21. Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-One
Mia
O ne of the things I loved about Tyler was the space he gave. He never tried to crowd or force me to tell him things I didn’t want to deal with. Sometimes, I wished I was more like that.
“I need you to tell me again.” I lay in our bed at the train station, staring at the ceiling and cupping my stomach. Now that we slept together, curled around each other like cats, Sunday was my favorite day. He never went to the shop, and I rarely bothered to write unless inspiration struck like lightning. “But you need to mean it this time.”
Tyler laughed, and then he peered down at me. “I meant it the last time.” His eyes danced.
“Yeah, but you were laughing, so it didn’t sound like you meant it.”
“You asked me if you looked like a manatee. I don’t even know how you’d come up with a comparison like that.”
“It was either that, or like… I don’t know…a hippo? Except, I don’t have a tail that shotguns shit, so that comparison is unrealistic.”
“That’s why the comparison is unrealistic? You look nothing like a manatee or a hippo. You’re not that big. You might feel that big, but you’re not.”
“It’s like someone blew up a beach ball in my uterus.”
“Maybe a basketball, not a beach ball. ”
“When you imagined your life, did it look like this?” With a sigh, I turned my head to look at him.
“Are you still joking, or is that a serious question?” The smile slipped from his face.
“Serious.” I tangled my fingers with his. “When you were my age, what’d you think your life would be like at your age now?”
“Well…” He glanced up at the ceiling and released a long breath. Propping his head up with his hand, he rubbed my bare belly in slow circles. “In my head, it looked a lot like the other week at the gala.”
“What?” I cupped his cheek, forcing him to meet my gaze. He’d hinted at his former dreams the night we talked about Katie, but I hadn’t realized he wanted that level of fame.
“I wanted to design kick-ass clothing that people loved, or that transformed people on stage.”
“What else?” There was an and ; I could feel it.
He stared down at me for a long time, and the air began to hum. The baby was taking over, dominating me body and soul. When he looked like this, I loved him, loved him so much. The emotion caused my chest to ache, caused my heart to beat unevenly with the fear and excitement of speaking those words. But saying them would be a lie, so I pressed my lips together, willing them to stay in. This sweeping, soul-deep feeling made me glad it was the baby and not me. I’d never survive loving someone this much, this intensely. This couldn’t be regular romantic love, the kind everyone experienced.
“What’s your best childhood memory?” He traced the side of my face with his finger.
“Hmm.” I tapped my lips with a manicured nail. Tyler had learned how to put on and take off gel nails once I couldn’t leave the house. “ Learning to play the piano with my grandmother. My dad’s mom. Singing with her, too. She’s the reason I know how to do anything. I spent every day after school with her until I was twelve.”
“What happened when you were twelve?”
Tears pricked at my eyes, and I blinked them back. There had been no weird cravings, no ferocious mood swings, just this liquid seeping from my eyes all the time. Like the tears I refused to shed for years were leaking out, one random conversation at a time. “She died. Heart attack.”
“What was her name?” He brushed his lips against my temple, my forehead, and then my mouth.
“Victoria.” I ran my fingers along the tips of his hair. “She’s the reason I love music so much, the reason I started writing songs. I had all this grief and nowhere to put it. My mom was too busy working, and since I was twelve, I was old enough to look after myself. My dad, well, he’s never been much good and only got worse after my grandma died.”
With a tenderness that made my stomach swoop low, he wiped away my tears. “I know you can’t control it, but, God, it twists my gut in knots to see you crying.”
“You might need an antacid or two for that.” With a soft laugh, I cupped his neck and pulled him down for a kiss.
“Or a whole bottle.” He left my mouth and trailed kisses down to my beach ball before putting his ear against my stomach, his hands on either side of my bump.
If we were really having this baby together, it would be cute, adorable even. There were a few moments where his excitement for the baby was almost contagious. Almost. But this baby wasn’t mine. It was his.
“I think it’s a girl.” He glanced up. “My money is on a girl.”
“Nope. It’s a boy. Has to be. ”
“Why do you always say it has to be?” Tyler laughed and came back to lie beside me.
“Because it’s my body, and I’m telling that thing in there to grow a penis already. It’s not a place for girls to grow.”
He tried to catch my gaze, but I pretended to examine my nails. Since I’d arrived in Little Falls, I wasn’t as tempted to bite them. Actually, since I turned up at Tyler’s shop, I hadn’t felt the same desperate need to devour them. Strange.
“Is this because of everything that’s happened to you?” His voice was quiet, and he picked at the blanket between us.
“I don’t want a girl for a lot of reasons. Stuff you know nothing about.” I hadn’t thrown up walls between us in a long time. He got the most authentic version of me. Some topics were off-limits, and I liked that he didn’t pry. I’d never had to tell him to leave a subject alone.
“Will you tell me?”
“You want me to relive my traumas with you? No, thanks. I think I’d rather slit my wrists.”
“Mia—”
“I should go get some writing done.” I threw back the covers from my legs and struggled to get up. More tears formed a stream down my cheeks when I realized I couldn’t get up. He put a gentle hand on my arm and helped me sit up. “I can’t even storm out of here.”
“Do you want me to help you slam the door?” A touch of amusement lit his face.
“That’s not funny. You’re not funny.” With my fist, I punched his arm lightly.
“Come on,” he said. “It was a little bit funny. ”
Maybe it was, but I was rattled about my reaction to him asking for this piece of my past. Every time I asked him to do something for me, he did it.
Don’t talk to Katie. Done. Don’t look at the baby’s sex even though you really want to know. Done. Make me a dress and attend this really fancy party. Done. Move all your shit to the train station to shack up with me. Done.
When I thought about his sacrifices, I knew I was really fucking selfish. Yet another reason why I’d be a terrible parent.
With a headshake, I pushed myself off the bed and grabbed a robe from the walk-in closet. “Someday, I’ll tell you, okay? Not today. But I promise I’ll tell you someday.” If I gave birth to a girl, I’d tell him everything, every terrible detail so he’d know how bad the world could be, how dangerous it was to be a woman. There was no doubt in my mind he’d protect the baby; he’d already done everything to keep me safe.
But the baby was a boy. It had to be.
“I didn’t mean to push, Mia.”
“Yeah, you did. But I didn’t need to be a bitch about it. It’s fine.” I opened the door to our master suite, which led to the kitchen. Pasha was already sitting at the island, drinking his coffee, eating his breakfast, and reading the weekend paper.
It was almost July. The countdown was on. From now until the baby was born, I’d be seeing Dr. David and possibly Katie every week. There was still tension between Tyler and Katie, but all of it flowed out of Katie now, as though Tyler had somehow made peace with whatever was or wasn’t between them. A few times, I considered requesting a different nurse. But more people meant more risk, and Katie was competent. I just hated their complicated history and unfinished business, at least whatever that was in Katie’s mind.
Often, I worried Tyler and Katie would reconnect when I left. The thought whirled around whenever I let it in. The idea made my stomach drop out, as though I was free-falling out of a plane. The idea I’d be so easy for Tyler to replace was deeply depressing.
From the bedroom, Tyler appeared fully dressed as I spooned some granola and yogurt into a bowl and added fresh berries.
“Em just texted and asked me to pick up Amir from a friend’s place.”
“Oh, yeah?” I slid the yogurt tub back into the fridge. “Are you bringing him here?”
“Just for the morning. She’s got stuff going on.”
Around my spoon, I smiled. He was always doing stuff for his family—taking a meeting for Maggie, walking Grady’s dogs, picking up Amir from one thing or another, getting quotes to fix his mom’s driveway. His commitment to all the important people in his life was unwavering. Katie had been an idiot to leave him.
From the shelf by the door, he grabbed his keys and was gone.
“You two fight?” Pasha cut into his egg and deposited the piece onto his toast.
With a frown, I turned to face him. “Not exactly. Why?”
“Weird feeling.” He made a circular motion in the air with his knife.
“Yeah, well, he asked me to talk about something I didn’t want to talk about.”
“He do things for you all time.”
“So what?” I shot him an irritated glare. “I’m just supposed to lay myself bare to him?”
“I think you do already.” He chuckled and sipped his coffee .
“Uh, not emotionally.” I made a back-and-forth motion with my hand. “He and I have an agreement. Whatever is going on isn’t emotional.”
Pasha rolled his eyes, actually rolled his eyes. “He love you. You love him. Have baby. Be happy.”
I shook my head and shoveled a spoonful of granola and yogurt into my mouth, chewing slowly. Once I swallowed, I said, “I don’t love him. The baby loves him.”
The coffee cup was at his lips when I spoke, and he sputtered, spilling coffee on the island. A string of Russian flew out of his mouth, and the look on his face was full of disbelief.
“I mean,” I conceded, “sometimes, I think I might love him a little bit too. That maybe it’s not all baby hormones.” I stared into my bowl and then glanced at Pasha. “I’m going to tell you something, but you’re not allowed to think I’m a bad person.”
He frowned while he wiped the counter with a cloth. “Okay.”
I took a deep breath and wondered if I could really speak the thought aloud. It was a new one, a crazy one. The only other person I’d told was Sarah. “I wish it was possible to keep Tyler, you know, as my boyfriend, without having to be a mother to this thing.” I pointed to my enormous belly.
Pasha reached for my phone and turned on my translating app. I always knew we were getting into a serious discussion when broken English wasn’t enough. Sometimes, I got a lecture, and sometimes, I got understanding. He spent more time with me and Tyler than anyone else. I trusted his judgment.
“You don’t like kids?” The robotic voice was the newest app we’d discovered that did close to real-time translations. Pasha had said the only thing better would be hooking up something directly to his brain. The visual had been disturbing, and I’d told him never to mention it again.
“I like kids. Other people’s kids, mostly.” I stirred my granola, swirling it around the berries. Not that I’d been around a lot of kids. “I’m only twenty-one. What do I know about being a mom?”
“Lots of women are mothers at twenty-one.”
“Maybe they had a better role model to start with.” I shrugged, avoiding eye contact. “I don’t think I could protect a child.”
“Why?”
I recognized the Russian word before the app translated. A good question, one I wasn’t sure I knew how to answer. No one protected me, and I suspected I would be just as terrible with a child.
“In all seriousness, if you think Tyler loves me, do you think I could ask him to put the baby up for adoption and keep me instead?” My heart hammered in my chest. I couldn’t believe I voiced the thought out loud. I’d danced around the idea with Sarah, who fluffed me off as being a romantic instead of a realist. If allowing a husband to cheat constantly was being a realist, I didn’t want her version of real life. I would rather live in the land of romantic notions.
Pasha shot me an annoyed look and shook his head. He stuck his fork into his egg and sliced through it with the knife, driving the piece into his mouth. When he’d finished chewing, he stared at me until I started to squirm.
“It was a dumb question, I guess.”
“It’s an impossible choice.” He sighed and rubbed his face. “Don’t ask him to do that. It’s not fair.”
The sight of the food in my bowl turned my stomach. With my spoon, I scraped it into the garbage and rinsed it out before depositing it in the dishwasher. “So, I guess I just have to hope all these feelings really are the baby, huh?” When I turned to look at Pasha, his eyes were filled with sympathy.
“You need to talk to someone about all the things that have happened to you, the reasons you think you can’t do this.”
I frowned at the translation app on my phone and shook my head. The only good thing about waiting for my phone to spit out his words in English was the chance to avoid eye contact. “Like therapy or some shit? Uh, no. That sounds like a terrible idea. Let’s take every bad thing that’s ever happened to me and hold it up to a microscope to dissect. No. Nope. Not gonna happen.”
“You like being unhappy?”
With my index finger, I pressed end on the translation app and glared at Pasha. “For the record, I wasn’t unhappy before I met Tyler. I was fine. I’ll be fine after this baby is born and I leave this nowhere town. You know when I wasn’t fine? When I was stuck in a nowhere town dirt poor in an area that barely passed for livable.” That was my mother’s narrative, not mine. Deep down, I didn’t remember my life as being terrible before I became famous. My mother always insisted it was awful, the worst, nothing worse than being poor. I’d never been sure that was true, but I didn’t need my bodyguard taking me to task about being happy . My jaw clenched in defiance. “What would you know about being happy anyway? All you do is work for me. No life beyond this.” I threw out my arms.
“I happy once. Long time ago.” He stared into his coffee cup. “She die. I leave Russia.”
“Oh.” All the anger rushed out as I breathed the word. “Oh, I…God, I’m an asshole. I’m sorry. ”
“When you happy, you—” He clenched his fingers around the cup. “Hold on.”
“I can’t love this baby. I don’t feel anything.” With both hands, I rubbed my face and sighed. “It’s just a thing growing inside me. I…I’d be a terrible mom.” Tears sprung to my eyes. “I know what it’s like to have a terrible mom. I don’t ever want to do that to someone else.”
“Maybe—”
“No.” I shook my head and met his sympathetic gaze. “You’re right. I made a deal with Tyler, a promise. I can’t go back on it just because I think I might have feelings. When the baby is born, maybe I’ll realize all the things I think I feel aren’t real. Hormones. Just lots of hormones. Then what? I’ll have asked him to do the unthinkable, and it’ll turn out I didn’t really mean it.”
He pursed his lips, but didn’t say anything as he rose and took his plate and cup to the sink. As he wandered past, he patted my shoulder.
Whether he believed me or not didn’t matter. Even if I could go the distance with Tyler, I could never love this baby. That kind of love just wasn’t in me.