Out of My League - Sarah Sutton Page 0,80

winking mischievously at me. “I’m pregnant.”

The words did.

Not.

Compute.

Several beats passed, and it still didn’t register.

I blinked. “What?”

“I’m pregnant.” Her excited expression hadn’t dimmed yet, hadn’t lost an inch of its glimmer.

“No, you’re not.”

Her eyebrows slammed down, effectively cracking her excitement. “Uh, yes, I am.”

“No,” I reiterated slowly, like trying to get the words through to a child. “You’re not.”

She shifted her position, tucking her ankles underneath her and leaning closer. “Sophia, I am. I have all the symptoms. Morning sickness, weight gain, cravings—”

“That doesn’t mean you’re pregnant.”

“I went to the doctor, Sophia. They confirmed it.”

They confirmed it. So she made an appointment, and they did an ultrasound, and there was…a baby. In my mother. Right at this very moment.

The urge to laugh hit me, but no sound came out. A baby literally a baby—was growing in my mother’s stomach. Had been there for some time now, if I really stopped to think about all the times she’d been sick these past few weeks.

Dear God, I hoped no one thought to secretly videotape my reaction, because the longer Mom stared at me, the more I felt like the world had been ripped out from underneath my feet, and I was falling.

And I knew now that no matter what people said, I was about to hit the ground. Hard.

I saw this moment like a picture in a book, reading the little description underneath. A mother speaks the joys of new human life whilst the daughter, sitting beside her, is about to start screaming.

It all became so horrifyingly clear. My parents weren’t making up for me. Well, not entirely. No, it was for him. Or her. The baby that was butting its way into our messed up lives.

That was what was happening: they were back to their cycle of playing house.

It was never about being better parents for me.

It was about being better parents for the baby.

Shiba meowed as I got to my feet, my head spinning around and around like a top, nearing the edge of a table. And I was about to fall off the edge.

“Sophia—” Mom tried to reach out for me, her hand only finding air. “Honey, please listen.”

But I was already dashing for the staircase, my socked feet slipping on the wooden floor, throat so, so tight. I stumbled as I took the steps three at a time, propelling myself with the handrail. My skin itched and stung, like I’d been bitten by a thousand mosquitoes.

I shut myself in my bedroom, leaning against the door and squeezing my eyes shut. It was a stupid soap opera. I was trapped in a stupid TV show where it all revolved around death or new life, breakups or hookups. There was no being normal, having normal parents. No normal relationship with normal boys.

I wanted to scream and scream and scream at the top of my lungs and never stop.

Chapter Twenty-One

It was official.

I was a complete stalker.

But standing in the middle of Walsh Hunter’s yard a little after midnight sounded weirder than it actually was. Probably. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself.

I should’ve just called him. I should’ve swallowed my stupid pride and asked him what he was doing. Saved myself the embarrassment of staring up at his dark house like a freaking serial killer. And it totally didn’t help that the sky was seriously about to crack open, the thunderstorm looming threatening any second. It just made my presence in the dark creepier.

This was a bad idea. On so many levels, just a bad idea.

Granted, I hadn’t set out to do this. Pedaling away from my house in a frantic fervor, Walsh Hunter’s house wasn’t my destination. I didn’t really have one. Desperation fueled me—desperation to just get away. And I found myself here.

But now that I was here, clutching the handlebars of my bike for dear life, was it wrong that I still wanted to see him? Just to be with him. To feel his arms wrap around me in a way we’d only been once before, hear his voice in my ear telling me everything would be okay. And I would believe it because it was him.

The collection of windows on his house only held shadows, a vast difference from that night of the party, when someone had turned on every single light on the premises.

“Sophia?”

In a rush of sensation, I felt my stomach drop swiftly to my toes, the air whooshing from my lungs.

Walsh wore long blue pajama pants, a black, loose-fitting t-shirt, and sported his