He sat in his car, silently watching and waiting. He didn’t know what he was hoping to see, or how he would feel when he finally saw it. All he wanted was to know if the rumors were true.
The radio played softly in the background as he continued to sit, fingers tapping on the dashboard and heart pounding beneath his chest. His breath caught in his throat as he saw the black Chevrolet pull into her driveway. It seemed like hours had passed before it happened, but there it finally was.
It wasn’t long before she emerged from the car, looking exactly how he remembered her. Her long sheet of light brown hair glistened in the sun as another figure emerged from the other side of the car. Laughing at something the other woman said, she went around to the back door of the car and opened it.
The moment he saw them he knew that it was true. A boy and a girl, they couldn’t be more than a few months old, but it was pretty clear who the parents were. They had his dark hair and her cloudy green eyes. In mere seconds he was out of the car and striding towards her, the rate of his heart beat increasing quickly.
She looked surprised to see him, as he expected she would be, but remained calm, balancing her daughter on her hip and gazing out at him from behind her sunglasses.
“Hi,” he greeted her shortly.
“Hi,” she replied similarly, avoiding eye contact.
“I got you pregnant,” he observed, glancing from her and the girl to the other woman, who was holding the boy.
“Yeah.” She nodded slightly as she adjusted the weight of the infant on her hip.
“You didn’t tell me.” A small amount of anger seeped into his voice, but mostly he was just shocked. Even after Jessica had told him he hadn’t really believed it. Now it was beginning to sink in.
“I know,” she confirmed with a sigh. Leaning down, she sat her daughter in the stroller that stood on the sidewalk and turned to her friend. “Kelly, would you take the kids inside please?”
The blonde nodded and rolled the stroller towards the house, glancing back furtively at the two people left standing in the driveway.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I barely know you. What was I supposed to do? Call you up and say ‘Hey, I know we aren’t exactly friends or lovers or anything, but guess what? I’m about to have your baby! Two of them actually.’” She shook her head.
“You should have told me.” He couldn’t deny that any of what she’d just said was true, but he still felt he’d had the right to know. If he hadn’t run into Jessica a few days earlier, he may have never known he had a pair of twins running around.
“Maybe I should have.” She shrugged. “But I did what I thought was the best at the time.”
Silence fell between them. The only sound was the leaves on the trees rustling as the wind rushed through them. She pursed her lips together and folded her arms across her chest as he stood trying to wrap his mind around what was happening. Finally he spoke.
“What are their names?”
“Aaron and Katy. Well, Katelyn, but I never call her that.”
He nodded. “Nice names.”
“Thanks.” She glanced around uncomfortably, not even realizing that she was holding her breath as she waited to hear what he would say next. It seemed like ages before he let a breath of his own and spoke again.
“I want to be here for them, okay? And you. Is that okay?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I guess. If that’s what you want.”
“It is.”
She paused. “Do you want to come in?” she inquired awkwardly. Somehow it had stopped occurring to her in the last few months that she would actually have to deal with the father of her children. She almost didn’t know how to act.
He nodded uncertainly.
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