Page 58 of The Best Worst Thing
Quite Desperately
You okay?” Logan said, wandering into his bedroom, brushing his teeth as Nicole crawled under the covers.
To the right of the dresser, Nero circled a pile of laundry, then plopped himself in the center with a satisfied sigh.
“You’ve barely said a word since we drove home.
I bought you two dollars’ worth of aspartame, and you didn’t even touch it. ”
Nicole nodded, head on pillow. “I think my period’s coming early or something. I’m just really tired.”
“Okay,” he said, tapping on the doorframe a couple of times. “I’ll probably go downstairs and finish my show, then. Let me know if you want some company.”
She nodded again, said good night, then watched him walk away.
One step …
Two steps …
For the first time ever, she wanted him as far away as possible.
That instinct—that push—gutted her. This absurd, wonderful, irresistible man.
And he couldn’t have left her alone fast enough.
And just when she was ready to close her eyes and fall apart into his pillowcase for nobody else to see, he turned around.
“Nicole, listen.” He sat down on the edge of his bed, searching for her legs under the covers and then circling his hand around her ankle. She raised her head and tried to smile. “You know you can tell me anything, right? That we can talk about all the hard stuff whenever you’re ready?”
“I know,” she said.
He breathed out. “It’s time, I think. We need a plan, okay?”
She nodded but said nothing. Logan, for a moment, pressed his lips into a thin line. And then he said, “I mean it,” kissed her forehead, and walked out the door.
He’d left it wide open.
But for the next couple of hours, as Nicole lay there, tossing and turning, listening to the sounds of whatever ten-part Korean War documentary was floating up Logan’s stairs, she knew she couldn’t tell him a goddamn thing.
She couldn’t tell him that the sound of Alexis’s voice had ripped open every last wound she hoped might stay scabbed over forever.
That each cold, inevitable truth she’d buried had rushed to the surface and filled her lungs with hot, thick panic.
That tonight, the clock had struck midnight a hundred times.
That, suddenly, March felt imminent. That, back at the diner, when she’d fallen into his arms instead of driving away, she’d gone completely off script.
That, when they’d first agreed to take things slow, nine months had seemed like a lifetime. But four? Four months was nothing.
That she was twenty weeks from bringing home a baby, and she still didn’t have the courage to set up the nursery, let alone have that long-overdue conversation with Logan about how the hell they were going to do this, or if he really wanted to.
That motherhood, now, was catching her by surprise.
That, on the nights Logan was in town, she fell asleep in his arms barely thinking about it at all.
What it stood for. How hard it might be.
How real and close it was. How much it might change her life.
That even if she and Logan stayed together, she would still, in a million ways, lose him and what they had and the way things were right now.
That, no matter what, they would lose that magic—that easiness.
That she had wasted those years of selfishness, of staying up until four in the morning, building furniture and eating cold pizza and talking about the future, on someone else.
That despite an autumn of cordial-enough estrangement from Gabe and the fact that she’d been gallivanting around Los Angeles with some other guy, she had never meant to put herself in a position where she’d have to worry about what her husband might hear when he rolled into his office Monday morning.
And that, more than anything, she had never, ever meant to fall in love with Logan Milgram.
Which she had.
Quite desperately.
In a way she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to shake.