Officially Over It - Lani Lynn Vale Page 0,20

his body when I hit him and took him down onto the other side of the tracks.

Sadly, the tracks had been raised up to go through a marsh—luckily that marsh was down thanks to a drought over the summer—and all we ended up doing was falling ass over tea kettle down a rather large hill.

Needless to say, I’d saved the guy, but I also wasn’t a young whipper snapper eighteen-year-old anymore. I was a grown ass adult that didn’t seem to take the hits as well as I used to.

Opening the door, I was half expecting to see one of the boys off the SWAT team or my dad. It wasn’t either, even though my dad was supposed to be here over an hour ago.

I instead opened the door to Reggie’s non-smiling face.

I blinked at her, staring hard, and said, “What?”

She looked… pissed.

Pissed and haunted and nauseous all at the same time.

Then a niggle of worry started to roll through me. Reggie being here could only mean one of a few things. And one of those was that she had news about my dad.

“Oh, fuck,” I said, jumping to the likeliest of conclusions. “Is my dad okay?”

Reggie’s face instantly went soft.

“No, this isn’t about your dad. This is about something else.” She ran her hands down over her face, groaning into them. “I don’t even want to tell you this. I’m sure it’s going to make you lose your shit.”

So I may or may not be notorious for losing my shit. I was always a hot-head. I’d been one since I was old enough to breathe. At least, that was what my father liked to tell me.

When I’d grown into my six-foot-four body, he’d said that I finally filled out enough to be able to handle being a hot-head.

Apparently, talking shit when you were tiny was frowned upon unless you could back it up.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

If it wasn’t my dad, could it be hers?

“Fuck!” she shouted.

I glanced over Reggie’s head to see three of my fellow SWAT team members outside. We had all of their attention.

Dax was washing his truck shirtless. Ford and Ashe looked to be installing a car seat into Ford’s truck. Then there was Saint who was sitting on his front porch drinking a Gatorade, looking to have just come from a run.

They were all now staring at Reggie and me.

“Babe.” I wrapped my hand around Reggie’s wrist and tugged it free from her face. “Tell me what’s going on.”

She looked sick.

Like she was about to throw up any second.

“Fuck me.” She blew out a shaky, steadying breath then said, “You remember seeing Eerie at the hospital?”

My stomach immediately soured upon hearing Eerie’s name.

“Yes,” I said slowly. “Why?”

She looked at my eyes hard and then blurted out everything.

“So here’s what happened…” She went on to explain what she’d heard Eerie say this afternoon. Followed up by her suspicions, and ending with, “…and he has your cleft chin.”

I sat there, on my front porch, and stared at her as something foreign started to slide through my body.

“Why is it,” I asked slowly, “that every fuckin’ time that I think that I’m away from Eerie, she just seems to keep coming back?”

A kid.

I might have a fucking kid.

That was just… insane.

I always wanted kids.

The only problem was, I’d never wanted kids with Eerie.

I’d always wanted them with the woman standing in front of me.

I’d daydreamed about a whole fucking houseful of kids.

Boys that acted like her. Girls that looked like her. A ton of them that loved their mother unconditionally like I did.

Yet, there I was having them with Eerie.

“I…” I shook my head. “I just… I can’t.”

That was when Reggie slapped her hands on either side of my cheeks and forced me to look at her.

“I know you didn’t ask for this. I know that you didn’t want this for yourself. I know that you would’ve gone about this differently if you could. But you can’t. This is out of your hands now. You have a child. At least, I’m fairly sure that you do.” I scrunched up my nose. “Though, they’ll need your DNA to prove it. But Nathan…”

My eyes focused on hers. My mind cleared of all the motherfuckers that were going through it. And I focused solely on the girl in front of me.

Her eyes were a beautiful shade of aquamarine. They’d changed since she was a kid, become more beautiful.

More stunning.

She was so fucking pretty.

“Okay.” I shook my head, hoping it would clear