Pregnant
Oksana Brewer stared at her reflection in the mirror of the small apartment she shared with her ten-year-old son and wondered why she was no smarter now than she’d been at eighteen.
The two sticks in her hands with bright pink lines on them mocked her right to her face.
“Well?” her best friend Hilary pounded on the bathroom door. “Don’t make me pick the lock.”
She grunted and pulled the door open and slapped the two sticks against Hilary’s chest.
“I’m going to be an aunt again!” Hilary jumped up and down excitedly as she raced away from her towards the kitchen.
“Shut your pie hole!” she raced at Hilary and clapped a hand over the other woman’s mouth and looked around wildly. “Paxon is not going to be happy.”
“That grumpy old fart hasn’t been happy since nineteen-twenty-one when he died in his past life.”
“Very funny.”
The thing was, Hilary wasn’t far off. Paxon was a grumpy old fart trapped in an almost forty-year old’s body. For the last eight years, they’d been friends with benefits minus the friends. When she’d stumbled into town looking for work nearly eleven years ago, the only place hiring was the Inn he ran. Paxon hired her on the spot but warned her to not do something stupid like fall in love with the boss. He was a single father to an infant, his wife having just up and left him for a rich Canadian. Eventually, he’d hired her to be a nanny as well as his hotel front desk clerk.
Then when he’d found out she was pregnant, he’d put her up in an apartment at the back of the Inn, giving her a place to live with her son. She babysat his kid and took care of hers and worked the desk. While her son Zane had no biological connection to Paxon at all, Paxon, despite his surliness was the only father figure he ever knew. Paxon’s son Cody was Zane’s best friend and closest thing to a brother a boy could have with only eighteen months between them.
Over the years, Paxon paced the floors with her, helped with hospital visits and even took them on vacations every once in a blue moon.
Eight years ago, after one particularly exhausting shift at the Inn Paxon ran, one thing led to another, and they’d had mind blowing sex right on Paxon’s desk in his small office in the building. He’d told her up front he’d never get married again. He didn’t want her to have false illusions of whatever their fucking was. She could take it or leave.
For the last eight ears, they made sure their sons never saw them so much as touch fingers lest they give them the wrong ideas. All the locals in their tourist destination town of Muston, Montana suspected they were secret lovers, although ninety-nine percent of them wondered how the hell a girl with a disposition as sweet as Oksana’s could put up with the crankiness of Paxon. Hilary was Paxon’s only sibling and the only person who knew what was up and it was because she also worked at the Inn and once forgot her cell phone and caught them when she’d come back to retrieve it.
For three months after being caught, Paxon put the brakes on their physical relationship, not wanting the pressure from his family to do right by Oksana. Then one particularly cold night, the power went out, the generator at her apartment wasn’t working. With the boys both at a sleepover at a friend’s house after a hockey game, Paxon demanded she stay at his place in the Inn until the power came back. She’d been kept very warm indeed.
Their sex life was off the charts. Paxon Rivera might be the most stoic man in the entire state, but he let all his passion loose when he was able to get Oksana alone. One time when the boys were at school the year before and the Inn was in a slow period, he’d had her in six different rooms over the eight hours the boys were gone. She’d barely been able to stand and his smirk each time she tugged her jeans away from her chafed nether regions was the closest thing to a smile he ever put on his mug.
“Hilary, you can’t say anything.” She begged her friend. “Please. I need to think on this.”
“What exactly do you need to think on? This is the push to make him realize you’re already a family. The four of you. This number five,” she patted Oksana’s belly, “will join you all.”
“He just made me his business partner last year. This is going to make him buy me out and throw me out.”Panic suddenly filled her chest. “He’s going to kick us out of here and I’ll have to move into one of the houses the mayor rents out.”
The thought of the dilapidated buildings Mayor Fraser used as Airbnb locations for tourists made her skin crawl. The number of times guests had shown up to the Inn begging to be accommodated because there were things living in the rental apartments was staggering. She did not want to live there.
“He is not going to kick you out. He loves you, Oks. Talk to him.”
“I can’t. I was so stupid not to notice my skipped period last month.” The words her friend said caught up to her, “and he doesn’t love me. I’m the nanny and the business partner who really isn’t a business partner and oh god I’m dumb.” She dropped to the sofa and pulled her hands over her face.
“At least you had enough sense to buy your pregnancy test over in Ridgebridge instead of here in town. Old Mrs. Creston would have been telling Paxon before you’d even peed on a stick.”
She shivered with the thought. “Just get rid of those for me. Take them home with you and get rid of them. Burn them in the fireplace or something. The box they came in too.”
“Fine but you’ll need to tell him at some point.”
“Once I make a decision on what I’m doing.”
“You can’t get rid of it. You can’t even kill a bug.”
She looked at the clock and sighed. “I have to get to practice.”
“You can’t go on the ice pregnant!” Hilary was wide eyed.
“Says who? I was on the ice all the time pregnant with Zane. I’m the assistant hockey coach. Maybe blowing my whistle and skating some laps will clear my head.”
“And if you fall?”
She slapped her backside, “I have enough padding here to protect me and eight embryos.”
“Its that ass which my brother can’t stop looking at. I bet he slaps it when he’s riding you from behind.”
“Get out of my home,” Oksana pointed to the door shaking her head, very much aware Hilary was not wrong. Paxon’s lack of control almost always stemmed from her bending over. Her bending over in a pair of yoga pants or climbing a ladder in a well-worn pair of jeans was always going to get her bent over a piece of furniture somewhere in the Inn.
Hilary was giggling as she exited the apartment swinging the plastic bag with the pregnancy tests haphazardly, clearly excited about the news she’d been part of discovering. Oksana grabbed the keys to the truck, another perk of working at the Inn according to Paxon and made her way to the vehicle.
Paxon would already be down at the rink in town. He’d been coaching the middle school hockey teams since he’d returned home to run his grandmother’s Inn when his marriage failed, and his wife left him with a baby over twelve years ago. He’d been a coach at a high school in Missoula since he was injured playing hockey for a Canadian NHL team. He’d coached from the time he was twenty-three until he moved back to Muston when he was twenty-eight.
The local middle-school begged him to volunteer coach. By the time the boys were two and one and after finding out who her father was, Paxon pulled her onto the bench with him. They were a great team and in the last three years, three boys who graduated from the local high school, were recognized to play at the national level and everyone attributed their success to the foundation built by Coach Paxon and his AC, or assistant coach.
Their lives were intertwined in so many facets from the coaching of the school team to the Inn, to the boys they’d raised together but separately and not to mention the unbelievable sexual attraction which hadn’t waned an iota in eight years. Yet, they weren’t a couple. He’d never professed to have actual feelings for her and despite knowing she loved him deeply and truly in way she’d never be able to shake, she didn’t harbor any illusions about whether he felt such an emotion for her.
He cared. She knew he did. Love though? Fear of his reaction to knowing she was pregnant rattled her brain and she punched the steering wheel and told herself to get her shit together.
She pushed the though away as she put the half ton into gear and drove it down the mountain towards town.
There was plenty of time to deal with his mess. Right now, there was a team to coach.
