Getting Played - Emma Chase Page 0,19
kid-friendly kind.
I bend over slightly at the waist, rubbing my breasts covertly with my forearm, wanting to just full-out massage the poor girls. Because they’re aching—a cold, excruciating, throbbing sort of pain—like my nipples have frostbite.
“You okay?” Erin asks.
“Yeah—it’s just my boobs are killing me.” I glance at Jack, leaning against the white marble counter. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. Boobs are my second favorite thing to talk about.”
“What’s the first thing?”
He wiggles his eyebrows. “You’re sister’s boobs.”
Erin laughs, then she turns to me, still smiling.
“Oh, my God—do you know what I just thought of? Remember, when you were preggers with Jay—but you were still hiding it from Mom and Dad? And we were all home from school in the car going to get the Christmas tree, and your boobs were hurting so bad, that you had them pressed up against the heating vents in the back of the car? You said it felt like they were frozen—two boobsicles.”
“As if I could ever forget.” I snort out a chuckle. “That sucked.”
But then I stop chuckling.
And everything inside me freezes—going as stone-cold as my poor chilly nipples. Because I did forget—what it felt like to be pregnant. The early signs.
It’s like God gives women amnesia about the really shitty parts of child-bearing, so we won’t mind doing it again and again. But now, in this kitchen—it’s like a horrible lightning bolt of epiphany has struck me. Like the blinders have fallen away.
And I remember all the early symptoms. The soul-deep exhaustion, the heavy, sluggish, bloated feeling, the nausea . . . the painful, aching breasts.
Everything I’ve been experiencing for the last three weeks.
I chalked it up to the excitement and stress of starting the show, the move—but there’s something else. Something else I totally forgot.
“Oh, no.”
I start counting backward in my head. The days, the weeks, not retracing my steps . . . but my menstrual cycle. And I feel the color drain from my face.
“Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no.”
“Are you gonna puke?” Jack takes a few steps back—out of the potential splash-zone. “Is she gonna puke, Er?”
A—yes, I’m definitely gonna puke.
And B—
“Lainey, what is it?”
I look into Erin’s eyes, the “B” spilling from my lips in hushed, shocked words.
“I need to take a pregnancy test.”
Chapter Four
Lainey
“Why does this keep happening to me?!”
Three positive pregnancy tests later—we’re all in the kitchen, with all of my sisters fully updated on the latest unexpected, development. My parents are still clueless and supervising the grandchildren down on the dock.
I’m pregnant. Knocked up. In the family way. Unplanned. Again.
No matter how many times or how many different ways I say it to myself—I still can’t make it make sense. When I first found out I was pregnant with Jason, the overwhelming feeling was fear—fear of what I was going to do, what my parents would say, fear of the unknown.
This time around I’m older—though wiser is still up for debate.
And I’m just utterly . . . flabbergasted. Flabbergasted is a really good word.
“We used condoms! We used a whole box of condoms!”
“Wow.” Judith smirks. “The drummer-boy really brought it, huh?”
Brooke twists her pearls. “Not the time, Judith.”
Jason’s father was my first—my first serious boyfriend, my first everything. We used condoms too, though a bit fumblingly. And by the third or fourth time we’d had sex—boom, I was pregnant.
“Was there any P and V slip and slide action going on?” Erin asks me.
“No! There was no P and V contact without latex, at all.”
I stare at my laptop screen, searching for an answer that will make this make sense. Because that’s what you do when you’re flabbergasted—you Google.
“Are my vaginal secretions acidic or something? Do they just eat through the condom?”
“That would be cool.” Linda grins. “Like a Sigourney Weaver kind of Aliens vagina. I’m gonna use that.” She writes it down on a sticky note.
And I think I might be hyperventilating.
“Do you think it was a stealthing?” my brother-in-law Ronaldo asks.
“What’s stealthing?” Brooke asks.
“It’s when a guy slips off the condom for the big finish without the girl knowing.”
“Ew. That’s a thing?” Brooke asks.
“Unfortunately, yeah.”
“Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with men?” Judith asks.
“That’s why I’m a lesbian,” Linda announces. “You should all try it. No offense to the penises in the room, but pussy is where it’s at.”
Jack points at Linda. “I couldn’t agree more.”
Brooke gapes at Linda. “Your wife had an affair with your marriage counselor.”
“Well, Genevieve happens to be lesbian who’s also an asshole,” Linda explains. “We’re gay, not perfect.”
I shake my