The Marriage Contract by Natasha Black (best novels for teenagers TXT) 📕

system. That’s something else you’ll get to learn about me. I’m a big baby when it comes to being sick. Just wait until I have a real cold. Pathetic all around.”

He was falling back to sleep, and I had to smile at his efforts to keep engaging with me.

“I bet you’re adorable,” he murmured.

“I whine the entire time, eat nothing but double noodle soup and butter crackers with cream cheese, and there are copious amounts of tissues used. Yeah. It’s a whole thing. And that’s what you’re signed up for,” I said.

He flashed me a sleepy thumbs-up, and I made my way quietly out of the room and into the spare room. Rather than getting a book, I tucked myself under the covers and tried to will myself to sleep. Even as I did, I was thinking about the idea of food poisoning versus a stomach bug. I didn’t know what might be going on.

My symptoms didn’t really sound like food poisoning. And no one in the bar had seemed sick. If that had been the case, I would have also expected by now for someone else working there to have gotten sick. I might not have the best immune system ever made, but I wasn’t going to be the only person in an entire area to catch something as contagious as a stomach virus.

There was another option. One I wasn’t really prepared to think about right then. But I was going to have to if I didn’t open my eyes to a miraculously better stomach.

Eventually I managed to crash for a couple of hours, but it was still woefully early when my stomach lurching woke me up and sent me scrambling for the bathroom. This didn’t bode well for that third option.

I was glad the bag Hannah brought me was safely tucked away in the very back of the cabinet under the bathroom sink. Unless there was a very sudden urgent need for carpet cleaner, Matt wasn’t going to discover it before I used it. Which I was hoping I wasn’t going to have to do. When she showed up and handed me that bag, I thought she was being ridiculous. I took it and hid it away, thinking it was going to be a big joke.

Not so much.

Now I was fishing that bag out from under the cabinet and bracing myself. It felt like I was the only non-virginal woman who had ever gotten to my age without having to do this. But here I was, reading the little paper insert in a box to make sure I could pee on a stick correctly. That wasn’t a skill I ever thought I would value, but suddenly it was the most important thing I could do.

Three minutes later, I was staring at the results.

Five minutes later, I was still staring.

Ten minutes later, the little window started to look strange, and I remembered the insert said the results weren’t valid anymore after a certain length of time. Which meant what I saw first wasn’t actually going to change.

What the hell was I supposed to do next?

I definitely wasn’t ready to be a mother, and I knew Matt didn’t want children. He was fantastic with his nieces and nephews, and he talked about them like they were the greatest things in the world. It just wasn’t something he wanted for himself.

With still no answers as to how I was going to handle this, I finally wrapped the test up in the bag and threw it deep in the trash can, then headed downstairs. With any luck, I would be able to play it off and not give anything away to Matt until I figured out what exactly I was going to do.

The other bag Hannah brought me was still sitting on the coffee table, and I sat down on the couch. My legs were feeling shaky, and I was a bit dizzy, but I did my best not to show it. Pulling several crackers out of the sleeve of saltines, I munched my way through them, then followed them up with a couple of pieces of peppermint gum. Hannah reassured me it would help me feel better.

I hadn’t been convinced, but within a couple of seconds of chewing the gum, I actually did start to feel steadier. My stomach started to settle, and I figured I was in for a lot of peppermint gum over the next couple of months.

The flavor was gone from my first set of gum, and I had moved on to a couple of fresh pieces when Matt came in. He was fresh from the shower and smelled clean and warm. He grinned at me when he saw me sitting up on the couch.

“You look like you’re feeling better.” He leaned down to drop a kiss in the middle of my head. “Maybe you feeling sick is all my fault.”

The way he said it was teasing and playful but considering the telltale test buried in the bottom of the trash can upstairs, it didn’t strike me as quite as funny.

“What?” I asked, perhaps snapping a bit more than I intended to.

He looked at me quizzically. “It was a joke. You went and slept in the spare room, and now you’re feeling better. So maybe I’m the one that made you feel sick in the first place. You could be allergic to me.”

The strange look turned back to a smile, and I forced one back in return.

“I don’t think I’m allergic to you,” I said.

“Well, that’s good to hear. Because I definitely intend on spending a whole lot more time with you.”

He leaned down for another kiss, and I managed to push a bit of a chuckle out through my ever-tightening throat. This was probably the prime moment to tell him about the pregnancy test. No introduction. No beating around the bush. No contemplation and laying out a big plan. Just tear off the bandage and tell him straight out so that we could figure it all out