The breathing was helping to bring my heart rate back to earth. I noticed my skin start to cool down as I kept my eyes closed and focused on the feeling of the air rushing past my nostrils. It felt good to be silent and still, to not have to study or clean or anything. Just sit. Just breathe.
Suddenly, something jabbed inside my stomach. It felt like the whole thing just lurched, like a muscle spasm or someone poking me from the inside. I bolted upright in surprise. Just then, I heard a flush and the door to my bathroom opened. Lori flounced in. She took one look at the startled expression on my face and her eyes narrowed right away.
“Are you okay, Carmen?” she asked with concern.
I stammered to find words. “I’m, uh, yeah. I’m fine. It’s just, um, a cramp. That’s all.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah,” I said, managing to find some confidence to inject in my voice. “Totally fine. I’m gonna go to the bathroom, though.”
“Okay,” she said. She shrugged and flopped onto my bed, then picked up a magazine and started leafing through it. I clambered out of the desk chair and wound my way between the piles of clothing on the floor. Stepping into the bathroom, I shut the door behind me.
I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes were wide and scared. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt a jolt like that, but it was the hardest one yet. I’d never felt anything like that until recently. And I was beginning to lose track of how many nights I’d spent sleepless in bed, counting up the number of weeks it had been since the party where I met Ben.
I hadn’t told Lori the full story. She was stunned enough that I’d taken Ben up on his motorcycle ride. For some reason, I didn’t want her to know everything that had happened after that. It seemed like a private thing, just for him and me to share and no one else. Maybe I just wanted to hold onto something between us. I couldn’t imagine he was doing the same.
At the time, it had felt so special, so unique. The way he looked at me, the way his hands and mouth grazed over my skin—I’d never had a moment that felt more real than reality. But with Ben, the whole night had taken on this otherworldly quality. I couldn’t shake it.
Yet in the four months since then, I started to doubt my memories more and more. He was a biker, a bad boy, a fuck-and-leave kind of guy. He sure as heck wasn’t sitting around reminiscing fondly about the wonderful lovemaking we’d shared. No, there was exactly zero percent chance that that was happening. More than likely, he was already onto the next girl, or the next dozen as the case may be. I was long gone from his rearview mirror. I’d be surprised if he even remembered my name.
It might have been the embarrassment of feeling so attached to a memory that he surely didn’t care about that kept me from sharing all of the details with my best friend. That would certainly have been a reasonable explanation, at least in my eyes.
But there was more to it. There were the symptoms.
Anyone who’d ever taken a sex ed class or seen a soap opera knew the signs. Nausea? Mood swings? Sudden pangs in the abdomen? I’d been fooling myself into believing that it was a physical reaction to the consequences of being discovered by my father, but deep down, I knew better. I knew the truth.
I was pregnant.
Chapter Ten
Ben
I raised my hand and knocked on the door. It was a crummy apartment building, infested with rats and the various low-life scum who populated a place like this on the shitter side of town. The decal on the door read 233.
I crossed my hands in front of me and waited patiently. A few moments later, the door opened, and a woman greeted me. She was small and had pale blonde hair tucked up into a bandana on her head. Her dress might have been pretty once, printed with colorful flowers, but the brightness of the fabric had faded away over the years. I noticed frayed threads poking out from the edges of the garment.
“Hey, Dina,” I said. “Hope it’s all right if I drop in on you like this. I was in your neck of the woods, and I thought I’d swing by and say hello.”
She smiled, though it didn’t quite reach her eyes. Poor woman. She looked so worn through, like an old dishrag that needed to get thrown away soon. There were bags under her eyes that looked heavy and immovable. “Hello, Ben,” she said. Her accent had gradually lost its edges since she’d first come to the city, but if I listened closely, I could still hear the harsh Russian grate on some of her vowels. She opened her arms to give me a hug. I leaned down to let her and she gave me a soft, friendly kiss on the cheek. “It is good to see you. Please, come in.” She stepped aside to let me into the apartment.