Brutal Game (7 page)

Heather put out a hand, all business. “C’mon. Come to the bathroom. We’ll get you sorted out.”

Too frightened to argue, Laurel followed in an awkward, tight-legged shuffle, horrified by the wet heat soaking her underwear and jeans.

I’m losing it.

I’m losing it.

Though they were alone in the apartment, Heather shut the bathroom door behind them. “Stand in the tub and get those pants off.”

Laurel did, barely aware that she was now naked from the waist down before Flynn’s sister. The blood was bright, bright as cherry Kool-Aid. Her back pulsed cruelly but it was her belly she felt now, with terrible clarity. Cramps as though someone were twisting ropes inside her.

Heather handed her one warm, damp hand towel and set a dry one on the tub’s edge. “Here, baby. Get yourself cleaned up. I’m gonna find you a pair of pants.”

Laurel could only nod and obey. While Heather was gone, she tenderly wiped away the blood, then stood there with the dry towel clenched between her thighs. She could feel it still flowing, see it turning the periwinkle terry cloth the color of merlot.

Heather returned shortly, a lump of patterned fleece tucked under her arm. She unfurled it with a wan smile, revealing a pair of pajama pants covered in hot pink flamingos. “Kim’s. Festive, right?”

Laurel mustered the world’s limpest smile and looked to the towel.

“How far along?” Heather asked quietly.

She jerked her head back up, feeling ten times more naked than she actually was. “Pardon?”

“I had three miscarriages,” Heather said, crouching to root beneath the sink. She set a plastic pack of maxi pads on the closed toilet and stood. “It’s no fun, I know.”

“You think that’s what this is?” Laurel asked, voice a tiny whisper. She didn’t have the luxury of googling “six weeks pregnant backache bleeding” just now.

Heather nodded. “Sorry, baby.” She’d never addressed Laurel by anything other than her name, now three times in five minutes she’d called her “baby”. It was weird. Weird and comforting. “Does Mike know?”

Laurel nodded. “Yeah. It wasn’t planned or anything…”

“How’s that towel?”

She eased it gingerly from her body, folded it, pressed a clean section to the spot. It came away red, but the gush had eased. “I think it’s slowing down.”

“Good. I brought you some of Kim’s undies. I know that’s not your idea of a party but hey, there’ll be a pad, right?” As she said it, she stripped the waxed-papery strips off a maxi pad’s adhesive and pressed it into the underwear, careful and meticulous as though she were wrapping a present. “You keep the rest—we’re a tampon house.”

Laurel cracked a tiny, frightened smile at that.

“I can’t give you a lift, but I could call you a cab.”

“Do you think I need to go to a hospital?” she asked.

Heather shook her head. “I doubt it. Call your doctor’s nurse line, if they have one, but this looks pretty textbook, speakin’ from experience. If I were you, I’d go home and take it easy.”

She nodded. “Yeah, you’re probably right. And a cab would be good, thanks.” No way she was taking the T, that much was clear.

“You got it. Here.” Heather handed her the underwear and set the pajamas on the tub’s edge. She picked up the maxi-pad package and studied it, sparing Laurel an audience as she got dressed.

“Like I said, I had three. I’m happy to talk about it, if you ever need to.”

“When?” Laurel asked, tugging the fleece up her legs. It felt odd, dry and clean and
cozy
, even as the rest of the world seemed to be falling down around her.

“One was after Kim,” Heather said, “when Robbie and I were trying for another kid. Two were before Kim. With those, it was like my body knew what was best for me, since my heart or my religion would never let me get rid of a baby. I prayed for those ones, even if I never came out and spoke the words for real. I felt real guilty both times, like I’d made it happen, but I was relieved. They were a couple years apart, a couple different guys, neither of them up to the challenge—and I wasn’t, either. They were blessings. I can say that now.” Though she crossed herself as she did.

To Laurel, this didn’t feel like a blessing, or an answered prayer. This felt like robbery. Not robbery of a child, necessarily, but the theft of her will, her choice. Flynn’s as well.

“I’m not saying that’s what this is for you, though,” Heather said. “You’re different than I was when I was younger. You’ll make a great mom, if you go there. It wasn’t meant to be, this time, and who can say why.”

Who, indeed? And how the hell was she going to tell Flynn?

“Don’t say anything to your brother, please.”

“Of course not.”

“Tell him I had a migraine or something, and that I’m sorry. Let him enjoy the party, and I’ll tell him when I’m calmer.” And once she’d stopped crying, which she sensed she’d start doing the second she made it to her place, her room. Or maybe just the backseat of the cab.

“Don’t worry about Mike. You just worry about yourself. You have a hot water bottle at home?”

“No.”

“Borrow ours. It’ll help. And that Vicodin’s yours, just say the word.”

“No, thanks.” She stepped out of the tub, feeling no less naked for the borrowed pajamas clashing with her garnet-colored sweater. Garnet. Christ, that color looked so garish now. So cruel.

Heather left for a minute and returned with a tote bag. Inside were the pads, Laurel’s jeans in a plastic sack, a hot water bottle, and another bottle—red wine.

She smiled. “Not as good as Vicodin, but it can’t hurt.”

“Thanks.”

“Cab’s on its way.”

“Cool.” So
not
cool in any way imaginable, that any of this was happening. But one thing was certain amid the fear and confusion—she wanted to get away as soon as possible. She didn’t want to risk running into Flynn. Didn’t want to catch sight of his face, because that’d be the end of her. She wanted to get home, get into her own pajamas, hole up in bed and cry until anything, anything at all, made sense.

S
ince many miscarriages
occur so early that a woman may not even realize that she is pregnant, it can be difficult to estimate how common miscarriage actually is. Some experts believe that as many as half of all fertilized eggs die before implantation—

Thump thump thump.

Laurel jumped at the knock on the bathroom door, halfway to a heart attack.

“Yeah?”

“It’s me.” Flynn’s voice permeated the wood, a rumble that both comforted and unnerved her.

She was sitting on the tile, back against the tub, phone in hand. Neither of her roommates had been in when she’d gotten home, and just as well. She clicked out of the browser app and shut off her phone. “Come in.”

The door swung in and there he was. Familiar man in a familiar space, and yet she felt so utterly, irretrievably lost.

He did a double-take, surprised to find her on the floor. “Hey. How’s your head?”

She had no reply for that, so she shrugged, no doubt looking sheepish as fuck. “How was the party?”

“Shitty without you. But also pretty special. I brought you a hunk of cake and some Vicodins Heather insisted you might want.” He held up a paper grocery bag then set it on the counter. “I didn’t explain exactly how terrible an idea that was, obviously.”

“She’s sweet in her weird way.”

“Don’t let her hear you say that.” He closed the toilet and took a seat. “I didn’t know you got migraines. Is it a pregnancy thing?”

“I…I don’t think so.”

“Wouldn’t you rather be someplace dark?”

She tried to smile, tried to be candid and brave and dignified, but one twitch of her lips and her entire face crumpled. Tears streaked her cheeks, burning hot.

“Whoa, honey.” He was on his knees in a beat, cupping her shoulders. “What’s going on?”

She tried to speak but nothing came, only a rusty squeak. She grabbed the maxi-pad package from the floor beside the toilet, held it up, flung it at the wall with a flash of anger.

His brows drew together, expression darkening from confusion to horror. “Wait. What
is
going on?”

“It’s gone.” The words felt odd, watery, coming from the roof of her mouth, somehow, not her throat. She gulped air. “The pregnancy. It just… I just started bleeding, at your sister’s.”

“Like a miscarriage?”

“Yeah. Exactly like that.”

For a moment he could only shake his head, looking lost. Looking slapped. “Jesus, Laurel… Does it hurt?”

“Yeah. So bad.” The pitiful, ringing truth of that opened something inside her, tears coming fast as though a dam had burst. “It hurts really,
really
bad.”

“How?”

“My back. And there’s cramps. But mostly it’s my back.”

“What can I do?”

“Not much.”

“Does it… Are you bleeding now?”

“Yeah, loads.”

He squeezed her hands. “Fuck me. Heather said you had a headache.”

She nodded, catching her breath. She stole one of her hands back to wipe her running nose. “I asked her to tell you that.”

His brow knitted. “What?”

“I didn’t want to wreck the party for you.”

“The fuck?” He paused, caught himself. Sighed and let her other hand go and rubbed his face. He leaned over and freed the toilet paper roll from the dispenser and unfurled a long banner of it to hand to her. “Sorry. I’m not angry at you. I’m just…fuck if I know. Upset, I guess.”

“I don’t blame you.”

Those blue eyes looked so tired. “So this happened
hours
ago? How could you not know how bad I’d want to be with you while you’re going through this?”

“I didn’t know if I wanted that.”

Hurt settled across his face like a shadow.

“Not because you aren’t a part of this,” she said, and blew her nose. “Not because you don’t have a right to know or to care, or to want to help. It’s hard to explain.” It was that same instinct that urged cats to hide themselves away when they gave birth, wasn’t it? The same one that made women so grumpy at the height of PMS. Something primal and isolating.

His expression softened. “What happened? To the baby, I mean.”

She wished he wouldn’t call it that—it was an embryo. Had been. Nothing more than a little squiggle of cells, or so she took comfort in imagining. She shrugged. “Something genetic, probably.”

He seemed to go pale at that.

“It’s
really
common. Something like half of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Usually before a woman even knows about it.”

“Oh.”

“It’s nothing either of us did wrong, or anything wrong with our bodies, or anything we could have prevented. This one just decided not to sign the lease.”

He smiled grimly, seeming a touch relieved by her levity.

“You’re allowed to be sad,” she said, and leaned forward to squeeze his arm. The motion triggered a fresh cramp and it took everything she had not to let it show. “Or to feel relieved, or any other thing. This was your experience too, brief as it was.”

“I’m here to be whatever you need.”

“Same.”

He scooted over to sit beside her, curled a palm around the back of her head, scrunched her hair and coaxed her face to his neck. He held her for a long time, rubbing her aching back with a hot, broad palm as she felt the tick of his jugular vein against her lips.

“It really hurts, huh?” he asked softly.

“So much. Like the worst period ever.”

“How long does it take to… Fuck, I don’t know—”

“About ten days. I called my doctor’s office. The bleeding tapers off in time. And there’s the cramps and backaches, but those get easier too.”

“What can I do for you?”

She shrugged. “Back rubs? Patience? Let me hole up and watch crap TV and be weepy and not take it personally if I need to be alone…?”

He nodded. “I’ll try. And how do you
feel?”
he asked again, tone making it plain he wasn’t talking about her body.

“I feel a lot of things. Sad, and powerless…but also a little relieved, maybe.”

His hand made slow circles across her back.

“I wasn’t ready to make that decision, no matter which way I landed on it,” she said. “How do
you
feel?”

“Doesn’t matter how I feel. Only matters that I be whatever it is you’re needing.”

“It absolutely
does
matter what you feel. You can tell me.” Was he relieved too, and didn’t want to make her feel unsupported? Or was he actually
heartbroken
, but didn’t want her to think she’d let him down?

Shit,
did
she want to know how he felt about it?

“I don’t know what I feel yet,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Was it because… Did I make this happen?” he asked in a rush of breath.

Her eyes widened and she turned to him. “The miscarriage?”

“The other night, when things got rough…”

“Oh, no. No, no, no. It doesn’t work like that. I promise.”

He nodded but she could read on his face he wasn’t ready to believe her yet.

“Seriously, Flynn, that wasn’t anything to do with it. It was just something about the embryo. It wasn’t meant to be, so it… I dunno. It just blinked out.”

“How big was it?”

“Like a sesame seed, I think.”

“So you didn’t have to see it, or…” He trailed off.

She shook her head. “Nothing like that.”

“Okay. And are you comfortable, sittin’ on the floor like this?”

“No, not particularly.”

He was on his feet the next moment, offering a hand to help her up.

Laurel stood, her butt cold and achy from sitting on the tile for so long, head swimmy and eyes itchy from the crying. She let him lead her to her bedroom. She crept across the comforter, each movement of her legs twinging something deep inside her. The pad between her legs felt like a diaper. Like a punishment.

Flynn sat across from her, making her bed seem tiny. He’d never spent the night, and they’d only screwed around in her room maybe three times—Laurel was a combination of courteous and shy when it came to having sex within roommates’ earshot, and to be fair, a muted Flynn was a complete waste. It just made a million times more sense, fucking at his place.

“You want some tea or something?” he asked. “A drink? You can have booze again, at least.”

“No, no drink.” It sounded nice, but it felt wrong. Felt too familiar and natural a choice. Too easy. “Thank you.”

They were quiet for a long time.

“What are you thinking about?” she finally asked.

“I’m thinking, ‘How can this have come to seem so real in next to no time?’”

That stung, but she didn’t fault him for it. She’d had the same thought.

“I dunno. But you’re right, it did. Even ambivalent as I was, when I realized what was happening, I was so panicky, so frightened for…for
it.
I felt so helpless, like some tiny creature was in crisis and I couldn’t do anything to rescue it.” And knowing that made her wonder how on earth she’d have felt if she’d chosen to get an abortion, or if she’d have been able to.

“It should’ve been me there with you, not Heather.” His voice didn’t break but it sounded odd. Thin, or brittle. Unlike she’d ever heard it.

“You couldn’t have known. You were working.”

He held his tongue.

“Would you get me some water?” she asked, more to give him a task than anything else.

“Sure. Want any cake?”

“Not just now, thanks.”

He came back with the glass and they sat on her bed for a long time, trading quiet words of no particular import. The backaches came and went and he massaged the spot while she hugged the hot water bottle to her crampy middle. In time they wound up spooning, his warm body plastered to her aching muscles, the strength of his arms a small comfort.

“It’s weird,” she mumbled, breaking long minutes’ silence, “but you know what I think upsets me most about this whole thing?”

“What?”

“The way it ended… I’ll never know what I would have decided, now.”

He sat up, studying her face. “No?”

She shook her head. “I have no idea. I don’t know what I would have decided, and I don’t know what that decision would have done to us. To you.”

“I do,” he said.

“Oh?”

“I’d have stayed with you, either way.”

“Yeah?”

“No question. And if we didn’t have a kid this time, I’d hope we’d have one in two years, or five, or ten, or maybe not at all, if that seemed like the right thing.”

“That’s really sweet.” And actually quite profound. No man had ever told Laurel he wanted her to be the mother of his child before. Not even close. Not even close to close. “You’re a refreshingly simple man.”

He laughed, a tiny little closed-lip
mm
of a sound.

“What?”

“I’m not that simple.”

“I beg to differ.”

Flynn shook his head. “If any man ever did to you for real the shit I pretend to, I would
literally
murder him. You think I know what to even make of that?”

“But you know it’s different. Different in every way.”

“Doesn’t mean I don’t doubt it now and then. Doubt who the fuck I even am, wonder exactly how thin a scrap of conscience separates me and the sickest fuckers walkin’ this earth.”

Now Laurel shook her head, smiling. “Don’t doubt yourself for a second. I don’t.”

“God knows what I did to deserve you.”

“Plenty.”

He opened his mouth. Shut it. He regarded her for a long moment, then got to his feet with a grunt. “Hang on a minute. Need somethin’ from my car.”

“Okay.”

That lie about having a headache was absolutely true now, Laurel noted, her brain feeling pickled. She headed to the bathroom, washed her face and brushed her teeth and changed her pad, feeling tender more in her heart than her sex. Back in her bedroom, she propped the reheated hot water bottle against a pillow and sat with her lower back pressed to it, hugging her knees.

Flynn returned with his jacket slung over his arm. “You lied to me earlier, having Heather tell me you had a migraine.”

“I know. I’m—”

“I lied to you too.” He sat at the edge of her bed, his hip touching her toes.

“You did?”

He looked down at his jacket, now folded in his lap. “Don’t think I’ve ever lied to you before. Can’t think why I would have.”

Indeed. A man as blunt and unapologetic as Flynn had no reason to. Her curiosity was thoroughly piqued, stomach just a little queasy. “What was the lie?”

“I didn’t work today. There was no overtime shift.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“I had an errand to run.” He unfolded his jacket and slipped his hand inside a pocket. When he slid it out, he was holding a small, polished wood box, opening it before Laurel’s imagination got a chance to jump to wild conclusions. Even if it had, it could never have predicted the ring she was suddenly staring at.

“I know I bought this after I found out you were pregnant—”

“Oh my God.”

“—but what’s happened doesn’t change how I feel, or what I want. Thinkin’ we were gonna go through whatever we were together, raising a kid, or goin’ through whatever the fuck sort of head-trip an abortion must be… It just felt obvious. It just felt right, like, this woman’s got the power to change my life in massive, mind-blowing ways, and I knew no matter what you decided, I only wanted to be next to you. So I’m hopin’ you’ll say you wanna be next to me, for whatever’s gonna come next.”

“Jesus, Flynn.” Her head was swimming. What she really wanted was to touch the ring, to see it up close, but she didn’t dare. It didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel wrong, either, just… Not yet. Just not now.

When she didn’t reach for it, he turned the little box around and regarded it a moment. “Do you think it’s pretty?”

“I think it’s gorgeous.”

“Anne told me you would.”

She had to laugh, floored to think there’d been such a conspiracy afoot. “You lied about your whereabouts so you could sneak off with another woman behind my back? While I slaved away, icing cookies for your niece’s—”

“You want to try it on?”

“I— No. Not yet.”

A pause. “Is that a no, no?”

“It’s not a no. It’s a… I’m not sure. It’s a… It’s an ask-me-again, when I’m not hurting so bad. Ask me when I can wrap my head around it.”