“Camdyn—”
“No,” I told him, and pulled back so he couldn’t touch me. I swallowed the tears down. “I specifically asked you not to tell, and you specifically did. There’s no excuse for being a liar.”
His face hardened. “I didn’t lie to you.”
“You just didn’t tell me something important that affects me, sure.” I turned to Davis Blake. “César and I are not a couple, so he wouldn’t be cheating on me,” I told him. “He can pick up whoever he wants and I don’t care.”
Davis didn’t change his expression at all. It was like talking to one of the faces on Mount Rushmore and if I were Katie, I probably would have wanted to slap him 23 hours out of every day.
“Just so we’re all clear, he’s definitely not picking me up,” Katie put in. “I’m not interested in César at all.”
Well, you couldn’t fix stupid.
“And neither is he interested in me,” she added.
But obviously, he had been, or she wouldn’t feel the need to deny it so much. “Excuse me for a sec,” I said, and unwedged my chair to step away from the table.
“Down the hall to the left,” Lindy called. I heard another chair also push back and César caught up before I made it to the bathroom.
“You just insulted me in front of all those people!” he said to my back.
“Insulted you?” I hissed. “You’re going around telling everyone!”
“I’m not doing that, but the day after you first climbed the gate and announced it to me, the day that we went to the doctor together, I lost it at practice. Davis dragged me over to the sidelines and I talked to him about what was going on. Later, you asked me not to tell anyone on the Woodsmen—”
“But you did anyway!”
“I had already said it,” he told me, his voice rising. “Really, Camdyn, what do you want me to do? Ignore that you’re pregnant? Pretend like you’re not having my baby? Act like your father, and say I’m just the uncle?”
I shook my head. Before, I really had been good at arguing, but now I was a total fail. I caught my breath on a sob.
“Honey,” he said softly, and put his hands on my shoulders.
I turned around to face him. “I’m sorry I said that you were a liar in front of everyone. But I don’t want people to know, and now they will.”
“I should have told you that I had talked to Davis before we came over here. I’m sorry that it upset you so much.” He sighed. “I really think it would be better for you, for both of us, if we weren’t running around keeping it a secret. Have you even told your sister yet?”
I could only shake my head and I stepped away, into Lindy’s little bathroom where I shut the door on César and everyone else around the dining room table. I looked at myself in the mirror, at the tears tracking down my face.
What had I thought was going to happen? That people just wouldn’t notice when I was six hundred pounds and then suddenly carrying a baby around? That my sister wouldn’t hear crying in the background if we ever spoke again, that people around town wouldn’t report back to Warren Wilde that his niece/daughter was walking around with a kid? And had I really expected César to act like my father and not acknowledge his baby?
I stared at my reflection. Pitiful. There was no way to fix stupid, and at the moment, I felt like there was no fixing me, either.
Chapter 8
“El árbitroha señaladouna falta,” I murmured, staring at the screen. Jesus and Mary, Spanish was harder to learn than I remembered. Maybe that was why I had started skipping all those classes in high school, but now I wanted to pick some up, before we went to Florida this weekend. At first, I had tried an app, but that had been lame, and so had the second one I downloaded, and so had the third one. I’d looked around and found a more exciting way to learn the language. I worked on it for a while, rolling the words around in my mind and moving my lips to form the words. “Tarjeta amarilla,” I said aloud.
“Camdyn.”
I took off my headphones. “Hi.”
“What are you doing?” César asked me as he walked into the room. “I heard you talking to yourself.”
“Nothing much,” I told him, sitting up. I had been lounging in his favorite spot, the couch in the office, while he’d been out to dinner with his new coach and some of the other starting players. “Did you have fun?”
He shrugged and sat down next to me. “It was fine.”
“What did you guys talk about?” I asked casually.
“Football. Not about you, if that’s what you’re wondering,” César told me. “Davis never said a word to anyone else.”
I nodded, sorry I had asked and brought up that night again. Things had felt strange to me since the terrible dinner at Lindy’s house. Well, the dinner had been delicious, but it really had been a bad evening for everyone. And of course, that was due to me, to my freaking out at the table. I had apologized later to Lindy for ruining her dinner and for leaving in the middle of it when I couldn’t seem to stop crying.
“It’s totally ok,” she had told me. “First, I understand about flying off the handle about things, because one time a few weeks ago, a bug landed on the popcorn I was eating and I cried about it for over an hour. Pregnancy is hard for anyone, and it seems like you’re dealing with more than I ever have.” I liked Lindy a lot, but the next time she had texted to see if I wanted to go to lunch, I had said that I was busy.
