Ash: A Bad Boy Romance (27 page)

An image—light and sound—flashes through my mind violently. I could hear a flicker of a heartbeat, nausea and pain sweeping over me.
 

No.

My stomach lurches.

“Food poisoning. Maybe the chicken was—”

Oh fuck.
 

I crawl over to the trash can in the corner and dry heave once, and then again. I almost
wish
I could vomit because my whole body feels hot, bloated, and swollen. All at once, everything seems like it’s on fire—my ass and my stomach and even my breasts. I heave hard again and finally empty the contents of my stomach. A wave of relief so powerful comes over me that I thank God, the universe, and the hospital administration for the trashcan in the corner and my ability to vomit into it. I sit back onto my haunches and look up to see one of the nurses staring down at me with her hand on her hip. My pulse speeds up, and my gut tightens like I might start the process all over again.
 

I push the memory from my mind like I have for the last three years. It’s not something I can think about. Not something I like to think about.
 

I ran.

This would never catch me.

This hasn’t caught me. It’s not
possible.
 

“You okay?” The nurse looks at me quizzically, cocking her head to one side.
 

Why does it feel like I got caught doing something I shouldn’t?

I nod and wipe my mouth on my sleeve. Fortunately, the only thing that comes away is drool. It wouldn’t be a good look for a resident to be sitting in a corner of the locker room, with vomit smeared all over her face.
 

“Stomach virus? It’s not the season for them.” The nurse comes over and helps me to my feet. I look down at her name tag.
Zelda
. Why didn’t I know that before? I’ve seen her dozens of times.

I shrug. “Zelda, thanks. I’d really prefer to just work my shift. I’m feeling a lot better now—just gross and like, a little dizzy and buzzed—kind of like I’m—”

“Drunk?” She takes my arm, and shamefully, I lean against her, my head spinning. She’s wearing some kind of vanilla-scented perfume, and that makes me want to barf all over again. But there’s nothing left in my stomach to come up.
 

It was cold in the hospital room when I woke up, and it hurt, not like the shoulder, but like a profound emptiness that could not be filled.
 

I knit my brows together and look over at her. Beneath the reddish purple dye job, her roots are brown, and her eyes the same color. She’s maybe ten years older than I am, but somehow she’s still hip with her tiny diamond nose piercing and messy, purple-hued bun.
 

“How did you know? How I feel, I mean?”

It was all pain. One moment of a heartbeat flicker. No hope—all signs of life were gone.

“That’s how it was with my first one. With the second, it was more exhaustion that nausea. But they say it’s different every time.” She raises an arched eyebrow at me. “Maybe we should run your bloods and—”

“The first one what?” I already know the answer. It strikes me that I’ve seen this nurse before, walking out of the hospital day care with a little girl about four years ago.

And each time I see her, a pang of longing, deep and angry.
 

She’d be three now.

“The first
kid
.” She starts walking me over to the door, and I freeze. “The first one was a boy. You’ve seen Ella, right? Looks just like her dad. He’s one of the nurses in pediatrics. Their dad, not the boy. The boy is seven—”

I start counting on my fingers, rewinding the days and trying to remember when I started my last pack of pills. I envision a calendar in my head and almost vomit again when it pops up in my mind.

“That’s not—this isn’t possible. I have endometriosis. I lost my left ovary and tube three years ago. The OB said that IVF was my only—”

“Oh.” She walks me out of the door and down the hall to the lab. She leans in close and brushes my hair back over my shoulder. “You know what you
didn’t
say? ‘This isn’t possible because I didn’t have unprotected sex with my boyfriend.’”

“Husband,” I croak. My throat feels like someone forcibly opened my throat and poured acid down my gullet. Actually, that’s just about what happened, except my angry stomach was the person.

She shoves a cup into my hand. “Pee in this. Then we’ll take your blood if it’s positive. Should be able to tell how far along you are.”

“Oh God.” I look at the cup in horror. “Okay. Everything is going to be okay.” Zelda pats me on the shoulder. “Give me the stick and I’ll test it myself. I’d be five weeks. Take my blood, and schedule me for an ultrasound—tomorrow.” Zelda shrugs and hands me a pregnancy test, and I head into the bathroom next to the lab. As
soon as I complete the test, two parallel pink lines show up.
 

My heart starts beating fast, vision failing, twisting and turning.

In my line of work, I’ve seen plenty of faint lines, lines that indicate tiny amounts of hormones circulating in a body. But this line is bright fucking pink and appeared in less than ten seconds.
 

Is there pain?
 

There’s no
pain.

I close my eyes and put my hand to my stomach. By five weeks, there’s an amniotic sac, and a tiny yolk that will nourish the embryo until the placenta is done growing. The embryo itself is “no larger than a grain of rice.” I remember that from my bio text book in college.
 

And I remember it from the ultrasound picture. The doctor who removed her gave me the picture to keep. I keep it with Ash’s letters.

It had been so strange to me back then. The endometriosis was always there, looming, barely helped by birth control.
 

Scarred.

Despite the lingering feeling of nausea, a warmth spreads through me as I straighten out my clothes and look back at the pink lines on the test. The sensation lasts only for a few moments. When I look in the mirror and straighten out my hair, the grief rushes over me in a wave so powerful, it almost knocks me down. I sob and put my hand to my stomach, a ghost of the old pain coming back.

It’s strange—since I started seeing Ash again, the pain hasn’t hit me like this. It’s like that empty space was finally starting to fill up.

It seemed fun, when we’d gotten together again. It seemed almost inconsequential that Ash was still working with criminals in town, even if it was only peripherally. He’d assured me that his business would be clean from now on—there were just a few details to work out, and then he’d make his gym legit. A crushing weight settles over me, and I throw the empty cup in the trash. I slip the pregnancy test into one of the lab’s plastic bags as I walk out the door and move briskly down the hall. By now, someone’s surely paging me for the day.
 

Zelda appears from nowhere and stops me as I turn the corner. “Hold out your arm,” she orders me. I do as she says, and she takes my blood while I stand in the hallway. “Repeat in forty-eight hours. We can get you in today for an ultrasound.”

“Tomorrow is fine. There’s no pain. It was—it was ectopic last time.”

“Got it.” She pats my hand.
 

I smile wanly, and she nods and then vanishes back to the lab where she draws and catalogs blood all day.
 

I don’t think she’ll spread secrets, but there are secrets in my life far more damning than this one.

The secret husband.

My mother’s failing business.

Every bit of illegal shit that happened in New York.
 

What’s one more secret? I’ll add it to the pile and deal with it when it becomes a reality,
if
it becomes a reality.
 

I put on a clean lab coat and bag up the vomit, tossing it conveniently into one of the medical waste containers as I move along to the emergency room. Before another episode hits, I stop at the pharmacy and pick up some anti-nausea meds.
 

Hope is of no use. It’s not a certain thing.

There’s no time for starry-eyed fantasy. I’m a medical professional. And I know as well as anyone that this embryo might not make it past the first twelve weeks. If it lasts beyond that and I start showing, then I can let that warmth take me over again. And then, and only then, can I tell Ash.
 

We’re not your typical husband and wife, and this child—no, this collection of cells—won’t make it any different.

Wait and see.

As I move throughout my day, I find myself wondering if it might be a boy, like Zelda said. I still have that buzzed, humming feeling, and I wonder if it has to do with the new resident I’m harboring.
 

Best not to think about it. Not until it starts to matter.

Still, I find myself patting my lower belly, even though it’s not really anything yet. Just a collection of cells, a tiny thing.

I’ll see if it’s in there tomorrow, but there are no guarantees of anything.

Especially not with everything that happened.

Present Day

“Frank’s pissed at you, Ash,” Josh says. He’s lean and limber, prepped for the fight at the end of October that’s supposed to bring us so much money. “He says you can’t come back to the gym. He’s getting there with me too, I think. Or close enough.”

“He’s an asshole. We’ve got our own plans, Joshie. We’ll figure it out. You’ll win the fight, and we’ll have the money. The owner has the earnest money to hold the new place for us.” Even as I say the words, my heart leaps in my chest just a little.
 

It might not work out.
That’s the thought at the edge of my mind.

Josh and I are at my shit gym again, the one that got closed down by the health inspector back in May. I can’t help thinking that I won’t be able to bring in enough money to be any kind of a husband to anyone. Now that she’s said yes—now that we’ve shared everything—I have nothing. Her mother—Linda—is getting her business back together, but there’s no revenue to speak of yet.

She said she’ll pay me back, but I’m not expecting it.
 

I lost my job with Frank now that I told him to go fuck the hell off. So even that slow trickle of income is no longer a part of my paycheck.
 

I’m Jonathan Ash. A solution always comes through.

But I do hope Summer enjoys living at
her
place. Because it’s not real certain that I’ll be able to pay my rent next month, not with every penny going to supporting Josh so he can make more—and not with every bit of money I did have tied up in the new gym.

Josh practices his knee strikes, narrowly missing my side. “Oh yeah man, I forgot to tell you. There was some issue with the inspection. We’ll need a new HVAC unit or some shit. And maybe one other thing. A supporting beam needs replacing. Some shit like that.”

Josh is many things, but he’s not specific on important details about buying property.

“What do you mean there are problems with the inspection? That’s the place—the place where you get out from under that criminal’s thumb—the place where I establish my business?” I’m about ready to burst open—there are so many things that hang in the mix right now.
 

Summer, most of all. She knew I
was
working for a criminal at a nasty fight club, that I
had
my own gym that’s condemned and falling apart, that I
wanted
to open a new place—and that I
gave
her mother every penny I had.
 

Josh shrugs at me. “Just that there are a few problems with the inspection. With the money I was able to put down on it—”

“What was that like? Five hundred bucks?”

“Five thousand, from one of my fights last year. We
were
supposed to have
twenty-five thousand
, but you went and gave it to Linda Colington.” Josh punches the bag again. His big fight is coming soon, and he’s not as prepared as he should be. “Good news is no one’s going to buy the place out from under us while we get the down payment together. No one’s gonna want a fucked up HVAC.” He strikes me again. “It’s almost as bad as your fucking shithole you’ve got here. ‘Gym Ash,’ what kind of name was that anyway? How long was it popular? Six weeks?”