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“Please. Half strawberry soda. Half root beer.”
“That’s nasty.” Dru stands and takes our cups.
“I thought it would be too, but it’s so good.”
Dru shakes his head and takes our cups to the soda machine. I empty the trash from our table into the receptacle while Dru refills my soda. We meet each other at the exit, and he hands me my drink before holding the door open for me. The temperature has dropped a few degrees and the sun has completely gone down.
We walk to my car, and Dru hugs me goodbye. “You know how to get out of here?” he asks.
“I think so.”
“We’re going the same way, so you can follow me if you’d like.”
“You drive too slow,” I tease.
“Spoken like a true New Yorker. Always in a hurry.”
“I’m working on it.” I open my car door and slide behind the wheel. Dru closes my door. He taps the roof of my car before heading to his truck. After buckling my seat belt, I start the car and put it in reverse. My phone starts to ring as I back out of the parking spot.
I check the screen and see that it’s my dad. I answer his call, putting my car in drive and switching our call to speaker since my car doesn’t have Bluetooth capabilities. “Hello?”
“Hello, Yasmine.”
“Hi, Dad.” We haven’t spoken since my move. Whenever I do something that he doesn’t approve of, like get pregnant and move halfway across the country, he won’t talk to me for a few days to weeks until he cools off or I ask for forgiveness. “How is everything?”
We spend the first few minutes catching up. The twins are growing like weeds. My little brother just lost her first tooth. Gloria is still battling morning sickness, as she did with her previous two pregnancies. My dad is preparing for a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new community center funded by the city.
“We won’t be able to make it down for the birth,” he says after we’re all caught up.
“Why not?” I’m not surprised, but it still hurts. I guess I had the tiniest bit of hope that they would be here for me.
“I have prior commitments over the next couple of months.”
“And Mom?” My voice drops.
“I’ll need her here to look after your brothers and sister.”
I swallow hard. “I was really hoping you’d be able to make it. At least one of you.”
“We can’t drop everything because you decided to follow after a man who isn’t even your husband.” Ouch. So there it is.
I press my lips tightly together and release a breath through my nose. “You know that’s not why I’m here.”
“You need to bring your ass home, Yasmine.” He gave me the silent treatment for months after I became pregnant, making it abundantly clear that I was no longer welcomed in my home. And now he wants me to come home?
“I can’t come home.” Would Hunter let me go if I wanted to leave? It’s not just me anymore. I have to think about my baby and what’s best for him. “This is where I need to be—where I want to be. With Niko and Skylar.”
“And with him?”
“Yes,” I admit. “I want my baby to be near both his parents.”
“You keep making poor decisions. And Hunter is one of them,” he says. My dad has always been hard on me. He’s critiqued and criticized me at every turn, whether it was about my friends, my grades, the way I dress, my tattoo, or any other thing he could find fault in.
“It’s not like that with us.”
“What are his intentions?”
His intentions? “He wants to coparent.”
