was going to wear had been the absolute last thing on my mind. I did, at least, have a clean pair of underwear in my purse. I’d made that a habit for years, and my time in Iran had made me almost compulsive about it.
I probably spent more time than necessary in the bathroom, but I needed it to get my emotions in check. I really hoped that this was some sort of placebo effect and not pregnancy hormones rearing their ugly heads. If I was pregnant, I didn’t want to be a basket case for the next nine months.
If.
I didn’t know the numbers when it came to the likelihood of an IUD failing or a pregnancy test giving a false positive, but both did happen. As my mind bounced around, I wondered if the insanity of my last couple months made it more or less likely that I’d beat the odds. And what would that look like? Was it beating the odds if I was pregnant or not?
And that was the moment I realized that I hadn’t asked myself one very important question.
Did I want to be pregnant?
I hadn’t intended it to happen. Hadn’t even considered it a possibility. Honestly, I hadn’t even been thinking about having a family in the near future. Obviously, I didn’t dislike children, as that would have made my field of study quite foolish, but a baby at this point in my life wasn’t even close to being on my radar.
Eoin wasn’t the only person who was just now processing this information. Even though I’d technically known about it longer than he had – either counting or not counting the amnesia – things had gone pear-shaped almost from moment one. I hadn’t been able to actually think about it yet.
I needed to do that. How could I hold Eoin’s reaction against him when I hadn’t truly thought it through yet myself?
My phone’s alarm went off, making me jump. I reached for it, not remembering why I had an alarm set for today. When I saw what was on the screen, I closed my eyes and cursed under my breath.
At least I now had a legitimate reason to leave.
I had promised my parents I’d have lunch with them today.
Wonderful.
Fifteen
Eoin
I thought I told Aline goodbye, but I honestly couldn’t be sure. A part of my brain was even wondering if I’d dreamed the entire conversation while still sleeping next to her in bed. Or maybe I’d actually passed out again in the hospital and was now unconscious, and my mind was trying to freak me out to wake me up. Or maybe I’d actually died, and the afterlife was just some strange shit that made no sense.
Because there’s no way this could be happening.
Could it?
I’d had sex with a lot of women over the years, and since graduating high school, I’d always used condoms, even if a woman said she was on birth control. Then I’d met Aline, and all that had gone out the window.
And now, she might be pregnant.
Might.
Possibly?
Probably?
Shit.
Then again, when I considered the odds, the fact that this was the first time anything like this had ever happened to me, I supposed it wasn’t too far-fetched. Shit like this happened every day.
Hell, it’d happened to my brother, Alec.
At least I knew how my family would take the news. Well, more or less. I’d already been enlisted when all of that had happened, but it wasn’t actually that hard to figure out.
While my parents hadn’t been the sort who’d expected abstinence from any of us kids, they’d also been big believers in making sure all of us understood the possible consequences of our actions. When they’d given us each the sex talk and discussed birth control, they’d also told us that the only way to one hundred percent avoid pregnancy and STIs was to not have sex. Well, other than the obvious exception of rape, of course, and none of us would ever blame a survivor for anything that came from something like that.
If we did have sex, we’d be expected to take responsibility for anything that came up because of it, but they wouldn’t tell us how that responsibility was supposed to look. The only thing they’d made clear was that brushing consequences off wouldn’t be allowed, and the first of us to go through this situation had risen to the occasion just like he always had with everything else.
Alec married Keli, but the marriage hadn’t lasted very long. He’d done the whole