Icing The Heart

Chapter 6 Rory's Pov

Pregnancy tests should have come with instructions for what to do after your entire life is split in half.

The box only told me how long to wait.

Three minutes. Only three minutes.

It did not say what to do when the three minutes ended and two pink lines appeared like a verdict from a universe with a very cruel sense of humor. It did not say whether to scream, cry, laugh, throw the test across the bathroom or sit very still until your body remembered how lungs worked.

It did not at all. It just gave me three minutes. Three f*****g minutes.

So I sat.

I sat on the edge of my cousin’s bathtub in a borrowed T-shirt, with bare feet pressed against cold tiles and my hand clamped over my mouth as if sound itself might make the truth more permanent.

Pregnant.

The word was too large for the bathroom. It pressed against the mirror, the sink, the shower curtain with tiny blue flowers, the ridiculous little seashell soap dish my cousin had bought during her Florida phase.

Pregnant.

With Jaxon Kane’s baby. I was pregnant with his baby.

Oh God.

My other hand moved over my stomach again.

It was not dramatic. Not yet. There was no swelling. No undeniable proof beneath my palm. Just skin, muscle, panic and the terrible knowledge that a single night in a snow-covered cabin had followed me two states away and taken root inside me.

Oh God, I thought again with harrowing despair.

I stared down at the test until my vision blurred.

“No,” I whispered to no one in particular.

The test, being plastic and evil, did not respond.

I stood too fast. The bathroom tilted sharply and I grabbed the sink, breathing hard through my nose until the room settled. Then I did the only reasonable thing a woman could do when faced with life-altering information.

I took another test.

Then another.

By the time my cousin knocked on the bathroom door twenty minutes later, three positive tests were lined up on the edge of the sink like witnesses prepared to testify against me.

“Rory?” she called. “You okay in there?”

I looked at myself in the mirror.

My hair was tangled from sleep. My face was pale. My sharp grey eyes looked too wide, too young, too unprepared for whatever came next.

I did not look like the first woman to survive two seasons with the Titans.

I looked like a girl who had just realized the ice beneath her had cracked and there was no referee coming with a whistle to stop the fall.

“I’m fine,” I said. My voice sounded steady as I spoke. Somehow, that scared me more than if it had broken.

“You’ve been in there forever.”

“Stomach bug.”

There was a pause.

“You sure?”

No.

No, I was not sure about anything. I was not sure about my body. I was not sure about my career. I was not sure whether I wanted to call Jaxon and scream at him, call him and cry, or change my name and join a monastery that accepted emotionally damaged hockey players.

“I’m sure,” I lied.

“Okay. There’s toast if you want.”

Toast.

The world was ending and there was toast. What a f****d up day!

“Thanks,” I said hoarsely and listened as her footsteps moved away a few moments later.

I turned back to the sink. The three tests remained there. Silent. Accusing. Unimpressed by denial.

I picked up the first one again as if the result might have changed out of pity.

It had not.

My phone buzzed on top of the toilet tank.

I flinched so hard the test nearly slipped from my hand.

For one terrible second, I thought it was him.

It was not.

It was Lena:

CALL ME. VICTOR WANTS YOU BACK IN NEW YORK BY MONDAY. WE NEED TO DISCUSS YOUR ABSENCE AND THE MEDIA GAP.

I laughed once and it was a dry, ugly sound to my ears.

Media gap.

That was what they called disappearing when your life collapsed. A media gap. Like I was a billboard with poor visibility. Like I had not left because the man they had forced into my apartment, into my life, into my mouth, had been financially rewarded for helping to destroy me.

My phone buzzed again.

This time, my chest locked and did not move an inch.

Jaxon.

I did not open the message.

I had not opened any of them.

There were twenty-seven texts. Six missed calls. Three voicemails.

The first few had come the morning I left the cabin.

Rory, where are you?

Then—

Call me.

Then—

Please.

That one had made me turn off my phone for twelve hours.

The next messages had become longer. Rougher. Desperate in a way I refused to let touch me.

I saw enough of the preview to know he was trying to explain. I did not want explanations. Explanations were how men turned knives into accidents. Explanations were how organizations called discrimination performance strategy. How managers called surveillance protection. How teammates called betrayal concern.

How Jaxon Kane could say, I do not give a damn about the bonus, and expect those words to erase the fact that the bonus had existed at all.

My phone buzzed again.

Jaxon Kane: I know what you heard. It was not what you think.

I stared at the words until they became meaningless.

Then I deleted the notification without opening it.

Not what you think.

That was the favorite sentence of guilty people.

***

The clinic was small, white, quiet and aggressively cheerful.

There were pastel posters about prenatal vitamins on the walls and a woman at reception who smiled at me like I had walked into a place where happy things happened. I wanted to tell her she had made a mistake. That I was not there for a happy thing. That I was there because my body had betrayed me with a man I did not trust.

Instead, I gave my name, filled out the form and sat in a waiting room beside a woman knitting a yellow blanket.

A baby blanket. Of course.

The universe was no longer subtle. It had picked up a hockey stick and was swinging directly at my head.