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EMILY

I ’d been taking the three-month supply of birth control pills Cohen had given me. Religiously . Every day. At the same time. To the minute. And all it seemed to do was make me sick.

I could deal with the nausea though. The exhaustion. The random lightheadedness whenever I skipped a meal. What I couldn’t deal with was the very real possibility that the side effects had nothing to do with the medication and everything to do with the box I snagged from the corner store between classes. The same box I’d avoided all day, pretending it didn’t exist before finally deciding at almost midnight that sleep wasn’t happening and I’d better just bite the bullet now. Even if the label on the back said it was best to test first thing in the morning.

I couldn’t wait that long, not when my heart was beating out of my chest. My palms sweating and my thoughts jumping down that rabbit hole without looking back.

Five minutes later, I was glaring at the two little pink lines staring back at me from where the white plastic stick was perched on my bathroom counter. Eyeing the results as if I could somehow will them to disappear.

This was it. My life was over. I’d carry on the legacy of becoming an unfit single mother to a child I never wanted. My hand drifted to my abdomen with the thought. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded, I told myself and the unborn baby who was nothing more than a blip beneath my fingers. It wasn’t about me not wanting them. It was about them being better off without me. I didn’t know how to do this. I was never shown how , and I was almost certain that the genetic trait of being a shitty parent was passed down from generation to generation in my family.

But it wasn’t just about me. Cohen needed to know. He deserved to know. It was the right thing to do. Then he could decide for himself if I— we were worth sticking around for.If this infatuation of his was just that. An infatuation. A few months of getting off on our toxicity.

My hands trembled over his name in my contacts. We barely knew each other, our relationship consisting of a few fucks more than a one-night stand. And he was about to start his surgical residency. At the top of his class. With a life and a future ahead of him.The last thing he needed was a kid holding him back.

I typed out a message. Deleted it and typed again while chewing on my nail beds till they bled. The copper tang grounded me enough to hit send .

Me:

Hey, it’s Emily. Can you come over?

That was stupid. He would know it was me. But my nerves were all over the place. How do you tell someone you’re about to ruin three lives? What if it was my fault? If maybe I rushed out the door one morning and skipped a pill? Or misread the instructions? Worse yet, what if he thought I’d done it on purpose? A girl like me looking to trap a guy like him?

It wasn’t unheard of…

My eyes flicked to the clock on the wall. Fuck, my text sounded like a late-night booty call more than an invitation to talk.I swiped my phone off the counter and tried again.

Me:

If not, that’s fine. I just have something to tell you.

Send. Yup, that sounded worse. Like I was about to inform him a series of antibiotics was in his near future. Lucky for us, a baby was only slightly less permanent than herpes. You could walk away from the former, not the latter. My mother taught me that much when she tried to leave me in the grocery store parking lot that one time.

Funny enough, child abandonment came with legal ramifications that STDs didn’t.

I watched those familiar bubbles pop up on my screen and disappear. Then pop up and disappear again twice more.

Cohen:

I can’t tonight, babe. I want to. Promise. But I have to be in the OR in the morning with Rath. It’s part of the application process. Have to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Me:

Okay. I understand.

I dropped my phone onto the counter with an audible clank and a sigh, my eyes glued to the chipped paint on the ceiling until the device pinged with another incoming message.

Cohen:

What are you wearing to class tomorrow?

I glared at the screen as if it had personally offended me rather than the man on the other end of the line.The thing about Leos was that we acted on emotion and impulse. A living, breathing example of “fuck around and find out,” which got me into trouble on more than one occasion.Especially with Cohen. I liked to grate on his nerves, more so when he was grating on mine.

Me:

This.

I proceeded to snap a photo of the pregnancy test and send it on through without bothering to consider the consequences. Something that got me here in the first place.