Beating For Two

Chapter 3

Monday, November 29th

Eleven weeks

It had been exactly one week since I'd paid the doctor a visit, one week since I'd been told that I was pregnant. It was still pretty damn strange to think about and I still wasn't sure if I'd accepted it one hundred percent, but despite the strangeness of the situation and despite not entirely believing it just yet, I still found myself holding my hands over my stomach every night when I went to bed. The morning sickness hadn't stopped yet, but that was hardly a surprise, and even though I'd gotten used to it, I still hated it with every fibre of my being.

My main problem now, however, wasn't accepting that I was pregnant or dealing with morning sickness, it was trying to figure out whether I wanted an abortion or not, and if not, I had to figure out how to tell mum, Owen and, most importantly, Harry. The guy was gonna be a father and he had absolutely no idea. I didn't need a paternity test to know that the baby was Harry's; he was the only guy I'd ever slept with, hence the only person to ever... well, to be crude: The only person to ever ejaculate his spunk inside me. There were no other candidates. How to tell that to him on the other hand... It would have been hard enough if I was a girl, but in addition to get him to believe that he was gonna be the father of a child that had been conceived while he was piss drunk, I also had to get him to believe that it was me who was pregnant. Me. A guy. Yeah, that conversation was gonna be loads of fun.

I saw Harry from time to time at school – when I managed to stop vomiting enough to go to school at all that was –, but he never looked my way and thus made it hard for me to contact him. I'd debated once or twice if I should send him a message on Facebook and tell him to meet me somewhere, but I realised that it would sound a bit too cryptic. My best option would be to simply track him down during lunch or between classes when he stood by his locker, which I'd discovered was only six lockers away from mine, and ask if I could have a word with him and that it was important. Not that that would be any less awkward. He was a popular football-player while I was the guy without friends who no one even knew the name of, plus the fact that he didn't seem remember ever talking to me, or fucking me for that matter, and probably had no idea who I even was.

I wasn't at school that Monday, not only because of the morning sickness, but also because I was waiting for the phone call from the doctor's office to know the results of my blood samples. If those too said that I was pregnant, then... there was no doubt. I'd seen the ultrasound picture, I'd experienced the morning sickness, I'd felt the bump on my belly and I'd taken three pregnancy tests, all of which came out positive. The only thing left now to erase my last trace of doubt was that phone call.

Which was why I, at two o'clock that afternoon, sat in my bed with my laptop rested on my knees, checking my phone every other second. I'd been sitting there since ten o'clock that morning and the hours went by excruciatingly slow. An half-empty glass of water was placed next to me on my bedside table and I kept taking small sips of it just to keep my hands busy – there really was a limit as to how many times one could check Twitter for updates without having the computer freeze. Just as I was about to stand up from my bed to go find something to eat, my phone buzzed and I virtually threw myself over it, knocking a book and the glass of water to the floor. I paid no mind to the items, but instead picked up the phone and quickly pressed the 'accept call'-button.

“Hello?” I said breathlessly.

“Hello, Mr. Tomlinson, it's doctor Martin Wright, I'm calling to inform you about your test results,” said the familiar voice on the other side of the line.

“I told you, doc, it's Louis; 'Mr. Tomlinson' makes me feel old.”

I heard him laugh on the other end of the line. “We're all going to be old one day, Louis, I already am. Now, about the blood samples we took of you, there was a high level of-”