Chapter 9 #3
Felicity thanked him and walked out of his office in a daze.
A baby. It was the worst news she could imagine.
She’d been braced for cancer, not a baby.
It meant the end of her art career as she knew it, with a baby hanging on her all day.
How was she supposed to paint? Taylor had already told her a million times that when they had children, he expected her to take care of them herself, as his mother had.
According to Taylor, real women took care of their own children, they didn’t have nannies.
She wanted to tell her mother, but she didn’t dare.
Violet wouldn’t understand and would tell her she was an idiot for not being more careful.
She had to tell Taylor, but he wasn’t ready for a baby either.
She had nowhere to turn and felt desperate.
She could get an abortion without telling him, but what if he found out one day and hated her for it?
That didn’t seem fair to him, but she wanted to deal with it quickly.
It had shaken her to see that it already looked like a baby.
She would be killing their child if she had an abortion.
She cried all the way to her apartment in an Uber, and she sat paralyzed all day, unable to think or paint.
She waited for Taylor to come home and she didn’t know what to tell him.
She didn’t know if he’d be happy or mad.
All she knew was that this was way more than she had bargained for.
She threw up twice before he came home. Taylor was in good spirits when he arrived.
He had stopped off for drinks with friends from work, to celebrate the closing of a deal he’d been working on.
Felicity was sitting on the couch waiting for him, and he slipped a hand into her sweater and held her breast, and then grabbed both of them and squeezed hard.
Too hard. She wasn’t in the mood to play, and even less to play rough, which he liked sometimes, and she liked a lot less.
He’d only been doing that since they’d been engaged, as though her body was his now and he could do anything with it he wanted.
She had told him several times that he was too rough, but most of the time he ignored what she said, which worried her.
“I’ve been waiting to come home to these babies all day,” he said.
He buried his face in her breasts and laughed, and then bit her nipples.
Not too hard, but hard enough. It only hurt a little.
But she had bigger problems on her mind.
“What are you looking so sour about?” he asked, when he saw her face. He hadn’t looked at it before.
“I’m upset, I’m not sour.” He looked bored at the thought and lay back against the couch with his legs wide apart. She knew what he wanted. Not tonight. “I got some bad news today,” she said, fighting back tears, and he looked serious for a moment.
“Are you sick?” She hesitated for a minute. She couldn’t avoid telling him. She wanted to deal with it quickly.
“I’m pregnant,” she said in a low voice, and he stared at her as though he didn’t understand.
“You are?” She nodded. His face was a blank page she couldn’t read. “Well, that was a dumb thing to do now, before the wedding.”
“I didn’t do it by myself,” she reminded him. “We did it. And it’s very dumb.”
“Will it show at the wedding?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. It might. I’ll be four and a half months pregnant by then. I want an abortion. Now. Soon. Right away. We’re not ready for a child. I barely feel ready for marriage, let alone a baby. In October. And you’re not ready either,” she said bluntly.
“So you want to kill our child?” he asked, rage etching itself on his face.
She tried not to remember the little form with the waving hand on the sonogram screen.
She couldn’t let herself think of that. “I thought you were on the pill,” he said angrily.
She wasn’t sure if he was angry about the pregnancy or the abortion she wanted.
“I am on the pill, but I may have forgotten one. It happens sometimes.”
“If you look pregnant at the wedding, my parents will kill me,” he said, looking scared. “They’ll think you’re a slut.” It was interesting that he expected them to blame her, and not the two of them.
“The baby is yours, it’s ours. And I don’t want to look pregnant at the wedding either. I want an abortion,” she repeated. He clearly wasn’t getting that she meant it. “I want to do it right away, as soon as I can.” He poured himself a drink and paced around the room, and came back to look at her.
“I won’t let you do it. It’s my baby, you can’t kill it.”
“It will kill my art career. It will kill our life, and our marriage. We’ll be trapped with a baby we don’t want. It’s not fair to the baby either. Five years from now, it will be different.”
“Fuck your art career. If you forgot to take a pill, this is your fault, so you can give up your damn career and stay home and take care of it.” It sounded like a prison sentence to Felicity.
He wasn’t thrilled either, and he wasn’t sympathetic.
But he was absolutely definite about the abortion.
“If you kill the baby, I’ll kill you,” he said, and looked as though he meant it.
She couldn’t even break the engagement now if she decided not to marry him.
She was pregnant, and trapped. He walked right up to her then and slapped her hard across the face.
“That’s for wanting an abortion. You’re having the baby, and it better not show at the wedding.
” And with that, he slammed out of the apartment and left, and Felicity sat on the couch, touching her stinging cheek.
He had hit her hard, and there was a thin trickle of blood running down from her nose into her mouth.
It was the worst day of her life, and she wanted to die.