16. Keeley
KEELEY
O nce again, any hope I had for a lunch break is decimated when I have to take two “emergency” patients, and just as I’m rushing out to grab something, Trinny calls me to say Dr. Fox is stuck in traffic and needs me to take the patients who are already here waiting.
“And she was behind,” Trinny warns, “so they might be a little pissed off.”
By the time I race out of the office, I’m hungrier than any character in Les Misérables , but every fast-food place has a line around the block and I’m too fucking tired to wait or walk inside anywhere.
I go straight to my apartment without even stopping to pick up the mail, and then grab a bag of Mike and Ikes from the pantry, which is the moment Graham emerges from his room, dressed to go out.
I don’t want him staying here, obviously, but seeing him looking hot as hell in a button-down, makes me sad too.
It’s like he’s throwing my captivity in my face.
“You’re going out?”
“I’m meeting a friend,” he says, and I want to grill him the same way he did that night about Mark— 'what kind of friend?’ —but I refuse to be the one of us who turns into my father first.
“Let me guess,” he says, carefully rolling up a shirt sleeve, “you didn’t get a chance to eat again.”
There’s a small, stupid part of me that feels sorry for him.
For a micromanager like Graham, it must be excruciating to have no control over your offspring whatsoever.
Also, he’s replaced the burned-out bulbs in all the light fixtures I couldn’t reach, and the refrigerator is now full, so he’s tentatively on my good side.
“A fetus will draw from its mother as long as she has fat to burn,” I tell him, cupping my breasts. “Have you seen the size of these things? Believe me, they are not shrinking.”
His eyes dart to my chest, linger a second longer than they should, and then he shakes his head as if jarring himself. “They were hard to miss, yes. But stop going hungry anyway. You got some packages, by the way.”
“My bras!” I cry, rushing across the room, all my sadness forgotten. I rip open the first package—three profoundly expensive lace bras in beige, black and red. My rack is gonna look amazing in them.
“And here I was futilely hoping you might be attempting to save money.”
I move onto the second package. “Spare me. Hasn’t your sperm already infected me with enough enforced responsibility?”
He glances from the mountain of lingerie on the table to the candy I just set beside it. “Yes,” he says dryly, “you now appear to be the picture of responsibility.”
“ Your fuck-up does not mean you get to police my spending habits.”
“ My fuck-up? I’m pretty sure I didn’t create this situation on my own.”
“Look, my vagina is always right here,” I say, waving in its vicinity. “It’s your sperm that somehow were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m not sure how that’s my fault.”
His mouth lifts with just a hint of a smile, as if he’s remembering. And then I am too, though it’s simply fragments, like photographs being flipped through at high speed to create a movie—his weight above me, his grip on my hips, his teeth on my shoulder.
“You’re right,” he says, smirking, “I don’t recall you having much to do with it.”
Asshole .
“I’m amazing in bed. You’d be obsessed with me if you could remember it.”
And there it is, in his face again: heat, and a certain knowledge he doesn’t plan to share…which leaves me wondering if he remembers more than he’s letting on.