“No one believed that,” he stated.
“Anyway, what I said was true even if I did make it up on the spot. You guys would have gone viral, fighting like you were in junior high!” I stopped, and sighed. “Yeah, sorry. I wasn’t thinking about myself. I thought you were going to get hurt and I just ran. And screamed, too. Sorry.”
César kept driving in silence for a ways. “You scared me to death. Those guys could have really injured you by mistake, and the baby, too.”
“Sorry.”
He nodded and lapsed back into silence for a moment. “Thanks for trying to save me, though.”
“You’re welcome.”
He reached over and took my hand. “Did we just leave your car back in the parking lot?” he asked, and I nodded. “I’ll drive you to work tomorrow. I want to make sure you stay out of any brawls along the way.” His eyes flicked over at me as he smiled, and he brought my hand up to his mouth to kiss my knuckles. “Good to know you’re in my corner.”
I leaned across the big seat so I could rest my head against his arm. Nobody was ever going to hurt César, not if I could help it.
Chapter 13
Stupid leaves. I picked one up and sniffed, trying to identify it that way. I was supposed to get dandelion greens, which I assumed couldn’t be the same thing as the weeds that we had rubbed on our faces as kids to make yellow eyeshadow and blush. Right? Why would you go to an organic grocery store to buy a pile of weeds? And why didn’t any of this crap have identifying signs, preferably with pictures, and why didn’t they have normal cookies at this store, either? I sighed, looking at the five boxes of gluten-free, fructose-sweetened treats already in my cart. César would never let me grocery shop again.
“Camdyn?”
I turned when I heard my name, even though I didn’t want to. I had recognized the voice.
His eyes bugged when I swung around and he saw my stomach. I wasn’t anywhere in the realm of what Lindy had been showing, but there was no mistaking that I was pregnant under my handed-down maternity top. It hugged.
“Hi, Lincoln. How are you?” I asked.
My ex-whatever, the guy Ellie insisted had been my boyfriend, just kept staring. “A lot of people had told me, but I didn’t…” His face turned from shock to looking almost like he was going to cry.
I gave up on finding the right greens and put something that looked spikey into my cart. “I didn’t know if you had heard.”
Lincoln glanced at what I was buying. “Is that mizuna? Are you really eating that now? Your diet has definitely changed.”
“Wait, those leaves aren’t dandelions? I’m looking for dandelion greens.”
Wordlessly, Lincoln reached into the display and handed me a bundle of green stuff. He looked at my stomach again.
“There’s a coffee place right near here. Do you want to go and talk for a minute?” I suggested. I owed him at least that.
“Yeah, I’ll go have coffee with you,” he said. “I think we should talk.”
Of course, I didn’t have coffee after I bought the correct greens and went to meet Lincoln at the café. I ordered another kind of herbal tea, this one smelling like César’s shoes that had to live in the garage. I hesitated for a moment before I carried my cup over to the table, not because of the putrid odor of the drink, but because this was going to be hard. Lincoln and I hadn’t left things at a great place the last time we’d spoken in the fall.
His eyes stayed fixated on the baby as I made my way over, and as I sat down, he kept staring at my bump. “I’m assuming that what I’ve heard is true, and it isn’t my baby,” he started off. “So were you cheating on me?”
“No, absolutely not! I mean, you and I weren’t exclusive, but—”
“Will you ever stop with that bullshit, Camdyn?” he exploded, loudly enough that heads turned toward us. This wasn’t the Lincoln I remembered. This guy was a lot angrier, and I realized that it was my fault.
“Ok, sorry. I’m sorry,” I soothed.
“We were together for five months,” he continued, his volume not decreasing. “I had told you that I loved you. You didn’t see anyone else, neither did I. Don’t give me some crap that it’s ok that you cheated because we weren’t ‘exclusive.’”
“Lincoln, I didn’t cheat on you. Not ever. This really happened after you said that that we were done,” I told him.
“I said that we should take a break,” he corrected.
“You told me that I was immature and hurtful, that you deserved someone better.” I remembered his words very well, and I also remembered my loneliness when he was gone from my life. “After that, we didn’t speak, not one word. To me, that didn’t mean a break. It meant that we weren’t going to be seeing each other again.”
He stared into his coffee and swirled it around so fast that some creamy brown liquid spilled onto the tabletop. “I was trying to give you time to miss me.”
“I did,” I told him. “I did miss you, and I decided to fix that feeling by being with someone else. And…” I trailed off, and we both looked at my stomach.
“You treated me like shit,” he said. “You never had time for me. You ignored me, you flirted with other guys in front of me. You wrecked my apartment with your parties, you wouldn’t spend the night, you wouldn’t even hold my hand in public.”
I literally hung my head. Had I been that bad? “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I don’t know why you put up with me for five months.”
“I thought I loved you,” Lincoln said. “I told you that I did, and
