Still Waters

Chapter 41

                                                     ***STRONG LANGUAGE AHEAD***

I'm not even gonna lie. Collin messed me up that night and from that point on. The way he looked at us...me and the baby...Kenney couldn't even look at us like that, because it wasn't his baby. Which I was fully aware of but, unfortunately, which Kenney increasingly was not. Kenney was just so good to us...but Collin was the one I was in love with. I thought...

The more pregnant I got, the more confused I became about who I wanted Kenney to be to my baby and to me. He was such a great guy. I knew that whatever I decided, Kenney would be down with it because that's just who he was.

...Which was exactly why I couldn't tell him about Collin. And how I had called him after I saw him that night. You know, just to tell him that I was ok, and that the baby was ok. He sounded genuinely happy to hear it.

More than happy, actually.

He sounded relieved, and I realized that all that time he may have been struggling with the fact that he had probably killed his own child.

I felt sorry for the guy, I really did. I mean, I really loved him, you know? And there was nothing I could do about that. The conversation was nothing, really. He was pretty much just talking about how sorry he was and how he had been going to anger management classes.

The usual.

But I believed him...like I usually did, and told him that maybe I would meet him somewhere and talk, but not any time soon. I needed to figure out what I was doing with Kenney before I tried to put Collin back in the mix. I knew that, as understanding as Kenney was, he would immediately put me out on my ass if I even halfway looked like I was about to go back to Collin. Besides that, truth be told, I was kind of falling for Kenney by that time, too. I mean, really falling for him.

Hard.

The baby was digging the Kenney situation too, I think. He was beginning to recognize Kenney's voice, and would go bananas every time he heard Kenney talking anywhere near me. Kenney got a kick out of that, of course, and started spending more and more time "on the mic." He'd even started calling the baby "Charlie Brown." I have no idea why. He never told me and I never asked. The more swollen and uncomfortable I got, for some reason, the cuter Kenney thought I was. It was crazy. And the cuter he thought I was, the more he started acting like I was his girl and like the baby was his chip off the old block.

This was unfortunate, for obvious reasons. But I still didn't bring Collin up to Kenney no matter what he said, or what we talked about. The hardest was how Kenney kept asking me when I wanted to go get the rest of my stuff from the apartment. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I wasn't sure if I did want to, because I wasn't 100% convinced that I wouldn't end up going back there.

Besides that, Kenney was my ace, the best friend I ever had, and I just couldn't risk losing that. He went to all of my Lamaze classes. Even when I wasn't in the mood, he would still coax me into going, and once we got there he would always make it unnecessarily exciting. For everyone. The class loved him. What a nut. I mean he always made everything in life more fun than it had to be, but can you imagine Lamaze class having a class clown? A mess. I loved him so much. Kenney was the absolute best. I honestly don't know if I would have been able to make it all the way through pregnancy without him. For many reasons...most of which I forgot the more time that I spent away from Collin.