THE BILLIONAIRE'S BABY (A Secret Baby Romance) (40 page)

I pulled the dress over my head and looked at myself in the mirror. I grimaced at my reflection in my pale pink bra and panties, noticing how my naturally darker complexion—inherited from my Colombian father—could not disguise how incredibly pale I looked.

I got up and closed the curtains. I stood in front of the mirror to take a good look at myself, hoping, I think, that sitting in bed with swollen eyes might have made things look worse than they really were.

I did look pale. I had spent most of the last couple of years inside the house with my mom, and I wondered how long it had been since my body had actually seen the sun.

The back of my panties had grass stains on them as well. I pulled them off and threw them on my bed with my dress and headed for the bathroom. I showered for about half an hour, then leisurely dried my hair for another fifteen minutes, working hard to think about anything except Neal. When I finally dragged myself out the bathroom, I put on a clean pair of jeans and a t-shirt and went to do my cursed laundry from last night.

I was ravenously hungry after finishing laundry, but I did not have the energy or the motivation to cook anything for myself. I was craving Chinese food, so I grabbed my phone to call The Wall of China, the best place to order Chinese cuisine in Richmond. As I took the phone out of the bag I had carried the night before, my heart flipped and settled somewhere around my stomach when I looked at the screen. There were nine missed calls, all of them from Neal. I opened my inbox with shaking hands and found about a dozen text messages.

Tia, I need to know what happened.

I swear, I’ve started to care about you in a way I’ve never cared about anyone. Do you think I deserve this?

At least say something, anything, so I know what’s going on.
And so they went on.

My heart thudded in my chest, and my body broke out in a sweat. I had rarely experienced such a powerful reaction to anything before. For a moment, my knees felt weak, so I grabbed the nearby chair and slumped into it.

Part of me wanted to call him back instantly, but part of me wanted to confront myself first and find the answers. I had always been straightforward when it came to making decisions, and I liked that quality in myself. I had never imagined finding myself in such an intensely confused state. I was certain I would feel differently if we hadn’t slept together.

A thought arose in my mind:
Why had he taken me to that empty stadium in the first place?

With it, my confusion suddenly morphed into anger, and unable to hold it in any longer, I screamed at the top of my lungs.

The empty apartment echoed around me.

***

For the rest of the day, I worked hard to distract myself. After I ate some lunch, I curled up on the living room couch and reread my old, tattered copy of
Pride and Prejudice,
one of my favorite classics
.
I could reread it a hundred times and still be just as fond of it as I was the first time I read it.

Elizabeth Bennet, the main character, always stirred something deep inside me. Even now, more than two hundred years later, in today’s world, women still needed to build in themselves the kind of self-awareness Elizabeth Bennet had in the early nineteenth century. All hail to feminism, but I did not think that, essentially or individually, women had managed to change much about themselves. The average woman today was still not half as self-aware as Elizabeth.

I have always been afraid of being the woman who put her emotions second. I was afraid of neglecting myself and of being pressured into becoming someone I didn’t want to be. My mother, though she had spent her life trying to convince herself otherwise, had taken the grief of my father’s infidelity to the grave with her. I wished she had gone out and met other men, made herself happy and found joy in her life outside of me, but that had not been the case. And even though I knew all of this, I still did not blame myself for any of it. I believed in fulfilling my responsibilities to myself, and succumbing to a child-of-divorce guilt or survivor’s guilt was not one of them. Mom had made her own choices in life, ones I had not actively influenced in any way, and I was free to make my own.

I had been staring blankly at a page for some time without taking in a word. In my mind, I had been going round and round until I had arrived at the conclusion I clearly needed.

I picked up my phone. I had received no more calls from Neal. I opened his text messages and tapped out a response.

Neal, I cannot give you an explanation right now because I don’t think I have an explanation for myself yet. All I know is that I do not see anything happening between us, and I want you leave me alone.

I felt more certain once I hit “send” than I had all day, but my certainty shattered into a million little pieces when a minute later my phone rang and vibrated at the same time. Neal was calling, and I did not want to talk to him. I let the phone ring as I took deep, calming breaths. A few seconds later, it stopped ringing and a text message appeared on my screen.

Two words:
What happened?

I took another deep breath and calmly tapped out my reply:
I don’t know. That’s what I want to figure out, but by myself and for myself. Please.

He took five minutes to reply, and his message contained just one word:
OK
.

I took a deep breath and decided that I needed a drink.

Tia

I didn’t hear from Neal for the rest of the week, neither did the app on my phone beep again. I went back to job searching and one day, Colleen Mitchel, an old friend from college, called me. She asked me to write a couple reviews for paintings by an up-and-coming artist as some freelance work, and desperate to have anything
to do, I took the job. A weekend passed quietly, and Neal was doing a good job of leaving me alone. I also saw Ella less and less. She and Guy were spending a lot of time together, and she was barely home.

In spite of my resolution not to, I thought about Neal every day. By the end of that week, I was not as sure about the decision I had made at all. The following weekend, I woke up to an empty apartment; Ella had not returned the night before. I spent the day completing the reviews for Colleen and sending them out to her. At least I would get a paycheck from her. When I was done with the work in the evening, I lay in bed, gazing purposelessly at the ceiling, somewhat disappointed that Neal wasn’t calling me.

I had thought my mind would focus better without him around to distract me, but I was wrong. I was even more confused now, if possible, than when I had asked him to leave me alone. A memory flashed across my mind, bright and sudden like a shooting star—Neal kissing my neck in the stadium. Instead of trying to shake it off, I lay there, letting it play.

The memory of him kissing me on the neck was followed by the memory of what happened after that. My heart beat fast, and my breath caught. For the first time since it had happened, I was thinking about the night Neal and I spent together.

My body reacted with confusion and chaos, like it had before. The memory of his scent swirled around me, forming into something very real and tangible until I could taste it on my tongue.

I slipped my hand into my pants. My fingers tangled in the soft hair on my mound, and a fresh memory of Neal’s fingers in the exact same spot swept over me. I closed my eyes, letting it wash over me. Then came the memory of his palm between my legs, forcing them apart, and with it, automatically, my legs parted. My little finger touched my clitoris, and I shivered in response. I touched myself over and over again, my mind filled with thoughts of Neal. Soon, a wave of pleasure began to wash over me, and when it was over, I relaxed again, feeling somewhat better. I picked up my phone and casually glanced at my messages and app, hoping the phone would ring. I absentmindedly opened my period tracker, an app on my phone that tracked my monthly cycle. It asked me to confirm that my period had started four days earlier. Shit! I was four days late!

Neal

I flew back to New York about a week after she told me to leave her alone.

It felt odd to just leave. I had found the person who ignited this fiery passion within me, and I wasn’t going to fight for her.

The moment I had met this girl, the moment I had set eyes on her, I knew a relationship with her would be difficult, different, and scary. What I had failed to anticipate was her telling me to leave her alone.

From the moment I met her, I had thought incessantly about what she was thinking or how she was feeling. I wanted to get in her head and discover her thoughts. I wanted to accept, own, and embrace every fiber of her being, every little thought that blossomed in her head.

I had spent an entire night going over and over plans for a perfect date, one planned and arranged specifically and only for her. I had run a hundred scenarios in my head. I’d wanted to do something grand and extravagant, I’d wanted to pool my riches at her feet on our first real date, but I couldn’t. I observed during the little time I had spent with her that she was not a fan of pomp and extravagance; hence, whatever I planned had to be simple and perfect. Just like her.

I had failed by sleeping with her, frightening her.

I looked out the foggy window as my plane landed at JFK. The airport swarmed with people at this time of night, but I didn’t care about a single one of them. The only person I had met whom I could care for unconditionally, I had left behind.

***

Once I settled back in New York, I tried to go back to my normal routine, but that was easier said than done. The first morning when I had to return to work, Rashida, my housekeeper, opened the blinds in my room at eight o’clock sharp, just like she always did and just like I had instructed her to always do. I pulled the covers over my head as sunlight streamed into the room.

This was not good.

I had always been an early riser. No matter what time I went to bed at night, I always managed to be up by eight.

Today, the winter sunlight burned through my eyes and into my skull, which threatened to explode at the prospect of having to get up and face another human being. I stayed in bed for a while. By the time I decided to get up and get out, I couldn’t tell if I had been lying there for five minutes or an hour.

Apparently, it had been two hours. The tiny alarm clock on my bedside showed ten a.m., and I stumbled around getting dressed like I was hung over.

Rashida appeared again. “Mr. Callaway, would you like breakfast up here?”

“Thank you, Rashida. I’ll just take a coffee with me,” I told her as I wandered into the bathroom to brush my teeth.

She stopped me. “Sir, are you feeling all right?”

I usually ate a complete breakfast at 8:30 sharp; just coffee was far from the norm. I looked at her bewildered expression and said, “I’m fine, thanks. Just the coffee will do today.”

Rashida nodded her head, though her expression didn’t change. “Yes, sir. It will be ready when you are.”

She left the room, glancing back only once to check on me. I frowned after her, hoping she wouldn’t sneak some vitamin supplement into my coffee. Rashida cared for me quietly, making sure I ate right and wasn’t ill. I loved her for it and paid her handsomely as well.

By the time I left the house, I had decided I wasn’t fit to go to work. I had a reliable and efficient team and was certain that they would be able to manage very well without me for a day. I had only been gone for a week.

I told my driver to drive up to Lily, an all-night bar on Lexington Ave, one of my favorites in Manhattan. Admittedly, I never found myself there at this time of the morning.

Once inside, I sat at the bar and pulled my phone out of my pocket. There were a few work related emails that I lazily scrolled through and replied to. Aside from those, I found another couple of invitations to different parties but nothing else.

I sat there, looking at my phone for a long time, until the bartender felt the need to drop the
Complete Works of Marquis de Sade
he was reading and come over. I ordered a gin martini.

I was tired and confused. A week without her had not helped clear my head at all, and I wasn’t sure of anything anymore. I was a different man than I had been when I flew to Richmond that Friday afternoon.

The bartender brought my drink, which sat on the table, untouched, while I tried to gather the chaos that described my thoughts right now.

Should I call her?
The voice inside my head seemed loud.
Should I call her? Should I demand an explanation? Did I not have the right to?
I did not know what to do.

She asked you to leave her alone,
the same voice echoed perversely inside my head.

Yes, she asked me to leave her alone. One thing I had been certain of from the moment I saw her was her vulnerability. On our date, both of us had tried to have a good time and talk only about pleasant things. I had wanted to know more about… Hell, I had wanted to know everything about her, but I had told myself to wait. I knew she was having a good time, and I wanted it to stay like that. I wanted her to keep smiling. I had worked hard, with every fiber of my being, to be the total opposite of the man I had always been. All that pop culture crap about just realizing
when the right one comes along and everything magically changing—I had experienced it! As soon as she had stepped into my life, everything had
changed, in just a matter of hours.