The Scandal

16. Impossible

A/N: name reveal¿ YES

and i really like this chapter and i hope yall do too even though there's not a lot of leolivia I KNOW ITS WHAT YALL WANT I WILL DELIVER SOON but like i can't ignore the fact that luke was her first bf and first love like that doesn't just go away plus they're still close friends even now in real life so

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Time passed, and not much changed. I watched the world move, and everyone else live their exciting lives, and I did nothing.

My world was moving fast, and faster, then faster, and finally so fast it just gave out. Came to a quick halt. And I didn't know what to do anymore. It was a simple kind of boring.

The worst part was constantly worrying about how quickly things would change after everything staying the same for so long.

The nursery was coming together in pinks and whites and florals—the girliest thing I'd ever seen. It wasn't something I would have usually chosen, but when my Mom asked if I'd had any ideas of how I wanted it done, my eyes landed on a little stuffed pig I had sitting on my dresser.

My Grandma had given it to me when I was a baby, and it was my favorite stuffed animal out of all the ones I'd accumulated in my near-sixteen years. It had a simple look, just a pink pig, nothing quite special, yet it was adorable. Every friend of mine commented on it. And I saw it and I just thought: I want my baby to have it in her room.

Then I told my Mom I wanted the room to be as girly and pink and cute as possible. The little pig was a big inspiration.

My daughter would arrive in thirteen weeks—ninety-one days. As scary as the thought was, I wanted her already. Her room was almost finished and I didn't get one second of comfort anymore—everything hurt and everyone bothered me.

So I stayed in empty rooms most of the time.

I sat in the nursery in the white wooden rocking chair, placing the pig on my growing belly and looking down at it like it was a memory. I looked around the room too, and imagined a little two-year-old girl with brown curls running around it.

Whenever I imagined her, she was hyper. She ran and she bumped into things. I guess I pictured her that way because it felt like that's what she was doing when she was moving around in me—all the time, she never stopped. It was annoying and painful and I hated it, but it was a nice reminder that I'd kept her so healthy for so many months.

I didn't think I'd be able to do that.

Sometimes I thought back to that day with Mateo, and how I kept repeating that I couldn't do this.

But I was. I was doing it. I had been doing it for seven months, and my doctor kept saying and kept saying: everything looks great. The world was used to the idea too, so much so that it was barely a scandal anymore—they'd gotten past the shock. Now it was just a baby that would soon be born, and my fans were even growing excited. I got tweets about it, like 'is the baby coming soon?' and 'have you picked out a name yet?'. I never responded, because I still felt weird talking about it, but it made me happy seeing that.

I wondered how things would be if I'd gotten rid of it when I could have, if my life would have been perfect, if Leo and I would have still been best friends, or, somehow, maybe—more than that.

Or maybe Luke and I would have gotten back together. That was a thought that I'd had in the back of my mind too, one that I never addressed, never allowed myself too, because I couldn't ever figure out my feelings.