Still Waters

Chapter 43

                           ** STRONG LANGUAGE AHEAD **

Can't do that like this.

Kenney didn't even really have to explain what he meant by that. I mean, clearly I was pregnant, very pregnant...but not so pregnant for that night to be extra weird. It was extra weird, no doubt, but because I was pregnant with someone else's baby. Someone else who I still wanted to be with...sort of. That part was extremely weird for me, but the fact that I was pregnant didn't make it weird for Kenney. Kenney had so much love in him that being with him never felt... shameful. If Collin truly didn't want anything to do with us, Kenney had already set it up for the baby to never know the difference. Kenney was just that guy.

And that is what made everything...too much.

Too much.

God bless Kenney all the days of his life for putting up with me and Collin's drama for so long. Pretty sure I wouldn't have done it. Kenney loved in a way that no one I had ever met before loved. He loved with his whole heart, and no matter how many times he got burned by his girlfriends, his fiancé, his family...by me, he just kept right on loving completely and totally. Like that was the only thing he knew how to do.

I guess that's what really kept me from going for it with him. Believe me, I wanted to. It was soooo hard living with him for so long, getting progressively more and more emotional. Kenney was exactly everything I ever wanted. If you want to know the truth, he was probably the Prince Charming that I had always dreamed of. I was just too gone to see it at the time. Kenney came too late. I was already 100% down for Collin by the time I even met Kenney. I just didn't know it yet.

Kenney took it all in stride, though. Like I said, I never met anyone like him. And I probably never will again. Which is what made it all the harder when I realized that sooner or later I would have to go home.

I struggled with that every night as the time grew nearer. Luckily, the baby was stubborn just like his daddy and took almost an extra three weeks to get here. This was months after the close encounter that Kenney and I had, and should have been plenty of time for me to woman up and tell him how I really felt. About everything.

I loved Kenney so, so much. I wanted him. I wanted to be with him. I wanted the baby to be his baby, but it wasn't. And there was nothing that I could do to shake the feeling that it would be wrong of me not to try and work it out with the father of my child. It just felt like the right thing to do.

I blew up around the last month. I mean, I went from cute little pregnant chick with the cute little baby bump to daaamn...are you having twins?

Around that time, I stopped going to church with Kenney completely. I had already started fading back out about a month before, but I just couldn't go looking like that with all those judgmental eyes watching me like "this heffa here." And the way they looked at Kenney...even if he had the stone face of a Greco Roman statue, I couldn't take it. They had no idea what he was about, or they never would have believed that he would have shacked up with me and gotten me pregnant, instead of marrying me first. Kenney just wasn't that dude. At all. It killed him the way we were living. I knew that, but at the time I had no choice but to accept his kindness and his help. He was taking on the burden of three other people, on top of his own, so they could all just bite it for all I cared.

It was getting harder and harder not to snap on somebody when I saw them looking at us like that, too. Looking at him like that. It bothered me to no end that I, personally, had taken him through so much when he had already been through so much. And all for nothing. I had to go back to Collin. It was the right thing to do. Kenney deserved to have his own real family that was good like him. Not my fucked up one. But as ass backward as it was, it was my family. Collin was mine, and the baby was mine. And we all belonged to each other. And no matter what we had been through, I'm sure the church folks would have looked at us a whole lot differently than they looked at me and Kenney if I had just stayed with Collin and married him. Honestly, I'm the one who walked out on him. He told me to go, but I knew he didn't mean it.