Can't do that like this.

Kenney didn't even really have to explain what he meant by that. I mean, clearly I was pregnant, very pregnant...but not so pregnant for that night to be extra weird. It was extra weird, no doubt, but because I was pregnant with someone else's baby. Someone else who I still wanted to be with...sort of. That part was extremely weird for me, but the fact that I was pregnant didn't make it weird for Kenney. Kenney had so much love in him that being with him never felt... shameful. If Collin truly didn't want anything to do with us, Kenney had already set it up for the baby to never know the difference. Kenney was just that guy.

And that is what made everything...too much.

Too much.

God bless Kenney all the days of his life for putting up with me and Collin's drama for so long. Pretty sure I wouldn't have done it. Kenney loved in a way that no one I had ever met before loved. He loved with his whole heart, and no matter how many times he got burned by his girlfriends, his fiancé, his family...by me, he just kept right on loving completely and totally. Like that was the only thing he knew how to do.

I guess that's what really kept me from going for it with him. Believe me, I wanted to. It was soooo hard living with him for so long, getting progressively more and more emotional. Kenney was exactly everything I ever wanted. If you want to know the truth, he was probably the Prince Charming that I had always dreamed of. I was just too gone to see it at the time. Kenney came too late. I was already 100% down for Collin by the time I even met Kenney. I just didn't know it yet.

Kenney took it all in stride, though. Like I said, I never met anyone like him. And I probably never will again. Which is what made it all the harder when I realized that sooner or later I would have to go home.

I struggled with that every night as the time grew nearer. Luckily, the baby was stubborn just like his daddy and took almost an extra three weeks to get here. This was months after the close encounter that Kenney and I had, and should have been plenty of time for me to woman up and tell him how I really felt. About everything.

I loved Kenney so, so much. I wanted him. I wanted to be with him. I wanted the baby to be his baby, but it wasn't. And there was nothing that I could do to shake the feeling that it would be wrong of me not to try and work it out with the father of my child. It just felt like the right thing to do.

I blew up around the last month. I mean, I went from cute little pregnant chick with the cute little baby bump to daaamn...are you having twins?

Around that time, I stopped going to church with Kenney completely. I had already started fading back out about a month before, but I just couldn't go looking like that with all those judgmental eyes watching me like "this heffa here." And the way they looked at Kenney...even if he had the stone face of a Greco Roman statue, I couldn't take it. They had no idea what he was about, or they never would have believed that he would have shacked up with me and gotten me pregnant, instead of marrying me first. Kenney just wasn't that dude. At all. It killed him the way we were living. I knew that, but at the time I had no choice but to accept his kindness and his help. He was taking on the burden of three other people, on top of his own, so they could all just bite it for all I cared.

It was getting harder and harder not to snap on somebody when I saw them looking at us like that, too. Looking at him like that. It bothered me to no end that I, personally, had taken him through so much when he had already been through so much. And all for nothing. I had to go back to Collin. It was the right thing to do. Kenney deserved to have his own real family that was good like him. Not my fucked up one. But as ass backward as it was, it was my family. Collin was mine, and the baby was mine. And we all belonged to each other. And no matter what we had been through, I'm sure the church folks would have looked at us a whole lot differently than they looked at me and Kenney if I had just stayed with Collin and married him. Honestly, I'm the one who walked out on him. He told me to go, but I knew he didn't mean it.

He called me a lot those last few weeks and told me over and over again how sorry he was, and that he wanted us back. He wanted us to be a family again. He had never even gotten rid of my apartment because he knew that I would come back eventually, and that I would need my own space to sort things out. He said that we could go back to how we were, and that we could start slow. We had all the time in the world and there was no reason to rush anything.

Collin always knew exactly what I needed to hear to get my heart to open back up. Every time he closed that tiny door, he sweet talked his way right back in again. It was like I had no control over my own feelings. Especially while I was pregnant.

Out of all the addictions that I've had in my lifetime, Collin Stewart was the absolute hardest to shake.

My emotions were all over the place. Feelings for days and nowhere to put them. I cried a lot those last few weeks. I think Kenney knew what was up. Sometimes he would just look at me out of the blue like "please don't." Or I would catch him watching me from the doorway looking so sad that I wanted to kill myself for making him feel that way. I truly wanted to kill myself, but I couldn't do that either. This baby had given my life a new purpose and I had to give at least him, if not me, a chance. Being with Kenney, I was so far removed from Collin that I actually forgot what a living hell it was to be with him. I only wanted to do the right thing. And I honestly thought that going back to the man who was almost my husband was the genuinely right thing to do.

I just had to tell Kenney.

And soon.

One night, Kenney asked me again what I was going to do once the baby got here. I couldn't lie to him anymore.

"Kenney..."

"Natasha...don't say it."

"Collin wants us back, Kenney."

"Natasha, you don't have to deal with that anymore. I already told you, I got you. I'll take care of you. You and the baby. Like he's my own son. I'll love him just like he's mine. Because I love you. I'm telling you Tashi, you don't have to deal with that anymore. Please...don't go back to that fool. Didn't you say that he would kill you?" Something suddenly seemed to dawn on him. "Natasha...was that bullshit?"

His eyes shot accusingly toward me like I had just wasted so much of his time that he didn't even know what to do with me. Like I had no idea how much of his energy and his heart that I had just wasted.

"Kenney..."

"No, Tashi. No..."

"Kenney, it wasn't bullshit. But he's been going to counseling now, and he's changed..."

A sharp pain shot up my back, worse than the stomach cramps that I had been having all day and the day before. I hadn't said anything to Kenney, honestly, because I wasn't ready to deal with a baby yet.

I was definitely selfish as hell back then.

"Kenney..." I said again, rubbing my back and trying to reposition myself to get the pressure off of my spine.

I guess Kenney thought I was trying to get up, or trying to turn away and avoid the conversation or something. I'm not really sure what he thought I was trying to do. But it was definitely the opposite of what was actually happening.

I know because he suddenly sat forward like he wanted to slap some sense into me. "What the fuck is wrong with you Natasha? I can't believe I never saw it before, but you really like drama. You live for that shit. Stringing me along, stringing him along. You like that shit."

I shook my head no, tears flooding my eyes. Not now. Let's not do this right now. The baby was coming and I suddenly remembered an extremely long list of mistakes that I had made when it came to Kenney, but none of them were as serious as not telling him that I had started having contractions the night before. My baby had survived so much already, and he couldn't die on the way out. He just...couldn't.

Please God, no...

"Kenney," I was panicking and he knew it.

"What the hell kind of hold does he have on you, Natasha, that you keep running back to his crazy ass every. single. time? Tell me. Because I know you're not stupid. Are you? I mean...what tha fuck Natasha?"

This conversation was starting to sound way too familiar. And the last time I heard the hateful words that Kenney was spitting at me right then, I ended up with a doorknob in the eye.

I had never seen Kenney this mad in all the years that I had known him. He had never spoken to me like that before. Nowhere close to that. It hurt me all the way down to the bottom of my soul that I had just taken him there...too. Suddenly the room started to close in on me and I couldn't breathe. I needed Kenney to back up immediately, but I couldn't find the words to tell him so. All I could do was sit there and take whatever he was about to hand to me. And whatever that was...and the baby...were both coming.

Soon.

I could feel it.

"Kenney..."

I interrupted his tirade again, hoping to calm him down. I couldn't breathe. And he refused to calm down. In fact, he was getting angrier by the second. When he kept going in on me, I tried again to diffuse the situation, but I couldn't get my brain and my mouth to work together.

"Kenney..." I started fanning myself with my hand. It was suddenly too hot in the room. "Please...Kenney..."

This was exactly what had taken me so long to talk to him...about any of it. This right here was exactly what I had been afraid of the whole time that we had been living together. It was why I tried so hard to keep his feelings at bay. Why I tried so hard to keep my own feelings at bay... This. And despite all of my pushing Kenney away all this time, when the only thing that I ever really wanted to do was hold him close, this was all coming to a head. Now. At the worst possible moment in the history of moments.

This.

My heart shattered into a million pieces right then.

And there was nothing that I could do about it.

"Fuck that, Tashi. Kenney my ass. You always call my name and get all hysterical when I strike a nerve. You know I can't take seeing you like that, but fuck that. This time I'm staying on your ass because I might just save your life. Collin is a ma' fuckin' fool, Natasha, and you know it. No matter what type of shit he's whisperin' to you in your ear late at night...and don't tell me you haven't been talking to him because I know you have...you know it's bullshit. You know he's lying to you, you know he's crazy as fuck, and you know he's not so different that his threat is not still very much real. What the fuck is wrong with you Natasha? Help me understand why the fuck you keep going back to him. I just don't understand this shit." He slammed his hands down on the table in front of me and stood up.

In my mind, he was jumping at me.

I was startled into saying something, anything, and the only thing that came out was "Oh my God, help me!"

"What...?" I'm not sure what part of that sentence reeled Kenney back in, but he kind of stopped and looked at me differently, like he was taking all of me in. "Natasha, who...are you talking to?"

It was a weird thing to ask, like he was pretty sure that I wasn't talking to God, but there was no one else in the room. And if I was talking to God, who could I have been asking God to save me from...? From him? Couldn't possibly be from him...

I could read all of that in Kenney's devastated face, in the way that he immediately gave me space, in the way that his huge eyes were staring at me, and in the way that he suddenly looked incredibly disappointed in himself.

"Natasha," he put up a hand like he was keeping me from coming any closer toward him. "For the last time, I'm not going to hurt you. I would never put my hands on you. I'll never do that to you."

He looked more irritated than anything else. But he also looked like I had just made him do something that he never in his life wanted to do. I had seen that look before. Too many times. In Collin...

"Tashi, it's so messed up how this guy has you thinking that you're always in danger. Always under attack. Before God, the same exact God that you're calling on right now to protect you from me of all people, and the same exact God that Collin had you thinking didn't even exist, I was not going to touch you." He took another step back away from me and put his other hand up, then turned his palms toward the ceiling like he was standing before an invisible judge and pleading his case. "For the last time. I would never do what he does to you."

"Kenney..."

"Natasha," he folded his hands together in front of him. It made him look oddly like...a gangster. I had never seen him look that way before. "Natasha," he began again, looking directly into my eyes. "You got me fucked up. I told you when I first met you that I'm not the one. And I still mean that. I may have fallen in love with you, but I still can't tolerate this type of shit in my space. I really can't deal with it. I love you. I love you so much, Tashi, that it physically hurts. But I'm still that same dude you met way back then. Not one thing about me has changed."

I was crushed. It was like we were breaking up, and I was going into labor...at the same damn time.

"Kenney, take me to the hospital." And just as I said it, my water broke.