26. Ashton
Ashton
That’s the whole message. She doesn’t ask me to come, doesn’t ask me not to. She gives me a time and an address and leaves the rest with me. She’s opening the door an inch and watching to see if I push through it or stand outside being polite about it.
I’m there by ten to nine.
The waiting room is small and plain, the sort of place I’ve spent my whole life building my way out of.
There’s a fish tank with a plastic castle in it, a water cooler, a TV bolted up high running some morning show with the sound off.
The chairs are screwed together in rows so nobody can drag one loose.
A woman across from me chews a pen over a crossword, a young couple bends over one phone between them, and not a single person in here has any idea who I am, or that I’m worth more than this clinic earns in a year.
It’s the most normal room I’ve been in for months. I sit in it and I don’t hate it.
The door by the desk opens, and Imogen comes through it.
She stops short when she sees me. She sent the text, so she knew I might turn up, but knowing it and finding me in the chair aren’t the same thing, and I watch her work out whether she’s glad.
She’s in jeans and a sweater with the sleeves shoved up, hair pushed back off her face, none of the armor she usually keeps between us.
“You’re early,” she says.
“I’m always early.”
“This is past early. This is a man who slept in the parking lot.” She drops into the chair beside me, not the one across, braces a hand on her knee. “I almost didn’t send it.”
“I know.”
“But I did, so don’t make it a thing.”
“I didn’t plan to.”
“Then why are you wearing a tie?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. Habit, I think. I got dressed at six like it was a work morning.” I pull it loose, work it off, fold it into my coat pocket.
“Better,” she says, and looks at the fish tank.
“Better,” I agree.
A nurse calls Imogen’s name off a clipboard, and we both stand. There’s a half-second where neither of us knows if I’m meant to follow her in, but then she nods, and I go.
The room past it is dim, warm, and barely bigger than the bed in the middle of it.
There’s a screen on a swing arm, a machine with a wand resting in a cradle, and a strip of paper running down the center of the bed.
Imogen lies back, pulls the hem of her sweater up, and the tech squeezes gel onto her stomach.
“Cold,” she says, sucking a breath through her teeth. “Why is it always cold? Forty years of this machine and nobody’s thought to warm the stuff up.”
“I could buy the building and have somebody warm it for next time.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“You’d be amazed how often I hear that one,” the tech says, pressing the wand down and working it across her belly. “Let’s have a look.”
She turns a dial, and the room fills with sound.
It’s fast, far too fast, a small frantic gallop going harder than any heart should be allowed to run, filling the dark like rain on a tin roof.
I know what it is before she says the word.
My throat closes up, and I put a hand on the rail of the bed to keep myself from showing it.
“There’s your heartbeat. Strong and regular, right on schedule for the dates.
” She holds the wand still so the sound keeps coming, then shifts it a fraction and the gray on the screen moves with it.
“See that little flicker there? That’s the heart, beating away.
Measuring right on track. Everything’s just how it should be this early. ”
Imogen’s gone quiet beside me. I glance over and her eyes are fixed on the screen, wet at the corners, her jaw working hard to hold the rest of it back. There’s no line ready, no joke loaded to take the weight off, just her face lit blue by the screen as she watches a gray smudge make that sound.
Her hand comes off the bed and finds mine on the rail. She doesn’t turn her head when she does it. Her fingers slide between mine and hold on.
The tech freezes the screen, takes her measurements, prints a strip of small gray pictures, and hands them over. The sound cuts out, and the place goes back to being an ordinary room.
Imogen lets go of my hand to wipe the gel off her stomach with a paper towel, pulls her sweater back down, and the rest of the world comes back in around us.
We don’t say much on the way out. She slides the photo strip into the inside pocket of her bag, zips it shut, and holds the bag against her side.
We ride the elevator down with a man carrying flowers and a kid with a balloon, then step out into the lot under a gray sky, the cold coming off the river two streets over.
She stops at the edge of the asphalt, and I stop with her. She winds the bag strap around her fist, glances out at the cars, then back at me.
“That doesn’t fix it,” she says. “I want to be clear about that before you read too much into it. Today doesn’t change what you did, and it doesn’t mean we’re okay. I need you to hear that now, because I know you, and you’re going to go home and make it into something it isn’t.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” I hold her eyes. “I’m not going to push. I’m not going to send you a terms sheet. I’m just going to show up when you tell me to show up, and stay away when you need me to stay away, and try to be someone worth trusting for however long it takes.”
She looks at me for a long moment. “That’s a very un-Ashton answer.”
“I’m working on it.”
She studies me, the gray light dull on her face, the cold pinking the end of her nose. I wait for her to turn for a cab, square her shoulders, and walk back into the arrangement where I’m her boss and the father of the kid she teaches.
She doesn’t move yet, and instead, her hand finds mine again, down at our sides where nobody walking past would catch it. Her fingers close around mine, and she squeezes. It isn’t long, three seconds at most, but she’s the one who reached for it, and she’s the one not letting go.
Then she lets go and steps back, and that’s the end of it.
I stand there until she’s in a cab and the cab is gone, and then I stand there a little longer, with the cold off the river and the photo strip she didn’t give me and a heartbeat I’m going to be hearing in every quiet room for the rest of my life.