiet friend. “Things that I want.”
“Like,” Gracen hedged.
“A family. A home. I’m twenty-five,” Delaney said, trying to make it sound less pitiful than it did inside her head. One reason why she hated admitting the thoughts out loud. “Maybe it’s because I see you settling into this nice, little domesticated life, and a part of me thinks it’s time for those things to happen for me, too.”
“They will.”
Yeah, when?
Delaney didn’t ask that question to Gracen.
It wasn’t really for her friend to answer.
“Have you told someone else that you are looking for those things?” Gracen prodded, making it clear who she meant without actually saying his name.
“I don’t want to pressure Lucas,” Delaney admitted. “He’s got a lot going on that he’s still trying to deal with and work through. He doesn’t need me on the phone crying to him because I’m in my feelings about my friend having a baby and getting married. That’s a bit—”
“No, I meant,” Gracen interjected, stopping Delaney’s ramblings instantly, “have you told him that you want those things with him?”
“I didn’t say—”
“You don’t have to.”
Delaney scowled up at Gracen. “I hate it when you do that. Interrupt me.”
“Yeah, well, deal with it,” her friend muttered. “And stop deflecting.”
“I’m not. He does have a lot going on. Trying to stay out of the courts with his father; starting the foundation for his brother …”
Delaney trailed off with a shrug.
The Jacob Dalton Foundation came as a surprise to her—something Lucas didn’t mention until the paperwork had been filed, and the founding of the foundation was officially, official. Or, that was how he explained it to her. Meant to be a non-profit organization to help teenage boys and young men struggling with substance abuse, either in their lives or at home, through community support and programs that would give them teachable life skills along with mentors to guide them, it was still brand new.
At the beginning of something amazing.
Probably.
Lucas planned to sit in a chair for the foundation’s committee, but those things still had to be worked out and set up. Other people, interested and driven in helping the same group he was, needed to be found and placed on the committee as well.
Official just meant it existed.
A lot of hard work, and time, lay ahead yet.
“I don’t really know what the foundation means, yet,” Delaney said after a moment.
Gracen, who leaned her back against the far side of the doorjamb opposite to Delaney, asked back, “For you guys, you mean?”
“Yeah—so, will he be staying there now? Which I get it, I’d probably do that, too, but I can’t stop feeling bad that I …” Delaney took a deep breath, trusting that judgment wouldn’t come from Gracen when she admitted the truth. “I really just want him here with me.”
“And you haven’t said that to him.”
Delaney scoffed. “No, and I don’t plan to.”
“Because that serves you how, exactly?”
“Well, I don’t have to be the person who takes him away from doing something he feels like he has to do,” Delaney said. “To start with.”
“How do you know he can’t do that thing and be with you?”
“Gracen—”
“Delaney, you’re talking yourself in circles,” her friend interjected, although with kindness.
“Okay, so maybe I’m scared he’s gonna say no—that he doesn’t want those things, or that he doesn’t want them with me.”
“I can’t see that happening,” Gracen muttered.
“I guess if I don’t say anything, then I don’t have to find out, huh?”
“And that’s not realistic, so …”
There was that part about it, too.
“He told me things are better when he’s with me,” Delaney said, picking at her thumbnail again while she considered that afternoon in bed with Lucas three weeks earlier. “Maybe it’s just hard for me not to get scared when things around me are good and happy.”
“It takes a while to get beyond that,” Gracen said, shrugging when Delaney glanced her way. “A year after Malachi moved in, I still thought I would wake up one day and the other shoe would drop. He couldn’t be that perfect. He couldn’t love me that much. Sure, he made it easier on me by proving me wrong every chance he could, but … I think being the person you are, Delaney, who had to grow up really fast, and learn to take care of yourself because you didn’t have a lot of people to fall back on when you needed them the most taught you not to be so quick to depend on others. You look within to find what you want and need, or to make things happen for yourself, first before you go looking for someone else.”
“And?” Delaney asked.
Gracen reached over to tug supportively on the black apron Delaney wore while she worked. “And it’s okay to be afraid that you found someone who makes you want to tell them that what you really need is them. You gotta be brave enough to tell him as much, though, and trust that he’s not going to leave you in a situation where you’re doing it all alone.”
Delaney tried to blink the wetness forming in her eyes away, but no surprise, the tears remained until one finally rolled down her cheek. “So, hey …”
“Yeah?”
“Can I eat stew here with you guys, instead?”
Gracen crossed the three feet between them to hug Delaney so hard she squeezed the breath right out of her lungs. Her friend’s tiny swell, bouncing with her laughter, pushed against Delaney’s side as the hug dragged on.
“You don’t even have to ask, Delaney.”
Right.
So what if her biological family had left Delaney a broken person, who even as an adult, struggled to find stability and emotional support sometimes? Who knew self-dependence, even to her own detriment, could be a by-product of the way she’d been shunned and abandoned as a teen? The family she had made, and still was, counted for a lot where her biological one had failed.
“I am happy here,” she told Gracen. “I don’t regret this.”
She whispered it like a promise between them.
Gracen hugged her tighter. “I know you are, but it’s okay to say you could be happier, too.”
Delaney would work on that.
But in the meantime …
“There might be another reason why these things are on my mind today,” Delaney said.
Gracen’s brow lifted with curiosity to the way Delaney’s tone lowered enough that it wouldn’t travel to anyone else downstairs. “Oh?”
Delaney chewed on her bottom lip, trying to make the words on the tip of her tongue form, but nerves kept her quiet and still. Arms folded across her chest, she allowed herself those few seconds she needed to get over it.
“A while back, Bexley made a comment to me—I’d know the second I got pregnant because I never miss my period.”
“Delaney,” came the rushed whisper from the other side of the doorway.
Delaney squeezed her eyes shut, and hunched her shoulders up closer to her ears. “Nope, don’t do that—my period is four days late, I’d give it at least a full week before I took a test—a few days is nothing. I’m not panicking over that.”
“You look a little panicked,” Gracen returned.
Yeah, probably.
Delaney hunched her one shoulder upward, making it easier to feel like she was hiding part of her face when she told Gracen, “Except you had a test upstairs that I found over lunch. Not because I was snooping, either,” she added fast when Gracen’s side-eye slid her way.
“I had some blood when I peed, and needed a pad or tampon,” Delaney explained. “Cramps started around noon, too. But it feels just like my period. So, that’s probably—”
“Did you take a test? You found them,” Gracen pointed out. “I had what, one left of a box of three?”
Delaney’s brow pinched, the only physical show of the way Gracen’s question made her heart fall in her chest. She glanced toward Gracen, but her eyes fell to the barely noticeable bump under her friend’s loose shirt and cardigan. “How many days late were you when you took yours? I never asked before—I didn’t know if it was cool to ask about the whole pissing on a stick thing.”
Gracen laughed, but the sound died fast. “Like five days, maybe?”
The two used the same Flo tracker app to monitor their cycles. In fact, Gracen had been the one to show Delaney how to input her periods back when they were teens. The app opened up a whole new world she hadn’t known existed inside her own body—with just two or three regular periods, that app provided months of estimated data showing her future periods, days when pregnancy was more likely due to ovulation, and more. It gave her a different kind of control over her body—well, at least when it came to tracking what should happen.
“I bet your line wasn’t hard to see and kind of spotty on your first test, right?” Delaney asked.
Whatever excitement remained in Gracen’s expression died instantly. Delaney wished she had felt just as crushed but the confusion from the point she understood what was happening to when she saw the blood in her panties upstairs … she’d just not processed it yet.
“I logged the period on Flo, and the positive test,” Delaney added when Gracen’s apologetic expression bounced from her to Mimi still sipping tea under a dryer that had shut itself off. “It gave me a couple of articles about why it might be late—it’s probably like a chemical pregnancy?”
A simple internet search had made it obvious to Delaney how common those apparently were—shockingly so, considering most women who experienced them didn’t realize that’s what it was and instead thought it was an irregular period.
A fertilized egg that, for whatever reason, didn’t implant itself along the uterus lining.
“Not really sure why I took birth control for the last, like, eight years,” Delaney stressed, “for it to fuck up the one time I didn’t use condoms. That’s the universe trying to fuck with me. God, maybe.”
Her dark humor earned Delaney a soft grin from Gracen.
“Or you took it for all the other times it worked and helped those four days a month where you can get out of bed,” Gracen said.
“Okay, fair. I feel like shit,” she told her friend.
“Stew is really good for that.”
Delaney laughed, and her gaze fell to the tiled floor of the salon beyond the doorway. “I definitely need some.”
“Are you going to tell Lucas?”
“My period is four days late,” Delaney countered. “I don’t even know that’s what it is, and—”
“If there’s a line, and you can see a line on the pregnancy test, it’s positive. That’s what the instructions say,” Gracen replied with a no-nonsense tone that reminded Delaney of a mother. At least, she had that down pat.
“I know what the instructions say, Gracen.”
She tried to be snappy.
It kind of fell flat.
Delaney had, in fact, read the crumbled instruction booklet Gracen had left stuffed inside the open box that had been sitting in the bottom drawer of her bathroom vanity. Right where she might also keep pads and tampons. They had also been in the back of the drawer. Not a great variety, though.
To be fair, Gracen hadn’t needed any in over twenty-something weeks.
“I’ll probably tell him,” Delaney confirmed.
“Yeah?”
“It’d be nice to know that’s what it is,” she added.
Gracen chewed on her lower lip for a half a minute before she said, “If you think you’re having a miscarriage, that sounds Emergency Room worthy to me.”
Delaney rolled her eyes toward her friend. “Stop that—just because it costs nothing to visit the ER doesn’t mean I should because I’m bleeding a little heavy.”
“Are the cramps worse than normal?”
“They’re always bad.”
Bearably so.
Women got used to that.
Gracen pursed her lips, and then checked on Mimi once more. “Let’s get her out of there, we’re eating supper, and take a trip to town.”
“Gracen, I don’t need to go—”
“They’ll tell you. They’ll run a blood test, tell you if the hormone is there, which it is and detectable because the home test said so, and what the levels are, and if they’re too low for a viable pregnancy.”
Her brow furrowed. “How do you know—”
“At seven weeks I was convinced cramping after I hiked for three hours were because I was losing the baby—no blood, or anything, but,” Gracen trailed off, shrugging. “Malachi tried to make me relax, give it the night, you know?”
“You didn’t?”
“Nope. That’s what I pay taxes for, Delaney. I don’t use the ER like a band-aid station, and I’ve been there all of two times in the last three years. I went down on a weekday, before nine when the diagnostics department leaves for the day. A client works in the department, so I might have had some inside knowledge on that bit, though.”
Her friend checked the rose-gold watch on her wrist, and then glanced straight up at Delaney.
“It’s Thursday, and we still have time,” Gracen added.
That achy heart of Delaney’s that she had numbed through the day by going through the motions and refusing to feel jumped to life with a beat that hurt.
“You know I love you, right?” Delaney asked.
Wordlessly, Gracen pushed away from the doorjamb to catch Delaney in a hug around her neck with both arms.
“No matter what—we’re in this together,” Gracen swore against the top of Delaney’s head. “I told you that before, and I meant it.”
No matter what, and regardless of who stuck by her throughout the years, Gracen had made that promise to Delaney when they were just seventeen. To some people, broken promises like those weren’t a big deal. The fact that Gracen never broke her promise said a lot to Delaney about what it meant between the two of them.
“I know,” she mumbled into Gracen’s cardigan sleeves. “Now let me go so I can breathe.”
Sometimes, she hated being short.
Soon enough, though, Gracen released her cage-like hold.
“Come on, let’s get Mimi out from under the dryer,” she said.
Delaney nodded. “Right, yeah. Supper, then the ER. I still feel bad about that.”
Gracen shook her head, as unbothered as ever. “Yeah, don’t. You pay taxes, too.”
A louder than she expected laugh escaped Delaney. “That’s true.”
Her noise had caught the attention of someone else, though.
Raising her voice so the slightly hard-of-hearing woman across the room would hear her name called, Delaney asked, “Mimi, are you ready to take your rollers out?”
Chapter 37
The entrance of the Valleyview Hospital’s emergency department sat atop a hill overlooking the river splitting the town in half, and the mirrored windows along the front allowed patients in the waiting room a view as the clock ticked down time while people waited to be seen by the doctor on call.
Delaney hadn’t been inside the hospital for years—at least three, for sure. As her Jeep rolled to a stop in a parking spot around the back close to the rear entrance doors, her nerves decided to make an appearance in the fast beat of her fingertips rapping against the leather of her purse.
The man behind the wheel of the Jeep didn’t miss Delaney’s nervous tick.
“You good?”
Malachi’s quiet question drew Delaney’s gaze away from the rear entry door where people entered the emergency room.
“Yeah, sure,” she told him.
He arched an eyebrow higher than the other. “Nothing’s … bad, bad, right?”
Delaney wanted to laugh at Malachi’s concern, if only to ease the tension in the vehicle, because it wasn’t really needed. Except this situation wasn’t really a laughing matter, and the cramps in her lower sides had picked up substantially during the ride to town.
