She looked up. “Actually, this isn’t the first time Kenny and I did it.”
“When?”
“Uhm…” She buried her face in her hands again, hiding from me.
“Sylvie?”
“I’m sorry, Brooke. It was the day when you went on a date with Jett.”
Was that the time he showed me his boat? “The day you said you went to Bellagio instead of Milan?”
She nodded.
“You didn’t.” I gasped. “You lied to me!”
“So did you!”
I couldn’t deny that.
“Geez, Sylvie. You could have been abducted.” My head was spinning from all the horrendous things that could’ve happened to her.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to tell you because I thought you were hurting and I wanted the focus to be on you. It just didn’t seem fair that I had found someone I liked while your heart was broken.”
“It’s okay.” I squeezed her hand reassuringly. “You said you were sick several times in the last three days. Technically, Kenny couldn’t be the father.”
“Who then?” She peered at me, confused—and then realization dawned on her. “Shit. I hope I’m not knocked up by that a**hole.”
With a**hole, she was referring to her ex, a married man, who first tricked her into believing he was single and then that he wanted a relationship with her. Just like Jett, Ryan happened to be her boss, with the only difference that he fired Sylvie when his wife found out about the affair.
“Let’s just hope it’s food poisoning,” I whispered.
Chapter 23
Traveling to Bellagio to get a home pregnancy test was a bad idea. Not only did Sylvie end up buying three, she also managed to convince me she needed a whole lot of other stuff. As soon as we reached the main street, she dragged me from shop to shop and she ended up with a new pair of shoes, a light summer dress, and a bottle of après sun lotion for me, which I’m pretty sure I didn’t really need…that much. On the bright side, she didn’t dawdle trying on clothes because she looked amazing in anything she wore. Miraculously, the whole shopping spree took her only around half an hour.
It was shortly after noon when the taxi driver stopped in front of the house. I was about to unlock the front door when my cellphone rang again. I fished it out of my handbag and checked the caller ID. It was Jett.
“Where are you?” he barked down the line. My heart skipped a beat.
“Stop worrying. I’m fine,” I said. It was the truth. We were still living and breathing. Basically, nobody got hurt so he didn’t need to know my little secret.
He let out a long breath. “Good. We’re on our way back and should be there in twenty minutes.”
He hung up and I relayed the message to Sylvie.
“We need to hurry,” she said.
I followed her to the bathroom and sat down on the floor, realizing she was going to use the pregnancy test.
“I can’t read the instructions. They’re in Italian. But we should be fine anyway. You see this stuff on TV all the time.” She tore one of the foils to remove the test stick and held it up to me. “What do I do now? Stick it into a glass of urine or what?”
How would I know?
It wasn’t like I had ever needed one of those.
“I think you need to turn the test stick so that the purple side of the handle is facing you. And then you hold the other side into your stream of urine.”
“Okay. Turn around.”
I focused hard not to listen to the gushing sound. Barely a minute later, she tapped my shoulder. “You can turn around now.”
“Finished already?” I sat up and regarded the stick in her hand.
“Yeah. What’s next?”
“I don’t know. I’d say put the cap back on and then put it on the table.”
“For how long?”
“A few minutes, I guess.” I thought back to all the TV advertisements I had ever seen and not paid attention to when I should have. The knowledge would have come in handy.
Sylvie turned on the water faucet and washed her hands. I stroked her back. “You’ll be okay. Even if you’re pregnant, it’s not the end of the world.”
“I know,” she whispered, staring at herself in the mirror. “But I’m not ready to be a mom. I don’t want to be a single mother raising a kid.”
We stood in silence as the seconds ticked by.
“I can’t look. Can you look for me?” Sylvie said eventually.
“Sure.” I lifted the pregnancy test and held it up to examine the pink colored band in the small window.
Sylvie peered over my shoulders. “Am I pregnant?”
“I don’t know. I think two bands stand for a positive result, so I’d say no.”
She let out a whoop of joy, her smile dying on her lips almost instantly. “What do you mean ‘I think?’”
I shrugged. “It’s not like I’m an expert or anything.”
“Why can’t they just mark it P for positive and a smiley for not pregnant?”
I laughed at her attempt at infusing humor. “You should give it another go in case you didn’t hold it under the stream long enough.”
Which meant waiting at least a day or as long as it’d take to get an appointment. I couldn’t wait. Sylvie grabbed me in a tight hug and I rested my head against her chest, letting her stroke my hair, her soothing voice barely reaching me. “Don’t worry, Brooke, it’ll be okay.” She kept repeating those stupid words I said. “It’s not the end of the world.”
It is the end of the world. Definitely.
“No.” I shook my head. “I’m doomed.”
I wanted to be a mom one day; just not at this point. The thought of telling Jett filled me with dread. A pregnancy so early, when we barely knew each other, could ruin my relationship. He’d run, like most men do. He’d run as fast as he could, and that would hurt me more than anything in the world. I didn’t want to lose him because of a mistake. A stupid mistake occurring under the influence of alcohol.
“You’ll have to tell him,” Sylvie said, deleting the browser history and switching off the computer. “It might seem scary now. But once you do, you’ll find out whether it was just a fling or more. And if he breaks up, which I hope he won’t, then you can either let it define you or strengthen you. And there is always that option,” she whispered. “You can get rid of it and he’ll never know.”