All I Want. Nicole Helm
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on their way to her booth.
“I suppose,” he returned, wondering if it would be awkward if she weren’t quite so...vibrating with anxiety. Or maybe drunken sex just always made things awkward afterward.
He sighed. At himself. At the situation. At life. “You know—”
“I’m pregnant,” she whispered so quietly he leaned closer, sure he’d misheard or misunderstood.
“I’m sorry. What?”
“I know you don’t have any reason to believe me. We don’t know each other well. It never should have happened, but the very fact of the matter is the only person I’ve been in any potential compromising positions with is...you, and my doctor confirmed a positive pregnancy test. So.”
He leaned back. Away from her and these words that didn’t make sense. He was thirty-five. He was a vice president of... No, not anymore.
He was an unemployed thirty-five-year-old being told the drunken one-night stand he hadn’t meant to ever let happen had resulted in...
“I didn’t mean to drop it on you like that.” She skirted the table of her booth in what felt like a purposeful distancing. He was on one side of this frilly, feminine table, and she was on the other.
Pregnant.
With his baby.
“I only meant to set up a time to talk, but it just...” She waved at the air around her, pacing under the tent that shaded her inventory of soaps.
He couldn’t think of anything to say, or do. He couldn’t wrap his head around this at all.
Someone cleared their throat—an older woman, looking between the two of them as if she could read between the lines.
How could she? He couldn’t even read the actual lines here.
“You have a customer,” he managed, when it was clear Meg hadn’t noticed.
She jerked, and for the first time in the ticking minutes between her dropped bomb and now, he finally saw something he recognized.
It was a look that accepted life was not what you wanted to be, and the acceptance you had to move forward anyway.
He’d seen that look on the face of just about every person he was related to, except maybe Kenzie. God knew he’d never seen that look in the mirror, because when life didn’t give him the things he’d wanted, he’d forced himself to want something else.
He’d never accepted that things might not go his way. Never rolled with a punch, knowing or accepting he was felled. No, he’d kept punching. Kept fighting. Kept fooling himself into thinking he was exactly where he wanted to be.
He’d called all that strength. Sense. Determination.
But it wasn’t. He could see it so clearly as he wordlessly watched Meg help her customer, dull smile firmly in place.
He didn’t know her. Had very few clues about the life she led day in and day out, aside from milking goats. But he could tell the acceptance—worried and freaked-out as it might be—was far stronger than the fight.
Far, far stronger than pretending failures didn’t exist, or were only steps leading you where you wanted to be.
He didn’t want to be here, now, with this information, but nothing could change the fact that he was. He couldn’t keep moping around, acting like some version of a whiny teenager, with or without a child. A child.
That’d never been him. He met challenges. He crushed them. But this wasn’t one he could carefully maneuver around or through. It involved people. It involved a child. His child.
Single. Drunken one-night stand. Tattooed goat farmer. He felt more than a little dizzy over the whole thing, and the next time he glanced at Meg, she was looking at him, big blue eyes solemn, but there was also something in them he didn’t understand.
“I’ve had some time to think about it. You should take some time too.”
“To think about it?”
“Yes. How involved you want to be. If you want to be involved. Like I said, I’ve had time to think about it, crunch the numbers. I can raise a kid.” She said it almost defiantly, chin raised, just daring him to argue with her.
But why would he argue with her? What did he know? Clearly he knew very, very little. Life had decided to finally show him just how little.
“So, if you’re not interested, that’s your choice. But it is your kid, so I wanted to give you a choice.”
“A choice.”
“Yes.”
“In how involved I want to be. With my...” He couldn’t form the word. Not with his mouth, not so it echoed down the aisle of a crowded summer afternoon at the farmers’ market. He didn’t belong here. He took a deep breath. It didn’t matter. Nothing about the self-centered pity party of the past month really mattered, not when he was faced with this.
“It’s a lot to process. Take some time, and when you’re ready...” She offered him a card, which he stared at without taking it. Because she’d handed him her card before. He fished his wallet out of his pocket, flipped it open and thumbed open the crease.
There was the card. He hadn’t been able to throw it away. So it had sat there. In his wallet. Like a very weird omen.
“I’ve got it,” he said, his voice sounding rusty and out of place.
When he looked up from the card to her face, her lips were curved. But she didn’t say anything, just gave a little nod.
“Moonrise,” he blurted, shaking his head at the total lack of finesse he was doing this with. “What time could you meet me at Moonrise Diner?”
She glanced at the delicate watch on her wrist. He’d held that hand, had sex with this woman—made a child, and he only remembered bits and fuzzy pieces. He’d been struggling to accept that before, but now?
“One thirty? But I’ll only have about half an hour before I need to get back to the farm.”
“It’ll be a start.”
It would have to be a start.
* * *
MOONRISE DINER WAS one of Meg’s favorite places in New Benton. While she’d had this picture of idyllic small-town life growing up in well-to-do suburbia, New Benton hadn’t lived up to most of it.
It was old and run-down, and a lot of the people weren’t sweet, quirky characters from a sitcom. They were rough, they were hard and they didn’t much give a damn who you were or where you came from.
But Moonrise was like something out of a movie. A diner still firmly planted in the past that did a bustling business to locals and very little else. The waitresses weren’t overpolite, more harried than charming, but she stepped into the bustle and felt like she’d found something.
Community, in a loose way. The waitresses knew her name. Some of the ladies would ask her about her goats or her soap. If she saw Dan, she always bought him a cup of coffee, and while she didn’t feel that sort of warm bloom of instant belonging she’d hoped for when she set out on this road, she didn’t feel like a stranger either.
So much of her life had been about feeling like a stranger. In her own home, to herself when she was high, to the friends who didn’t want out of that ugly cycle and to the friends who didn’t want to look her in the eye because they might remember and want a hit.
Meg blew out a breath as she slid into an empty booth. Between Grandma and pregnancy, all the old crap was getting stirred up and she needed to get a handle on it.
It hit her then, like a bolt of lightning straight through the diner roof and into her chest. She’d lost Grandma and created a life within the same week.
She placed a hand over her