Page 53 of My Favorite Lost Cause (The Favorites #2)

I open the doors to the wide veranda and walk out. When I start to take a seat on the cushioned sofa facing the room, he snatches me to him, pulling me into his lap. He’s still mad, but he wants me close.

I love that and I hate that, both.

“Okay, please tell me what you’re doing here a week early if it’s not ‘really’ about Andrew.”

“I came here to have my Eat, Pray, Love moment,” I tell him. “I thought I was going to learn life lessons and come back with my head on straight and able to see things more clearly. Why are you here?”

I expect him to make some surly comment about Andrew. To my surprise, he pushes my hair out of my face and pulls my mouth down to his. “Because I don’t want to spend a single night without you. And I never again want to discover through a fucking note that you’re gone.”

“I thought you didn’t want to be attached to anything.”

“I didn’t,” he says, and my heart sinks. “But it appears I already am, so it’s too fucking late to take it back. I’m attached, Maren. I’m here. I’m not leaving unless you tell me I have to go, and to be honest, I’m probably not leaving then either because I’ll keep trying to win you back.”

I press my face to his shoulder and begin to cry.

How badly did I want him to tell me this for weeks, only to hear it when I’ve got to ruin everything?

I’m not going to stick him with the precise life he’s always sworn he doesn’t want, even if I think he’ll change his mind in a couple decades with someone far younger than me.

“Charlie, we don’t want any of the same things. It’s the house doing this, trying to reenact a sad old story. It’ll pass eventually. ”

He shakes his head. “Are you serious? Because I kissed you when I got jealous? Because we danced together? Because you liked to watch me doing push-ups?”

“You’ve got to admit it’s weird, all the similarities,” I argue.

“No, I don’t. Has it ever occurred to you that this is how people act when they’re in love, Maren?

That for as many similarities as you’ve found, I can name twice as many differences?

Was Margaret also married to a twit? Was William about to start a new arena football team?

Did he inherit a mansion? Did Margaret run off to Barcelona without explanation? ”

“Well, she couldn’t go to Barcelona. There was a war going on…”

He laughs, pressing a kiss to my head. “You’re missing the point, which is that my life and your life are wildly different from theirs, and we happen to have a handful of things in common because that’s how people behave when they’re head over heels—and many of the biggest moments happened with the house hundreds of miles away.

Our first kiss for instance. Or the fact that I felt like this a decade before we ever went down there. ”

My head lifts. “You did?”

“I did. From that first day I met you in the Hamptons. You know I did. I asked you to run away with me on your wedding day, remember?”

I stare at him. “You never…you never implied you meant it like that.”

He holds my gaze. “You know I did.”

I wince. Maybe, but it hardly matters at this point. There are a thousand different directions our relationship could have gone, but I can’t take this back. I can’t wish I’d chosen another course because look where this course got me.

I take a deep breath and raise my chin. “Charlie, I’m pregnant.”

He freezes. His hands are still on me, but I swear they’ve suddenly lost their warmth. “Pregnant,” he repeats, as if it’s a death sentence.

I nod. “I’m so sorry.”

“Whose is it?” he asks, his voice quiet and controlled.

I gasp, audibly. “What kind of question is that ?”

“What kind of question do you fucking think it is, Maren? If you flew halfway around the world to fucking see Andrew ?—”

“I’m not here to see Andrew. Where the hell did you get that idea?”

“Elijah said…” His voice trails off and I fill in the blanks: Elijah implied I was here to see Andrew because he knew it would send Charlie flying here in a jealous rage.

Charlie blinks as he meets my gaze again. “So…that would mean…it’s mine?”

I swallow hard to fight the lump in my throat. “Yes, idiot. It’s yours.”

He’s so frozen. So stiff. I rise from his lap, and he doesn’t even seem to notice I’m gone. He buries his head in his hands. He’s now picturing the two of us, losing a child. The two of us on our knees in a hotel parking lot, asking God for something He’s not going to give us.

“I know this isn’t what you want,” I say quietly. “I’ve been trying to figure out what to do—if the best thing would be to disappear for a year or so and let you think it was IVF or something else.”

I don’t mention the solution involving Andrew—it seems like more than he needs to know.

Though he barely seems to hear what I’m saying, so perhaps he wouldn’t hear that either.

I only realize now that there was still some tiny piece of me holding out hope for a different outcome, picturing him learning I was pregnant and being surprisingly okay with it.

I was being all Maren about it again. Dreaming up a best possible outcome in place of the realistic one. Even when I was telling myself I’d call Andrew…I was still hoping Charlie would pull through.

And he’s not going to.

“Charlie, you don’t need to be involved. I can do this on my own.”

“So you weren’t planning to tell me?”

My eyes close. “I tried. I tried the other day, and you went on your rant about how kids ruin everything. So I came here to think.”

“Were you, or were you not, going to tell me?” he demands.

“I was trying to do the kindest thing, Charlie. You’ve been pretty open about how this is the worst possible outcome, so yes, it occurred to me that I could just disappear for a while and pretend the kid was someone else’s. Possibly.” Probably .

“I need to think,” he says, and then he gets up, walks back into the room, and out the door, closing it softly behind him.

Just like that. I gave him terrible news and he handled it even worse than I’d imagined he would. So is he thinking about whether he’s going to force himself to become a part of this? Or is he wondering how he can politely extract himself?

I curl into a ball on the corner of the long bench and press my face to my knees, feeling far more alone than I did before he arrived.

I have a father who left before I was born. A stepfather who was kind but didn’t really think of me as his kid. An ex-boyfriend who fell in love with my sister while he was with me. An ex-husband who stopped wanting me before the ink was dry.

“It’s just going to be us,” I whisper to my daughter, resting my hand on my stomach. “And maybe we’re better off that way.”

I go into the room to pack. There’s an early morning flight direct to JFK and I’d rather wait overnight at the airport than spend the next eight hours listening to Charlie explain all the ways this isn’t what he wants.

I’m still crying, but I’m also furious, because… what the fuck? How am I possibly so egregious, so terrible, that every man in my life wants something or someone else? Wants a different daughter, girlfriend, wife?

“You need to think ?” I demand, though he’s not here. “You need to fucking think? Take all the time you want. Take your whole fucking life. We don’t need you anyway.”

I turn off location sharing, growing angrier by the moment.

“Fuck you,” I say loudly. And that’s to all of them. To my dad, to Henry, to every guy my mother was ever with who hit her or hit on me. To Miller, to Harvey, to Charlie. They all brought me as much heartbreak as they did joy, and my daughter and I don’t fucking need any of them.

There’s a knock.

I stomp across the room, sliding the chain in place before I open the door because he had his chance and he’s not coming in now.

“Go away,” I tell him. “I don’t need this. I’ve got my own money, and I don’t want you involved, so just go away.”

“Maren,” he says coolly, “you will open this fucking door right now, or I’ll jump onto your terrace from upstairs and throw a chair through that sliding glass door.”

I’d like to call his bluff, but he’ll probably do it, and he’ll break half the bones in his body in the process.

I unlock the door and step back, swiping away the tears on my face. “I?—”

He shuts the door behind him, and then his hands cradle my jaw. “I made you cry,” he whispers.

“Everything’s making me cry,” I sob. “You’re not special.”

He laughs. “You’re a lot like Kit when you’re triggered, you know that? But I love you anyway.” And then he kisses me. He kisses me hard enough to steal my breath and make me lose track of every last thing I was about to say. For a second.

And then I remember.

“Stop.” I pull away. “You can’t just walk off and come back and say you love me, then decide you don’t love me enough and walk off again.

I’m done. I’m tired of this. I’m tired of men deciding I’m not enough.

So please go. I’m just—” Exhaustion roars into me like a tornado, out of nowhere. “I’m really tired.”

“Then lie down,” he says, leading me to the bed and frowning at the open suitcase there. “Holy shit, Maren. Were you about to fucking take off again? How many places do I need to chase you?”

He pushes the suitcase off the bed, and I’m too exhausted to even get mad. I guess I’m not going to the airport. I’m just going to cry myself to sleep and figure it out tomorrow. “I don’t want you to chase me. I stopped sharing my location.”

I place my head on the pillow, and he lies down with his face next to mine.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry I took off like that. It wasn’t my finest moment. But it was a lot, and I had to catch my breath before we had this conversation.”

I let my eyes fall closed, swallowing hard before I say what needs to be said. “We don’t have to have any conversation. You don’t want kids. End of story.”

He frowns. “I didn’t want your dogs either, but I seem to have adjusted.”

It isn’t enough. He’s trying, but it isn’t enough. “I don’t want you to just go along with this, Charlie. I had a father who felt like he was tricked and took off almost immediately. I’m not doing that to my kid.”

“ Our kid,” he corrects. “Ours. Look, hon, you’re exhausted and I need to process this, so go to sleep and maybe by the time you wake up, we’ll be in a better place. I love you. I just need a minute to adjust, okay? ”

“Okay.” Something settles inside me. Nothing he’s saying means he’s enthusiastic about this…

but I can at least believe he will be. So we’ll try it and see.

And if he changes his mind, I’ll deal with it.

I’ve dealt with it before. “I can’t believe you came all the way here because you were jealous of Andrew. ”

He hitches a shoulder. “I like Barcelona. If you’d gone to Siberia, I might’ve tried to figure it out over the phone first.”

“You’d still have come for me in Siberia.”

“I’d still have come for you, no matter where you went,” he says, his lips close to my ear. “Even if you’d gone to the underworld.”

Under other circumstances, we might have stayed in Spain a bit longer. I’d have dragged him into all kinds of museums he wasn’t interested in, and he’d have demanded sex in exchange. But…other issues are more pressing.

We need to see a doctor. We also need to admit we’re together. If we’re together. Charlie is saying the right things, but I haven’t seen a smile on his face that wasn’t forced since the second he learned the news. A good night’s sleep didn’t do much for either of us.

We get on the next flight back to NYC and go straight to my doctor. A blood test confirms that I am, indeed, very pregnant, and an hour later, she’s sliding a sonogram wand over my abdomen.

Charlie squeezes my hand. I see nothing on the screen, but then…there’s a flicker.

“Huh,” says the doctor.

Charlie’s hand tightens. “Is something wrong?”

The world begins to cave in on us both. His worst predictions are already coming true .

She glances at him, then me. “Here’s the heart,” she says, pointing to a flickering little light. “That’s the first baby.”

I swallow. “First?”

“Right,” she says, grinning. “And over here, this is the second baby.”

“Twins,” Charlie says blankly as the color drains from his face.

Twins. Wow. When we get pregnant by accident, we really get pregnant by accident.

“Your worst fear,” I tell him. “So, is it worse than being murdered?”

He’s white as a sheet. “I don’t know,” he says. He forces yet another smile. “I’ve never been murdered. But yes, I assume it’s worse.”

I’m not sure he’s joking.

I let Marais & Wolfe know that my measurements are changing and that I will definitely be gaining a lot of weight as we ride back to his apartment. Charlie is utterly silent the entire way.

Once inside, he’s kind and he’s considerate. He asks me what I’d like for dinner and suggests I stay off my feet, as if I’m already in labor. But what he isn’t is pleased or enthusiastic . And that’s the only thing I really need from him right now.

I fall asleep early, and when I wake at three AM, he’s no longer by my side.

We’re supposed to be telling the family at dinner, sixteen hours from now. I no longer think we should. Charlie’s doing his best not to be like my dad, not to act like a guy who got tricked into a situation he wants nothing to do with.

He just can’t quite pull it off.