Just as I turned around from hanging up the phone, I was faced with Justin again. He’d followed me into this room. And before he could say anything I said, "I know that Coral was the one that told you I’m pregnant…"
"What?!" Justin’s face erupted in shock. The "Duh, stupid, of course he didn't know!" moment was so strong, I could’ve slapped myself for telling on myself like that. "You’re pregnant?"
I nodded; figuring there was no reason to lie now.
Several moments passed with nothing but Justin pacing and silently cursing. "How far along are you?"
"Three months."
"Three months? And you didn’t tell me?!"
I didn’t say anything, figuring I should put the shovel down for awhile…there would be plenty of time to finish digging my grave later.
"It is mine, isn’t it?"
My guilt faded as anger and insult raced to replace it. I could have slapped him. He must have seen that in my face, because the next thing he said was, "I’m sorry. I don’t know why I asked that."
"Why didn’t you tell me?" He asked, his voice sounding like I had slapped him.
Thankfully I had lost the shovel for the time being so instead I just simply shrugged.
"If I hadn’t come here tonight…would you have told me?"
A few beats passed, before I finally whispered, "I don’t know."
I watched as a thousand emotions raced across his face, the dominate ones being disappointment and anger. He walked toward me, falling to a crouched position in front of where I sat. I felt myself cringe when he lifted my top up, exposing my swollen midsection. He ran his fingers lightly over and around my belly button; his eyes completely focused on my stomach. He laid both of his hands flat against my belly, he didn’t move for awhile…and I soon realized what he was waiting for. Taking his hands, I guided them to the spot where I often held my stomach, a few seconds passed before the baby responded with its usual strong and powerful kicks. I watched Justin’s face as the baby continued to kick a few more times. His face lit up like a Christmas tree blinking a different kind of happiness, one that I’d never seen from him before. Happiness that I’d love to always see from him. And suddenly I felt selfish for thinking about keeping this from him.
I let go of his hands, allowing him full run of my stomach again. And it wasn’t long before his fingers again began to play in their newfound playground. I realized that I’d gotten comfortable with his hands on my belly---even come to enjoy it---when he pulled away from me. Standing up again, he watched me…looking from my face to my stomach and back again.
He shook his head and sighed. Still not saying a word.
"Justin…" I finally said, but the hand he threw up silenced me again.
He exhaled audibly again, his hands running through his curls. Immediately my fingers ached to be tangled in those curls again. He turned his back to me and began to move around the room as if he were looking for something. Finding my suitcase in the closet, he began to pack away my clothes.
Frowning I said, "What are you doing?"
He didn’t bother answering me or even looking at me, until he finished packing my stuff up. "C’mon let’s go."
"Go?" My frown deepened. "Go where?"
"Home." He said simply as if that explained everything.
"I’m already home, Justin."
He shook his head as he walked toward me. Taking my hand, he began to lead me out of the room. "No you aren’t. Let’s go home now, it’s getting late and I wanna tuck my baby into bed."
I didn’t know if he was talking about me, or the actual kicking baby in my stomach. Five kicks and three painful steps toward the door later, I realized what my cranky child must have wanted.
"I can’t go, Justin. Nathan just went out to get my food. And I’m starving."
"There’s food in the fridge."
"Do you have pickles and ice cream?"
He wrinkled his nose in disgust, but said, "Yeah, I think so, but if I don’t…I’ll go get it."
My mind fumbled for a reason that I couldn’t go, even though a huge part of me was aching to. "Well I can’t just leave! Nathan will be back any minute now. And he’ll wonder where I am."
"Well we can’t have that, now can we?" Justin said, his voice dripping with bitter sarcasm. "Then I’ll leave him a note." He added, grabbing a nearby notebook and opening it to the first clean page.
While I was glancing over his shoulder, I noticed that he scribbled down something that looked like, "Looking for K? Well, you won’t find her here. I’m taking her back home…and by the way, I’ll feed her."
Silence.
Silence can tell you a lot about a relationship. How new it is, how comfortable it is, how overly talkative it is. Or how underly so. When a relationship is new, silence can be one of the most awkward things in the world. You can't get comfortable in it even if you try and it's probably the fact that you are trying that makes it uncomfortable in the first place.
Silence is something that people don't like probably because it gives you time to think. Think about what dumb thing you just blurted out. Think about how it's being taken by your now silent companion. Think about what's the next thing you can say to make the original less dumb. Think about how maybe it's better that you leave well enough alone and just shut the hell up. Think about how you're probably thinking too much and should just say something...anything to fill up the silence.
Silence is neither good nor bad in the right relationship. In an old relationship silence can be welcomed by your ears with open...uh, arms, having already spent years listening to each other yammering away on one topic or another. Silence then becomes merely a break or pause in the conversation and not the traffic jam of awkward, where uncomfortable shifting and bouncing paranoid thoughts collide.
After years upon years of knowing each other, growing up together, loving each other friends and otherwise, you would think that Justin and I would have that old relationship silence going on right now. But as I sat staring out the window into blurred darkness with Justin behind the wheel staring straight ahead so focused, as if he concentrated enough on the road he wouldn’t have to notice the fact that his knocked up ex-girlfriend was riding shot gun, I knew that this silence wasn’t a good one.
I wanted to know what he was thinking, but at the same time I really didn’t want to know. I didn’t like the thought of him being angry at me, without me being angry at him as well. It made me feel guilty.
But silence has a way of allowing you the time to remember things you’ve been too busy with other things to think about.
That’s when Sandy’s named popped into my head and out of my mouth.
“Do you have any pictures of Sandy?”
The silence, save the rumble of the engine, continued for a few seconds, but I knew he had heard me because there was a tightness to his posture that hadn’t been there before.
“I don’t think now is a good time for that.”
I chuckled. Low. Bitter. “I bet you don’t. And just when would be a good time, Timberlake? Sometime between now and never?” I frowned, staring at the side of his head, which was still determinedly staring straight ahead. If this had been under any other circumstances, I would have had to tell him to keep his eyes on the road, because he had a tendency to want to look at the person who was talking to him and look out the windows as if he was a passenger and not the one controlling the car. “I want to see the pictures.” I said, taking the question out of it, because I was sure now that he had some, somewhere…he just didn’t want me to see them.
He took his eyes off the road for a second to glance at me. Now the tightness had shifted from him to me. He watched me for a moment, before again giving the road his full focus. “What good is it gonna do for me to scrounge up some pictures of a woman I don’t hardly ever see?”
“I never said it was gonna do any good. I just said I want to see them.”
He sighed then and I knew he was close to giving in, giving up, reluctantly, but giving in nevertheless. “If it’s going to do more harm than anything why do you want to see them?”
“Not seeing them now, isn’t going to make it hurt any less when I see her later.”
“How can you be so sure you’re ever going to see her?” He frowned. “There was a five year gap before I even got to see her again.”
“How can you be so sure that I’m never going to see her? How can you be so sure that I haven’t already met her once before?” I frowned back, arms crossing against my chest. “If I ever see her, again or maybe for the first time, and I have this nagging, sinking feeling confirmed…” I trailed off, shaking my head, rubbing my hands up and down my arms. Suddenly I was very cold. “I don’t want to hate you and I don’t want to not trust you. But if what I’m feeling is right, then you would have made it pretty damn hard not to.”
His eyes left the road for the second time, glancing at me through a thin layer of water clouded eyes. He blinked and the tear fell. Seeing it made me want to wipe it away, knowing why it probably sprung up made me want to hit him, to really give him something to cry about.
The drive that had seemed impossibly long while we were on the road was now finally over. Justin had hopped out of his side with a sprightly burst of energy that didn’t fit the occasion, making moves as if he was going to open the door for me.
Pushing the door open for myself, I wasn’t in the mood for chivalry. Too late for that. I just wanted to see the pictures. I just wanted to not recognize her. Not see that she was the woman I’d spoken to and damn well encouraged to go after her man, my man.
When he saw that I’d already let myself out, he stayed standing where he was at the front end of the car as if my doing that had thrown him off so much that he didn’t know what to do now. Rolling my eyes at him, I strolled past him, careful to not get too close. I didn’t want to touch him right now and I sure as hell didn’t want him to touch me.
Once we were in the house, Justin was quick to disappear within it, in search of the photos is what I assumed. But you know what happens when you assume.
I’d taken a seat on one of his many overly expensive designer couches by the time he returned with an arm load of photo albums. Seeing the stack of albums brought a nearly instant frown to my face. “’You have that many pictures of her?”
He didn’t answer, just held out one of them for me to take. Seeing the volume of pictures almost made me not want to see any of them anymore. Too bad almost doesn’t count.
Taking the album that he was offering from him, I placed it down on my lap, not opening it immediately. When I did open it, I only flipped through the album quickly. I didn’t need to really look at them, because every page was filled with picture after picture of Justin and I together.
“You really think I’m stupid don’t you?” I asked, less than half-way through the album, looking up at him as he stood nearby.
“I know you’re not stupid.”
“Well then what’s this about? I didn’t ask to take a trip down memory lane.”
“But maybe you need to.”
“Why?”
He sighed, moving towards me then thinking better of it and moving away, settling on pacing the floors instead. “Because what’s in those albums is what matters to me.” He said, searching my eyes as if he was expecting me to be moved by that crap. “I have a ridiculous amount of photo albums that I can fill up with just pictures of the two of us. You know how many I can fill up with just pictures of Sandy and I? None. I don’t even have enough to fill up one page.”
“So that means you have one though, right?”
Sighing again, he reluctantly nodded. “Yes.”
“And that’s what matters to me.”
He opened his mouth like he wanted to say something else, but I cut him off before he could. “Just show it to me.”
Another sigh escaped his lips, but this time his hands that I hadn’t even noticed until that moment that were behind his back came forward with a single picture. He held it out to me, just as he had done the album, only this time when I reached for it and tried to take it, he didn’t let go.
“Let. Go.” I said, not taking my eyes off his face, even though I wanted to see picture, I could stand to wait the few milliseconds it would take my eyes to go from his face to the photo. In fact, I needed those milliseconds.
Having the picture in my hands now didn’t make it any easier. Justin had gone back to pacing. Flipping it over so that it was face up, I stared down at the faces captured. It was an old picture; the edges were worn like it had been handled many times over the years. There was two grinning pre-teens in the photo. The one with the curly-mop and cheesy grin was Justin, but it was the other one who had caught my attention.
Big blue eyes sparkled out of a fair skinned face, which was framed by midway down-her-back length blonde hair. The blonde hair and blue eyes didn’t really stand out, but that smile gave her away. Even though that night at the merger party I’d only seen the watered down version of it, I could still recognize it.
Having all the facts didn’t make me feel any better. In fact, I felt queasy, woozy, like I needed to sit down. That’s when I realized I was already sitting.
Looking up into Justin’s worried face, I knew that he knew that I knew. I knew that he knew that I knew and that he would want to talk about it. But I knew that he knew that I didn’t want to talk about it.
“I’m tired.” I said, finally.
He didn’t say anything, just nodded and began to lead the way up the stairs as if I hadn’t lived here already and didn’t know where things were better than he did. When he continued down the hall past the guest room, I frowned. “Where are you going?”
He raised his eyebrow at me, glancing from me to his bedroom door and back again. “I thought you said you were tired.”
“I am.”
“So…” He nodded, looking confused. “Go to bed.” He said, opening the door to his master bedroom.
Frowning I said, “You didn’t have to say it like that. I thought you meant for me to sleep in your room, that’s why I was asking that.”
Before I could open the door to the guest bedroom, he said, “That is what I meant.”
I watched him for a second. “I’m not in the mood for this, Justin. Pull that good host crap with someone who cares.”
“I care.” He said. “About you.”
Feeling another frown ripple across my brow, I said, “I really don’t want to hear it. That’s what daylight is for. Headaches.”
“Sleep in my room. I’m not going to be there, so you don’t even have to worry about it.”
“I wasn’t worried.” I said, walking into the guest bedroom.
“You’re not a guest.” He said, now standing just outside the door.
“Oh, really? Then what I am?”
“It’s not daylight yet, so I can’t tell you.”
I expected him to smirk after that, smile, grin”something. Not even his eyes laughed. And that bothered me, I didn’t want us to be different. Not with a baby on the way. I didn’t want us fighting. I didn’t want a lot of things to happen the way that they were, but clearly while God was writing these scenes in my life She really didn’t care what I wanted.
I found myself responding by rolling my eyes, kicking my shoes off and crawling into bed. I didn’t wait to hear if he closed the door, I just closed my eyes and waited for sleep to come for me. Too bad Justin got there before it did.
I felt him next to me before he’d even touched me. And when he did touch me, it was accidentally since he was reaching for the blankets. I expected him to pull the sheets back and slide in, which would then force me to open my eyes and tell him that either he goes away or I do. But he didn’t do that. The sheets instead were pulled up to my chin and that’s when I realized his intentions had simply been to tuck me in bed.
Patting the covers down at the sides, he made sure I was in nice and tight. I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d been tucked in, so this was weird to say the least. At least on a cognitive level, but it didn’t feel weird.
Feeling his lips press gently, fleetingly to my baby bloated stomach first, then to my forehead”that felt weird.
Knowing that all I wanted to do was pull him in the bed with me, despite everything that had happened”that felt even weirder.
