Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 74379 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 372(@200wpm)___ 298(@250wpm)___ 248(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74379 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 372(@200wpm)___ 298(@250wpm)___ 248(@300wpm)
I laughed when I saw a man, much older than Reed, walking down the hall toward us.
He may be old, but there was no way in hell the man was out of shape.
He had to run or something, because Jesus Christ he was tall and fit.
“Hey, Boyce. We’re here to get the Hail babies checked out and over.”
The man looked at me, and his eyes changed.
“I had no clue that it was that Hail.”
Reed laughed, and I felt like I was left out in the dark on who this man was to Reed. I’d never seen him in my life, and honestly, I knew everyone here.
This man, though?
Never seen him before.
“I’m glad you could follow me back here. I was worried about you.”
Reed’s words had me glancing back between the two men like an annoying bobble head doll.
“Oh, shoot,” Reed said. “Boyce, this is Krisney. Krisney, this is Boyce, he’s a…used to be a sonographer with the Army. He’s retired now, and he moved back here, what was it…a month ago?”
Reed turned to Boyce, and Boyce nodded his head. “It was time. It’s nice to meet you, Krisney.”
I smiled.
“Boyce is gonna do all the fun stuff today.”
My brows rose at that.
Reed winked at me, though, understanding my hesitation. “It’ll be okay.”
With that, he led us into a second room, and this time it was with a huge fucking couch off to one corner of the room. The exam table was smack dab in the middle of it, and the biggest TV I’d ever seen was taking up the wall across from the couch and the table.
Reed didn’t take the couch, though.
He took my hand and helped me up onto the table, and then stood beside me while shoving up my shirt.
I would’ve laughed if I hadn’t liked seeing him so excited.
“Do y’all want to know the sex of the baby?”
“Babies,” Reed corrected, then looked down at me. “Do we want to know?”
I’d originally planned on saying yes. But what came out was a resounding, “No!”
Reed looked like I’d ran over his pet cat. “Really?”
“Really,” I confirmed.
He sighed. “I guess that was what we’d planned on doing from the very beginning, anyway. I just never expected you to actually go through with it.”
When he said from the ‘very beginning’ he really meant the very, very beginning. We’d talked about children on our second date.
I’d told him that I didn’t want to know. That I wanted to be surprised. To find out the sex of our babies with him in the delivery room.
Oh, if I only I knew how wrong I’d be.
If I’d known, I would’ve found out right then and there.
***
“Any problems you want Dr. Hail to be aware of?”
I shook my head.
“Good.”
I paused, remembering something.
“These stretch marks, though,” I muttered, lifting my shirt slightly and showing Reed’s nurse.
The nurse grimaced right along with me.
“Those are going to be there forever.”
That came from the bitch that hated my guts.
I had a feeling that she and Reed had something going on before I came along and ‘ruined things’ by showing up pregnant.
Then again, at this point, they could have started something right back up.
I’d left Reed standing only a foot away from Pepé’s grave over three months ago, and I had stuck with my guns ever since.
After our last doctor appointment, I’d left him standing in the elevator, watching me leave with a sad expression on his face.
But I couldn’t help it.
I needed to protect me at this point, not Reed.
And that was what I’d planned on doing.
But Caria? Yeah, I fucking hated her. With a passion.
I was blaming it on the hormones, but I knew had I not been pregnant, I still would’ve hated her just as much.
I’d seen her around town before with him. Once last week while at Subway, and another time while at the gas station when I’d been filling up. They’d been getting coffee.
I never got the confirmation, but I tried valiantly not to think about what Reed might or might not have done with her.
It hurt too bad.
Literally, every time I even came close to thinking about it, I was reminded that though we now shared children together that would be born in a few months, we weren’t anything more than that.
We were still in the same exact spot as we’d been when this all started.
Apart.
“I’ve heard using the stretch mark lotion doesn’t really help,” Reed’s nurse, Opal, interrupted my inner musings. “You’re just spending the extra money on it when you could get the same results from using the Wal-Mart brand.”
I grimaced.
That’d been what I’d been using.
Shit.
“Well, what the heck do I use now?” I muttered almost to myself.
Opal patted my hand as she finished up with my blood pressure, and I stood up while also stretching my back.
Who knew having two kids growing inside of you would cause a relatively healthy woman to feel this much pain?