Chapter 17: Pregnancy Reveal & Breaking Point

The two pink lines stared back at me like twin accusations under the harsh bathroom light, the plastic stick trembling in my fingers as if it had a heartbeat of its own. I’d waited until Ethan crashed after his late practice—his door shut down the hall, the house finally silent except for the low hum of the fridge upstairs. My knees gave out on the cold tile floor, back sliding down the tub edge while the world narrowed to that cheap little window and the impossible truth blooming inside it. Positive. Not a scare anymore. Real. Forty-three years old, stretch marks I’d finally stopped hiding from Derek’s mouth, freelance work barely breathing after the client rebrand miracle, and now this. A baby. Derek’s. My son’s teammate’s. The thought punched the air from my lungs in a wet, broken sob that I stuffed against my forearm so Ethan wouldn’t wake.

I sat there for what felt like hours, thighs sticky from the under-bleachers quickie earlier that afternoon—Derek’s cum still faintly leaking into the crotch of my panties because I hadn’t dared shower yet. The test I’d taken that morning—no more faint lines, no more maybe—stared back at me under the harsh bathroom light. Two bold pink lines. Positive. Real. Forty-three years old, stretch marks I’d finally stopped hiding, and now carrying my son’s teammate’s baby.

The test had been burning in my purse since the truck fogged up last night, reverse cowgirl while Ethan waited inside the house for his “team meeting.” Every bump of the suspension, every whispered “gonna fill this mommy pussy till it takes,” had pushed the scare deeper. Now it was here. My belly—soft, marked, the one Derek kissed like scripture—fluttered with something terrifyingly close to want beneath the panic. I pressed a hand there, feeling nothing yet, just the phantom heat of his loads from the last week of raw, nightly basement fucks. God, the guilt tasted metallic, like blood on my bitten lip. Ethan’s face flashed behind my eyelids—his hopeful “Whoever he is, I’m happy for you, Mom”—and fresh tears spilled hot down my cheeks. I was destroying him. Destroying everything. And still my core clenched at the memory of Derek’s growl against my neck last night: “Keep it, Mrs. L. Let me put a baby in you for real.”

The front door clicked open downstairs hours later—Derek, slipping in after midnight like he’d been doing since the team started covering for us. I’d left the basement door unlocked on purpose, a silent invitation that made my stomach drop every single time. He found me still on the bathroom floor, test clutched like evidence, eyes swollen. His big frame filled the doorway, sweat from practice still clinging to his skin in that sharp, masculine musk that always made my nipples tighten before my brain could protest. No words at first. He just knelt, pried the stick from my fingers, and stared at the lines. His breath hitched once—raw, vulnerable, the same crack I’d heard in the hotel when he confessed about his dad leaving at fifteen.