Chapter Sixteen
Lydia
The next day I walked into the office with the full intention of pretending that nothing had happened the night before. It was all too much, all too confusing, and unless someone brought it up to me, I was going to act as though Skylar had never seen us and that I hadn’t witnessed the argument between her and Gabriel. I hadn’t heard from him for the rest of the night, but part of me felt like that was a good thing. After what he had just gone through with Skylar, he wasn’t in the state of mind to do a session with me, and I doubted that he was in a place where he was going to be willing to talk about what had happened between us.
If anything had happened between us.
I had gone back over the evening over and over in my mind, repeating the scenario and everything that had happened in it. I still felt as though something were different, but there would be no way for me to bring it up, to talk to Gabriel about what I had felt, or thought that I had felt. The fact that he hadn’t answered Skylar’s question was still hanging heavily in my mind. Did that mean that the question and the concept itself of possibly caring about me were so preposterous that he didn’t feel that he even needed to answer it, or did it mean that he couldn’t find a way to admit something to her that he didn’t even want to admit to himself?
As I walked into my office, it seemed that the question had been settled for me. A vase sat on my desk, overflowing with white and red roses. I felt my breath catch in my chest and my cheeks ache as I tried to stop the smile that was stretching across my face. I walked up to the desk and reached for the note that was tucked among the blooms. I paused for a moment to lean down and take a deep breath of the flowers’ velvety fragrance before opening the card.
“You can’t be serious.”
The words on the card made my blood run cold.
“You didn’t really think that they were from him, did you?”
I nearly dropped the note in my hand at the sound of Skylar’s voice behind me. I turned around to face her and saw her leaning against the doorframe, her arms crossed over her chest as she stared at me mockingly. She pushed away from the wall to come fully into the room and closed the door behind her. She stalked across the office and stopped just a few feet from me.
“He can’t get into your office, Lydia,” she said, emphasizing each word as though she were convinced that I didn’t understand anything that she was saying. “He doesn’t have authorization, remember?”
“You aren’t supposed to, either,” I pointed out.
“I can do anything I want around here,” she said. “This is my company.” She looked at the roses and then reached for the vase, sweeping it off of the surface of the desk and into her hand. “You really are so totally blinded by him that you would think that he would send these to you, aren’t you? Well, you need to pay close attention to what I’m going to say to you.” She leaned toward me. “Gabriel doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t care about anyone or anything but himself. You aren’t special, Lydia. You aren’t remarkable. You aren’t anything. You are just another woman who fell on her knees in front of him.”
“If you hate him so much, why did you bring him here?” I asked. “And why did you put me on the project?”
“I don’t hate Gabriel,” she said. “What Gabriel and I have been through you would never understand. And I put you on the project because frankly I didn’t think that he would be attracted to you. Who would? You are plain and introverted, and your entire life revolves around your work. I’m surprised that you even found the time to act like such an utter idiot.”
“And what gives you such authority on Gabriel?” I asked. “You don’t have any idea what he’s thinking or feeling.”
“Of course, I do. I know better than you do. I know that he’s a man who will never see anything in a woman other than how much he can push her into total submission. He sees an object, another toy, something that he can mold and test and train. It doesn’t matter to him what you go through, because if you break, there are countless others who are more than happy to be your replacement. He doesn’t need you, Lydia. And he doesn’t care about you. He never did. Remember what he told you at the beginning of your arrangement.”
I felt defiant even though tears were burning at the backs of my eyes.
“What?” I asked.
“He told you that you are not in a romantic relationship. You are not, and will never be, his girlfriend. He doesn’t even allow you to talk to other people about what the two of you have done.” She gasped, miming fake horror with her fingertips coming up to cover her mouth and her eyes widening. “Oh, no! You’ve broken one of his rules. What’s going to happen when he finds out?”
“Get out of my office,” I said.
“You truly are pathetic. I’d encourage you to ask him yourself, but he’s not around today. He’s at my house, sleeping it off.” Skylar tossed the roses to the floor at my feet so that the vase shattered, and the water poured into my carpet. “Clean that up,” she said. “I know you’ll know the position you’ll need to be in.”
She stalked out of the room, closing the door behind her. I heard her lift her voice into a high, falsely cheerful tone to tell someone who was approaching that everything was fine and that some flowers had just fallen off my desk, but I had it under control. That word. Control. It sank into my brain. It rushed through my blood. It burned on my tongue. I started to crouch down to collect the roses, but dizziness suddenly hit me and as if all of the emotion and adrenaline of the morning hit me at once, I felt the world go dark around me.
When I opened my eyes again I was being wheeled down a bright white hallway and unfamiliar faces were bobbing overhead.
“What’s going on?” I asked, trying to sit up.
A hand came to my chest and eased me back to lie down again.
“Don’t try to sit up. You passed out at work and they couldn’t wake you up. We’ve transferred you to the hospital so that the doctors can check you out and make sure that you’re alright.”
I passed out? I tried to remember what happened and everything came rushing back to me. When the gurney finally turned and slid into place in a small examination room, I lifted my head again.
“Can I sit up now?” I asked.
“I think you should just keep resting,” a nurse said as she walked into the room. “We aren’t sure what’s going on.”
“It’s fine,” I told her, starting to sit up. “I just got really upset and really angry and it all just caught up with me. I’m alright.”
As soon as I was lifted enough off of the bed to recline, the dizziness hit again, and I rested back. The ceiling above me swam and I squeezed my eyes closed.
“I’m going to draw some blood and run some tests to see if we can figure out what’s causing all this, alright?”
I nodded in the direction of the nurse’s voice and a few seconds later felt her take my arm and stretch it out. She tied a rubber strap tightly around it, causing it to pinch my skin, and the tapped at the inside of my elbow, trying to coax a vein upward. I tried to ignore the sensations and the images that they conjured. That wasn’t something that I should be thinking about right now. The bite of the needle brought some clarity to my thoughts and I grimaced as I felt her draw several tubes of blood. A few moments later she was gone, and I was alone in the room, my arm still outstretched as the port now acted to send a bag of fluids through me. That seemed to be the knee-jerk reaction of hospitals no matter what was happening with a person. If there was a health complaint of virtually any kind, they started with drawing out blood and then trying to replace it with fluids.
No one else came into my room for more than an hour, then I heard a sharp knock on the door before it opened and smiling man with silver hair stepped in.
“Hi, Lydia,” he said. “It is Lydia, right?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding.
I assumed that whoever had called the ambulance when I passed out told them my name.”
“Are you sure that you don’t prefer Mommy?”
I glared at him, the words that he said not really sinking in.
“Excuse me?”
He laughed and walked to the side of the room where he opened a cabinet and pulled out a pair of gloves.
“I guess that’s going to take some getting used to, isn’t it?”
“I don’t understand.”
He looked at me with sympathy in his eyes and patted my leg.
“I ran a full course of bloodwork to try to find out what caused you to pass out. It seemed that you’re pretty healthy, so in those situations the best thing to do is to run all of the basic tests so that we can weed out the easy to find stuff first and then narrow it down from there. Well, it seems that I did find a little something.”
“I’m pregnant,” I said, the words coming out of me in a rush as my mouth seemed to find them in the same moment that my brain processed the reality.
“Yes, you are,” the doctor said.
He sounded more delighted by the minute, but I felt anything but delighted. This wasn’t possible. This couldn’t be true.
“How far along?” I asked.
“Well,” he said with another laugh, “I can’t tell that just from a blood draw, but I thought that we would do a quick ultrasound to see if that could tell us anything. Why don’t’ you go ahead and get undressed from the waist down while I get the ultrasound machine. I’ll be right back.”
He left the room and I lay in dumbfounded silence for a beat before shifting to take off my pants and slip out of my panties. They were peach satin, a pair that had caught my eye when shopping with Gabriel. I had held them to his face, stroking them over his cheek, and then he ran his tongue across them, telling me that now any time I wore them all that I should think about was his tongue tucked into my pussy.
I lay back on the bed and covered myself with the sheet just as the door opened again and the doctor returned dragging the ultrasound machine and leading the nurse. He replaced his gloves and brought a stool over beside the bed. Sitting down, he asked me to bend my knees and part my thighs. I winced slightly as he inserted the ultrasound wand. The night before hadn’t been intense enough to warrant me feeling sore and I realized with a sudden gulping feeling that it as the pregnancy making me more sensitive. I squeezed my eyes closed, willing back the tears, and silently thrashing myself for being so stupid that I hadn’t insisted Gabriel use condoms. He had only come inside me on a few occasions, but everything I had ever learned told me that even once was enough, yet somehow that hadn’t occurred to me in the moment.
“There’s your baby.”
The words silenced every thought in my mind and I opened my eyes to look at the screen. It was grey and fuzzy, but the doctor was pointing to something in the middle. It looked like a tiny curved breath mint, but it was there. It was definitely there.
“How far along?” I asked, trying to keep the emotion out of my voice.
“About six weeks. Congratulations.”
Six weeks. Six weeks. How could that be possible? How did I not realize that I had missed my period?
I realized in that moment that everything Skylar had said to me was completely true. I had completely lost myself in Gabriel and nothing else that was happening around me, with the exception of finishing the project, and barely even that, had mattered. I was too wrapped up in him to even pay enough attention to my calendar to realize that I had gone weeks past my period. He had promised me that he would be able to make me hand over my control and realize that a life that was as regimented as mine wasn’t one that would ever give me pleasure. He had done that. He had accomplished that goal in a way that I never would have expected, but in going along with it I had lost my organization, my precision.
Now I was pregnant.
Pregnant.
No matter how many times the word repeated in my mind, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. The doctor was rattling off information, giving me recommendations and telling me when I should go to the OB, but I wasn’t paying attention. Instead, my mind was seeing Skylar, the smug look on her face as she told me that she had spent the night with Gabriel and that he would never love me. I knew that it was true. I had been fooling myself for every second that I thought that anything might be different between us. It wasn’t his fault. Gabriel had been clear with me from the very beginning. He had been nothing but honest about the way that he felt about relationships and how he perceived our arrangement. Anything else had been something I constructed in my mind, and it would do me no good to cling to it.
Skylar had been right, and Gabriel had been absolute. A child was not in his plans, especially one conceived accidentally during a session. He had no intention of creating a family with anyone, and I knew that I wasn’t the type of person who would be able to accept that. As much as I couldn’t bear the thought of being without Gabriel or of raising a child on my own, in that moment I knew that that was exactly what was ahead of me. This baby had done nothing wrong. It hadn’t asked to be conceived and it certainly hadn’t selected its parents. Instead it had simply happened. It was my reality now and I had to cope with it in the best way that I could.
As I walked out of the hospital into Cheryl’s waiting car, I knew that part of coping with the pregnancy wasn’t going to include Gabriel. The wrath that I knew he would show would destroy my perception of him and would mar any thoughts of him that I ever had again, including when I eventually told my child the name of their father. I didn’t want to do that to myself or to them. I went into my apartment and gathered up as much clothing as I could fit into my suitcases. I barely had any other belongings and I tossed what I could into a couple of plastic totes. The rest I would ask my building manager to transfer into the storage closet downstairs and I would eventually be back for it. I loaded everything into my car and then went back into the apartment to say goodbye. I strolled through the rooms and then paused in the living room. I took a final look through the picture window that had once been a symbol of my adulthood, my freedom, and my accomplishments, but had become my gateway into Gabriel’s control. Forcing the thoughts out of my mind, I turned away from it and left the apartment, closing the door behind me for what felt like the final time.
I climbed into my car and started toward my mother’s house. I hoped that the fifteen-hour drive would give me time to clear my mind, to give me better perspective, and to help me find a way to explain to my mother that I was going to raise this baby on my own.