Read Online Stand by Me by Sheila O'Flanagan - Free Book Online Page B

extremely funny. But she grew bored listening to Emma’s inane questions and Gabriel’s polite answers, and eventually left them alone and went up to her room, where she filed her nails and painted them with pearly pink varnish. (She was very proud of her nails. She’d stopped biting them shortly after meeting Brendan, and they were now a neat, even length.) When she came downstairs again, Emma had left. Dominique hadn’t heard her go, and she was peeved at her friend for not even bothering to say goodbye.
     
    ‘When did she leave?’ she asked Gabriel, who was still in the living room although now reading the newspaper.
     
    ‘About ten minutes ago,’ he replied.
     
    ‘And did she swear undying love to you?’
     
    He smiled. ‘It’s just a crush,’ he said. ‘She’ll find someone else.’
     
    ‘So you’d think.’ Dominique shook her head. ‘Honestly, I don’t know what she sees in you.’
     
    ‘Thanks,’ said Gabriel.
     
    ‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ Dominique said. ‘She’s really pretty and everything and at school she had all the guys panting after her, but she’s got it into her head that you’re her one true love or something.’
     
    ‘She’s lacking in self-confidence,’ said Gabriel. ‘Telling herself she’s in love with me means she doesn’t have to risk getting hurt in a real relationship.’
     
    ‘That’s a load of shite,’ Dominique told him baldly. ‘She’s not in the slightest bit lacking in self-confidence. She knows she’s gorgeous. She’s always had half a dozen different boyfriends on the go at any one time.’
     
    ‘Quantity and quality aren’t the same thing.’
     
    ‘I know that,’ said Dominique. ‘But you’re wrong about Mizz Walsh. I think she’s superconfident.’
     
    ‘You’re very naïve.’
     
    ‘No I’m not.’ Dominique made a face at him. ‘She’s my friend, not yours. And I know what she’s like.’
     
    She went out of the house and pulled the door closed behind her. She was luckier than Emma. She had a real boyfriend who was the love of her life. And later that night she’d be having great sex with him, which at the moment was something Emma Walsh could only dream about.
     
     
    It was actually easier to find pregnancy tests in the chemist’s than condoms, which had only recently become more freely available over the counter in Ireland. There was quite a choice of tests, but she just grabbed the first one off the shelf. She didn’t really believe she was pregnant. She reckoned she was just stressed because she’d chickened out of the family planning clinic again. She couldn’t understand why she was so nervous about it. It was the sensible thing to do, after all. But she hadn’t gone, and now she was late; but being pregnant simply wasn’t possible. Brendan had promised her, and he always kept his promises.
     
    They’d made love half a dozen times altogether and only once without a condom. So it must have been that one time, against the tree in the rain, that had been the one to leave her staring at the two pink lines in front of her and realising that she was going to have a baby.
     
     
    There was a part of her that didn’t believe the test, a part of her that said that it was impossible, simply impossible, for her to be pregnant. She wasn’t the right sort of person. She didn’t go to loads of parties and have flings with different boyfriends. She didn’t live the kind of life girls she thought would get pregnant lived. Girls like the Nikkis and Cara and Emma. They were the party girls. They were the ones who gambled with their futures. Not her. There had to be a mistake. She did the test again. And again. And then she did it one more time, just to be sure.
     

     
    She couldn’t breathe. She was getting ready to meet Brendan, coating her eyelashes with Maybelline Great Lash so that they appeared wider and bigger, because she knew that he liked her eyes like that, and then, quite suddenly, as she looked at