At Any Turn (Gaming The System) (34 page)

Chapter Nineteen

Two days after Christmas, I was back at work. I headed toward development for the daily meeting—which we called the early morning scrum—where we’d go over the subject of the newly opened Golden Mountains quest chain. On the way, I barely escaped a close encounter with the predatory interns from marketing. They gathered not far from the bathrooms. I paused, not in the mood for them to see me and start the swarm of stupid again.

This morning, I was in a pretty black place, actually, as I’d been since Christmas, between all the stress at work and having to deal with the family bullshit. Emilia had left not long after our confrontation in the hall. Peter had to console Kim. Though they hadn’t said anything, I knew they thought I’d said something to offend her and send her home early.

I hadn’t yet devised a plan of how to proceed. It all kept coming down to “wait until she quits in January, then move on.” She wanted her freedom, clearly, for whatever reason. But I was slowly beginning to accept that whatever it was that Emilia wanted, it wasn’t me.

No, that wasn’t quite true. She
did
want me. But she was scared.

Instead of doing an about-face to avoid the interns, I waited around the corner for the giggle-horde to dissipate. The one who looked like Snow White had just walked out of the bathroom. “Whoever’s in there is puking again! Like every other day this week.”

“Shh, we were waiting to see who it is,” said the blonde with all the hair. “She’s got to be pregnant or something.”

“Maybe she just binges on breakfast and now she’s purging,” said Snow White.

“Does anyone know who it is?” said a third intern I didn’t know. Who the hell hired all these interns, anyway? Why were they swarming around my complex gossiping about coworkers?

I moved into full view of them and stopped short, taking them all in. I decided to be a dick about it. “What’s going on here?” I said in a loud voice.

They turned as a unit and all jumped when they saw me; the blonde had a huge smile on her face. “Good morning, Adam! How—”

I didn’t let her get it out. Instead I made an obvious show of glancing at my watch and raised my eyebrows. “I don’t believe I’m paying you to stand around and gossip.”

Snow White sucked in a breath and she exchanged a long glance with the blonde. “Oh yeah, sorry. We were just—Yeah, let’s go.” She turned and followed the rest of the pack, all of them hightailing it out of the corridor as quickly as they could move.

I watched them go for a moment before continuing down the hallway. I was just passing the ladies’ bathroom when the door opened. I shouldn’t have looked, but when I saw that brilliant white hair out of the corner of my eye, I did a double take. Emilia came out of the bathroom with a face that was paler than the wall. She halted when she locked gazes with me, looking almost guilty.

I tried everything I could to keep the shock I was feeling from my face. Then she faked a smile and shrugged, muttered something that sounded like, “Back to work!” and turned and left me standing there, rooted to my spot. I watched her go and in my mind I replayed the conversation of the little mean-girl interns.

She’d been puking for a week, every morning? The mean girls had come to a conclusion I hadn’t yet considered—an eating disorder. But she’d eaten normally whenever I had a meal with her. And while eating dinner at my house, she had shown a lighter-than-normal appetite, but nothing anorexic. She had lost a little weight, but nothing drastic. But then—then when we’d met for dinner at the café and at Christmas, she’d shown little to no appetite.

I went back to my office and did some cursory reading on eating disorders by surfing the Internet. Bulimia? Maybe…

Or maybe the erratic behavior and appearance change heralded a mental disorder, like anxiety or depression. I added those to my catalog of possible problems she might be suffering from.

It certainly wasn’t pregnancy. She was on birth control so it ruled that out. But something about that conclusion bugged me and I couldn’t put my finger on why. Hours later, in the middle of working through a stack of papers I had to sign, my pen froze when I realized what it was. I’d rummaged through her sack pretty thoroughly the night she’d fallen asleep over at my place. I’d found the sharps container, the syringes, and I’d freaked. After that, I’d ransacked everything, looked in her makeup case and everywhere else. And the one thing I hadn’t seen?

Birth control pills. They came in a special box. I’d seen them before, of course, when she’d lived with me and when we’d traveled together. The type she used came in a little green square that opened like a compact when you pressed the little silver button—and they were stored in a grid that was labeled by day of the week.

She never forgot those, carried them with her everywhere when we traveled, of course. But they had not been in the bag of her things when she’d come home from Vegas.

And in Vegas, we’d…

I counted back the days since the Con. Almost four weeks. I fought for a breath after that realization. I paced for a half hour in front of my window. Most of my officers, including Jordan, were out of town still from the holiday. I thought up a long errand to send Maggie on to get her away from her desk and then I went to the drugstore on my lunch break.

When I got back, I called Emilia’s desk directly. She answered on the first ring. And I knew she knew it was me, because my name was on her caller ID. “I need to see you in my office.”

A long pause on the other end. “Um. Okay, can—”

“Now,” I snarled and slammed the phone down, trying to contain the unexpected rage and frustration that had risen up just on hearing her voice. I took a deep breath and forced myself to relax or this would become ugly.

I walked over to the door and pulled it ajar so she wouldn’t have to knock, double-checking that Maggie was still gone.

When she came in, she must have known something was up because she didn’t close the door and instead stood right next to it. I was sitting in my chair gazing out the window at the atrium garden, my chin in my hand, trying to figure out what the hell to say to her.

Without looking at her I said, “Close the door, please.”

She hesitated, then slowly shut the door behind her. I gestured to the chair opposite me without saying anything. She crept across the room and sank into the chair, sitting on its very edge. It was casual Friday so she was wearing a pair of jeans. They looked too big for her and I realized these were the old pair she always used to wear—the ones that once had fit her like a glove, that showcased her long legs and her gorgeous, round ass. They were baggy on her now.

She watched me with wide eyes. “Did I do something to piss you off?”

My eyes went to hers, my chin still in my hand. “What makes you think that?”

She blinked at me. “Um. Because you are acting like you’re pissed off.”

“Maybe I’m getting tired of the bullshit between us.”

She took a deep breath, blew it out and seemed to go a shade paler, if that was possible. She laced her fingers in her lap and bounced one of her knees up and down.

“I know you’ve been wanting to talk. I know you’ve got things to say. I’ve got things to say too. I just…I can’t. Not right now.”

“You’re sick,” I blurted.

Her knee stilled. Her hands smoothed across her lap. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “Um. Yeah,” she finally said quietly.

“Are you pregnant?”

She let out a half laugh. “No.”

“You’re certain?”

“Of course. It’s—”

“You’re still on birth control, right?” And this is where I’d know if she was lying. Because I already knew the answer to this.

She looked away from me and out the window. “I’m not taking the birth control pill. But I’m on other—”

“You never mentioned that in Vegas, that you’d stopped taking the pill.”

“I was pretty shitfaced. There’s a lot of things I didn’t mention, but—”

“So you’re not certain, then.”

She looked back at me. “What?”

“You’re not certain that you’re not pregnant.”

She took a deep breath. “I’m not pregnant—I’m not even fertile.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

She shifted in her chair and grabbed a lock of her freakish white hair, twirling it around her forefinger. “It means I can’t get pregnant, okay? Stop worrying about it.”

“There’s only one way I’m going to stop worrying about it.”

She looked at me with the question in her eyes.

I opened my desk drawer, reached inside and slapped the pregnancy test on the desk between us.

She shook her head, rolling her eyes. “I’m not taking a pregnancy test.”

“Why not?”

She looked at me like I was an idiot. “Because I. Am. Not. Pregnant.”

“Then it won’t cost you anything to go in the bathroom and use it—for the sake of my peace of mind.”

“Adam, you need to drop it—”

“I’m not going to drop it. I have a right to know and it takes you two minutes to use that.”

“You’re starting to really piss
me
off now.”

“You’re going to keep your secrets. You’re going to refuse to talk to me—or anybody—about why your life appears to be circling the drain in front of all of our eyes, fine. But
I have a right to know this
, goddamn it. Now go and piss on this fucking thing and if it’s negative you can storm out of here and we’ll never have to look at each other ever again.”

She scowled, then snatched up the box from the desk. Standing, she walked around me to get into my private bathroom, and slammed the door after her.

I waited until I heard the toilet flush and the sink being used. When she turned off the faucet, I opened the door and went in. I’d already read the directions. It had indicated a three-minute wait after use. I glanced at my watch. She stared at me in the mirror as she dried her hands.

“Hopefully that makes you happy. You have gone so far over the top this time that you might as well be on your space station trip again,” she huffed, flushing red with anger. “I’m out of here—as in packing up my desk and walking the
fuck
out of here.”

“You aren’t going to wait a minute for the results?”

She rolled her eyes. “I already know what the results are. It’s humiliating enough that you made me pee on a stick in your bathroom, I don’t need to wait around to find out what I already know.”

I glanced at the test sitting on the back of the toilet where she’d set it. She turned to leave. Very clearly I saw two lines. Two pink lines. The three minutes weren’t even up yet.

She was halfway out the door when I said, “It’s positive.”

She froze and turned around and stared at me in the mirror. “Is that a fucking—”

But I held up the test so she could see and she never finished that question. Her eyes landed on the test and then widened in horror. She’d been fully convinced that she wasn’t pregnant.

But she
was
. I searched inside myself for some reaction to that knowledge and all I felt was a coldness, a distance. Shock. Disbelief. I read once that these were mechanisms used by the mind to protect itself from falling apart in times of high stress.

Her demeanor changed immediately. She started shaking. “It’s a mistake. It has to be a mistake. Where’s the other one?” Emilia had run straight through shock and into denial.

I found the box and handed her the remaining test from the double pack. I was pretty certain those results were going to come up the same, but if she needed that confirmation, I wasn’t going to deny her. She stared at it, her brows knitting in confusion.

“It’s—it’s wrong. These things are wrong sometimes, right?” Her voice settled somewhere between hysteria and panic, trembling along with the rest of her. “I can’t go pee again right now.”

I’ll admit that in another circumstances, if I wasn’t so ragingly pissed off, I might have tried to comfort her. But I didn’t.

Because I hadn’t wanted that thing to be positive any more than she had. Any hopes of healing us, of getting back what we’d lost, seemed gone now, blown away in the wind. The heavy weight of this new development would snap the fledgling branch upon which our hearts, our lives hung. We couldn’t handle our own lives and now there was another one in the balance?

She stared at me for a long moment and I didn’t move, didn’t say a word. I had no idea what the hell to say. I didn’t know what I wanted. I was so done with this. With us. With the lies and the stupid games. The rage started to bubble up, burning through the layers of ice in my gut, melting the shock. How I hated the powerlessness I felt at that moment. My life was careening, out of control.

My hands clenched into fists and that red-hot lava burned up every limb. She seemed to be pressing herself into the bathroom door, or using it to hold herself up. I squeezed past her and stalked back into the office. The first thing I did was grab that ridiculous vase that Maggie had put on the table last month—one filled with a bunch of colored marbles. I turned and slammed it against the wall. It shattered into fragments, marbles bouncing everywhere. And it didn’t make me feel better in the least.
Fuck
.

I turned to stand next to the window. The top part of my vision had that curious wavy quality to it, a migraine aura presaging another vicious strike of lightning into my brain at any time now. Great. Just fucking great.

After long moments where I continued to stare into the daylight as if daring the headache to flare up, she reentered the room. I couldn’t look at her.

I stood rigid, still, my arms folded across my chest. I’d been so careful, always, with my sex partners. I’d never had sex without a condom and usually some other type of birth control on her part. But I had never used a condom with Emilia. Had trusted her to bear the burden of the birth control. That probably wasn’t entirely fair of me but goddamn, it’s the way it had been between us since the beginning and damn her for changing the rules without telling me.

Whether or not this was intentional, it was a trap. She had knowingly gone to bed with me unprotected.

“Adam,” she said, her voice quiet, hoarse from unshed tears.