Chapter Nine

CHAPTER NINE

Zarah

A s the scenery races by, doubt and unease crowd me. I wish Jerricka wouldn’t have thrown my phone out the window, but I won’t be able to text Gage every five minutes or check to see if he’s texted me. By now Zane will have told him my message, and I wonder if that will be the last straw. He can’t be happy with me and the wishy-washy way I treat our relationship.

Maybe I don’t want to know what he has to say after all.

Jerricka glances at me. She’s declined two calls since we set out. She doesn’t speak, and as the miles fly by and she keeps her mouth shut, I force myself to relax. I know this is the right thing to do, but I couldn’t handle her starting in on me so soon. I need a moment to come to terms with the fact that what I’m doing could all be for nothing.

Well, not nothing. If Gage leaves me over this, I’ll date again one day, won’t I? Maybe. It hurts too much to think about. But even if I stay single for the rest of life, Jerricka’s time will help me in other ways.

The city melts away, and all I can see is miles of empty, barren field. We’re headed toward Spring Lake, but there are so many smaller bodies of water in this area that it may not be where her house is located. It doesn’t matter. A lake is a lake, and it will be frozen over.

“Have you been taking your medication?” she asks, reaching out to hold my hand.

“No. You said it wasn’t safe for pregnancy, and I don’t know if I am.”

She squeezes my fingers until the bones rub together. “We’ll give you a test. It’s important that you stay on any medication I prescribe.”

“Would I be far enough along to take one? It’s been barely two weeks.”

“Not a urine test. We’ll draw blood.”

“Oh.”

If Gage dumps me, I guess it would be better to know.

It’s stupid, but I miss him. Miss his soft flannel shirts, the way his beard scratches at my skin. Especially when he’s between my legs, licking me. I never had it so good than when he ate me out while I was sitting on the vanity in the bathroom. The way he pushed his fingers inside me, twisting them as he sucked on my clit. I came so hard my cum ran down his wrist. It was the sexiest thing I have ever seen.

A whimper escapes from the back of my throat. His hands on me is what I live for. His kisses keep me alive.

“It’s going to be okay, Zarah. I promise. You’re doing the right thing.”

She always says that, but it never feels like it is. What feels like the right thing is believing Gage when he says he loves me the way I am. Believing him when he says he wants us to build a life together while we cuddle under the covers in the dark after making love. Believing him when he says he’ll never leave me.

Those things feel right, letting myself go and trusting he’ll be there to catch me when I fall. He’s never not come for me when I called.

Heartsick, I doze as she drives.

She sharply turns a corner, jostling me against the door, and I blink the fogginess out of my brain. A huge lake house looms through the trees, the second-story windows sparkling in the setting sun. According to the clock on the dash, we’ve been driving for more than four hours. Four hours on the road, in a direction I lost when I fell asleep. Apprehension wiggles in my gut. We’re all alone out here.

There’s no way I can go home if she won’t drive me back.

I swallow. We didn’t stop for something to eat or anything to drink, and she never asked if I had to go to the bathroom. My bladder feels ready to burst.

She smiles and coasts the rest of the way into the drive, rock and ice crunching under the tires. The lake is a snow-covered sheet beyond the house, and there’s no sign of another cabin, another person, anywhere.

“Let’s get your bags inside. I have the perfect bedroom in mind for you. It has its own clawfoot bathtub in the bathroom. Perhaps not what you’re used to, but we’ll make it work.” Killing the engine, she turns to me. “I’m happy you’re here, Zarah.”

She kisses my cheek, and the scent of her perfume, while it has never bothered me before, queasily churns my stomach.

I slide out of the truck, and she leaves me to carry my suitcases up the porch and into the house by myself. Is this when the lessons start? She never seemed to resent my money, but maybe now that we’re alone her jealousy will seep out. It usually does with anyone I meet.

Not Stella, though. She disliked the way we lived, and it helped me grow close to her, knowing it was our friendship she valued and not anything else. Gage never cared, never asked me for a dime. The kitchen table was my idea, and I didn’t realize until afterward, but his auto insurance covered most of his new truck. He let Zane take care of the difference between what his insurance company paid and the kind of truck my brother wanted him to buy. Otherwise, had Gage chosen a more conservative truck, he wouldn’t have needed Zane’s money at all.

When I asked what I could give him, all he said he wanted was a vacation so we could be together. To love me as the fish swam beneath us.

I already miss him so much, and I saw him just last night. Two weeks without him seems like an eternity.

“This is the downstairs. The living room, and the kitchen is through those doors. Feel free to look around and to help yourself to anything you want—food, books—there’s a TV in the den at the back of the house. We’ll be spending a lot of time together, but you’ll have some time alone, too. If you go outside, please let me know. I don’t want you to get turned around out there.” She smiles, and I don’t detect anything other than concern and hospitality.

Maybe I imagined her prickliness because I don’t want to be here.

“You can take your jacket and boots off. I’ll show you the upstairs.”

I unzip my boots and hang my jacket in a closet that’s almost empty. No one lives here full-time. We pay Jerricka a lot of money in fees, and she has several other high-profile clients. She can well afford a place like this and to hire a caretaker to keep it up all year round.

I grasp the handle of one suitcase—this time she carries the other—and she leads me up the stairs. It’s a very pretty house. Light and airy, watercolor prints hanging on the walls. Something my mother would have found pleasure in. Sometimes thoughts of her come out of nowhere and pierce my heart. I miss her terribly, and I wipe a tear off my cheek. I don’t want Jerricka to notice me crying.

She tilts her head to a bedroom on the left and I step inside. The king bed fills half the room, and a huge dresser uses up most of the remaining space. The windows look over the snowy woods, and the red and grey squirrels scampering along the bare branches remind me of Baby and Gage and our walks.

“I think you’ll be comfortable here,” she says, poking me, wanting a reaction.

“Yes, it’s nice, thank you.”

My heart isn’t in this at all.

“Why don’t you freshen up, then meet me in the kitchen. We’ll do the blood test right away. Whether or not you’re pregnant will determine how my treatment plan will go during these next two weeks.”

“All right.”

She backs away and shuts the door, leaving me standing alone, afraid and unsure.

Make the best of it. She convinced me to do this, now I need to use the time she’s giving me. Maybe the medication she prescribed can get my jumbled thoughts under control, even if that seems counterproductive to Dr. Reagan weaning me off what Ash hooked my body on.

I haven’t had a lapse since the courthouse the evening Zane and Stella got married, but when Jerricka asks how I’m doing, I’ll tell her that I still have holes in my long-term memory. While I don’t want to remember the way Ash’s jobs treated me or the evil things the doctors did to me at Quiet Meadows, it’s better to remember every vile, gory detail than let my brain suppress what happened.

I can deal with what I know.

I can only hide from what I don’t.

After I use the bathroom, I find Jerricka in the kitchen letting a bottle of wine breathe on the counter. She changed out of her dress into jeans and a sweater. I’ve never seen her look so casual.

“Are you married?” I ask, stepping farther into the room.

She’s fiddling with a syringe and a glass vial that has yellow goop at the bottom of it. Because of my time at Quiet Meadows and Dr. Reagan lowering my medication dosages, I’ve had enough blood drawn over the years that the process is very familiar. Needles don’t bother me. I would be a very unhappy patient if they did.

Smiling thinly, she says, “No. I was engaged once. He cheated on me. He tried to hide it, but I found out and broke it off. If a man can’t be faithful before he’s said his vows, chances of fidelity during marriage are slim. I’m seeing someone now, and he’s a better match. We have the same vision of what we want our future to be.”

“I’m sorry about your fiancé. How did you find out?”

She lifts a shoulder. “We work in the same profession and I heard about it through gossip.”

“Do they still see each other?”

“Not that I’m aware. Possibly. She’s married, but her husband cheats on her too.”

“What’s the point of getting married if you’re going to do that to each other?”

She gestures to the kitchen table, and I sit. She unbuttons the dainty pearl button at my cuff and rolls the sleeve above my elbow. Her fingers skim over my skin, and goosebumps dance up and down my arm.

“Do you remember the one thing I always say about sex?”

“Sex is about power.”

I say the words by rote. It’s something Jerricka says whenever we’re talking about my past and Ash’s jobs, but the more she asks me to repeat it and the closer Gage and I become, the less I believe her. Rape may be about power, the kinds of things that Ash’s jobs did to me, but sex isn’t only about power. Sex can be about love.

Maybe Jerricka’s never made love, and if that’s true, I feel very sorry for her because there’s nothing that will ever compare to Gage wrapping his arms around me, sliding inside me, and telling me he loves me. Nothing.

Na?ve, inexperienced, confused, I’ve always believed she knew what she was talking about, and to her credit, almost everything we’ve discussed in my sessions has proven to be correct.

Not this time.

“Yes. Sex is power. My fiancé loved me, I have no doubt about that, but he wanted the power he felt fucking another woman and it made him feel powerful to think he was getting something over on me. It made him feel powerful he could sweet-talk a married woman into spreading her legs.”

“How do you know he loved you?” I ask curiously. “That he wasn’t just saying it?”

People can say anything, but you can’t know what’s truth or a lie unless you have actions behind the words. Gage loves me, but he doesn’t have to say it at all for me to know it’s true. He rescued me, just like Stella, and that’s all I need to believe.

“Because when I asked him to do something he didn’t want to do, he did it anyway.”

She ties the blue rubber strip around my bicep and taps on my veins, finding the one she needs. I barely pay attention—I’ve gone through this so many times—but it might hurt if she doesn’t know what she’s doing. I’ve had nurses so skilled they drew blood while we talked and I had no clue they were doing it until it was done.

“Did he get tired of that?” I ask as she uses an alcohol swab to disinfect my skin. “He cheated on you and you broke your engagement. He’s not doing what you want him to do now, is he? Maybe he didn’t love you as much as you think he did.”

“This will pinch,” she warns, pressing the needle to my skin.

I look at her expectantly, waiting for her to praise my brilliant deductive reasoning. I’m actually proud of myself for coming up with that. It’s not that I want to best Jerricka at a game of common sense, but during our sessions when I continually felt like a dog chasing my own tail, getting one up on her is somewhat exhilarating.

I didn’t know she’d make me pay for it.

She jams the needle into my vein, and I gasp. “Ouch.”

“I told you it would pinch.” Blood begins to trickle into the tube. “And you’re wrong. He did love me, but our visions of our future together failed to mesh. That’s why he cheated. We wanted different things. As I said, I’m seeing someone now who appreciates my professional goals. I wanted more and always have. That’s why you’re here, Zarah. You’re going to help me put our studies on the map.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Do you think this started when your brother pulled you out of Quiet Meadows?” She scoffs. “I think not. Ashton Black had foresight. He had innovation and drive. He knew where we wanted to go, and he helped lead us there. He convinced your brother to give him power of attorney and said we could do whatever we liked to you.”

She lowers herself onto the chair in front of me, slides the needle out of my arm, and presses a cotton ball to the small puncture wound. She secures a bandage over it and seals the tube full of my blood. Blood that will tell us if I’m carrying Gage’s baby.

“Ashton Black saw the future. He gave us your mind to help elevate our studies to heights we only dreamed possible. He gave us permission to use you however we needed to.”

She rubs her thumb over my lips, and I fight off a wave of nausea.

“And we did.”

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