Ash: A Bad Boy Romance (28 page)

I give him a wicked smile and shuffle to the side so he strikes air when he hits. Then I catch him unaware and cuff him on one ear and then the other.
 

“You little asshole. I was doing my best to compete with Frank.”

“Best to get actually buy a place that people can work out in without fear of asbestos or crumbling walls full of mold.” He strikes the bag once, twice, and then a third time. I own this place, in all of it’s tumbling down glory. Josh was exaggerating some—but Gym Ash did have a short heyday. This new place would be breathing room from worrying about it for so long, from wishing we could succeed without Frank, from the ties that hold us to the criminal world in North Carolina.
 

I’m done with that shit, with all the anxiety, all the difficulty, all the wondering if we’ll make it to tomorrow.
 

For the past three years, everything in my life has been about preparing for Summer to come back—and now that she’s here, I’m failing.
 

She told me she doesn’t see it that way, that she knows what I did to save her mother.
 

As Josh cleans up and heads out to his truck, I still feel useless.
 

There’s been something strange about her for the past week, something off. I can’t put my finger on it, and I can’t place what it is.
 

This is the time in my life when I should be happiest, and here I am, strolling through the gym I’ll forfeit to the bank next week and wondering how in the fuck I’ll pay for my next failing business venture.
 

Maybe I should have taken my ass back to New York when I had the chance. At least the money was steady.

I’ll have to tell Summer that there’s no money, and that will make everything in both of our lives that much worse.

It occurs to me that there might be a point she wises up and figures out no doctor—no woman—should be with a man who can’t succeed. I know what she’d tell me—I sacrificed for her family. I made her a priority.
 

And now it seems I have nothing—no plan to make it better, no plan to break free. I imagine myself telling her to go one day, that she deserves better.
 

But
fuck
. I’m Jonathan Ash. I might not be able to marry her again, but
something
will come through in the end.

Present Day

My eyes are shut tight. The gel touches my body, and the machine turns on. I can hear the heartbeat of the hospital—lights and machines and people walking, talking, breathing. The world flutters on around us like there’s nothing wrong or unusual or anxiety-inducing about today. Like there isn’t a trillion tons of hormones flooding my body and making me feel like shit.

“Though we weren’t going to be able to see it—but—” Zelda whispers in the darkened room, and I feel a light flick onto the screen in front of me, even though my eyes are still closed. Slowly, I open them. On the video screen are a perfect dark circle, the smudge of a yolk sac, and the a tiny flickering white smudge that looks more like a sea monkey or a jelly bean than a baby.

The sound reaches me from a long way off.

Tiny and quick, the tap tap tap of a heartbeat.
 

“Strong and healthy—it’s 152 beats per minute, on the nose!” Zelda moves the ultrasound wand and takes pictures of each angle. I just stare at the screen and watch the tiniest human heart beat on and on, miraculously and unquestionably healthy. “Looks like you’re five weeks, six days. You usually don’t see a heartbeat at this point, and sometimes not even an embryo. But there it is.”

“There it is,” I repeat. All at once, my heart starts to beat fast, and a faint sheen of sweat makes its way over my body. I’ve had so much trouble—and so many doctors telling me a pregnancy would be incredibly dangerous—it feels like this can’t be it. I lean forward and squint at the screen—three dark spots encircle the amniotic sac, dark fluid moving within them.

Zelda gives me a look. “That’s nothing to be worried about.”

“It’s a—” I lean in closer. “God, that’s
big
. A fucking hemorrhage.”

“Hematoma—those dark spots aren’t hemorrhages yet. They doesn’t necessarily mean anything, Summer. The embryo looks really healthy, and there’s a strong heartbeat. Sac is the right shape, looks like your lining is thick.”

“But a hematoma like that--there’s blood circling around the whole sac—it’s—I’m not an OB, Zelda. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s not
good
.”
 

“Well,” she says, pausing. “It’s not fantastic. But with everything else—your hormone levels are great, everything inside looks great--you’re probably fine. Just don’t go lifting a bunch of heavy stuff.” She bites her lips and looks away. “You know the diagnosis, Summer. It is what it is—”

“Threatened miscarriage. With the blood and all that around the sac. Jesus.”

“Do you want me to call anyone? Your friend Debbie? Or?”

“No. No one needs to know about this until we’re sure it’s going to stick.” I clench my teeth and hold back tears as Zelda hands me a wipe for the gel and turns off the machine.
 

“You sure about that? Most of the time a subchorionic hematoma doesn’t mean anything at all. It’s very rare that anything is really wrong. Like three percent?” Zelda scrunches up her face as if she’s trying to recall the particular study that tells her I
shouldn’t
worry, that there’s
nothing
wrong. “You might have some—”

“Spotting. I know. But come in if there’s cramps or fever or lots of blood.”

“You got it.” She looks at me with big eyes, like she’s about to draw me into a hug. Instead, I just hang my head in my hands and look down at the floor. Still, she walks over to me, and she takes my hands. “Summer, I know your left ovary is gone, and there are some striations on that side on that side of your uterus. Scar tissue, right?”

I nod. There’s so much more to it than that, and the new life inside of me draws it all to the surface, making it pulse and pound and bring back pain I’m no longer used to feeling. Ash started to dredge it up when he appeared again, but here it is again,
all
of it.
 

“Just because your body is different—just because it’s been through a lot—doesn’t mean you’ll lose this baby.” I hang my head lower, and I can’t prevent the tears from coming. “Summer, tell me you hear me.”

“I hear you,” I mumble, hot tears rushing down my face. I look up at her, face wet, nose running—far less beautiful and delicate than I thought I was when I first met Jonathan Ash. I’m grown now, and this shit sits heavy on my chest.

“Tell me,” Zelda says. “Tell me you know. I don’t know exactly what you went through, but I do know it wasn’t fun. And I know it makes this worse. But tell me you understand this isn’t a death sentence. Not for you—not for your baby.”

“Embryo,” I correct.
 

She shrugs. “Baby, soon enough. Maybe you should talk to him and tell him you’re scared. It’s okay if you are. You just need to know it’s not
doomed
.”

“Him who? I should talk to who and tell him I’m scared?” I raise an eyebrow and look at her in confusion.
 

“The baby,” she says simply. “He needs to know you’re thinking about him.”

“No—he doesn’t. It’s not even a he—this is nonsense.” I pull on my leggings beneath the hospital robe and hop down from the table. “No offense. I just don’t subscribe to that stuff. The spirits of the universe and the ‘everything happens for a reason’ fate stuff.”

Zelda gives me a bemused smile. “I don’t either. But I’ve done this enough to know that I believe in the resilience of the human body. Even if you had surgery before—” She pauses and looks me directly in the eye. “Even if your body
lost
a pregnancy before, it doesn’t mean it will happen again. Just rest for a while. Sex is okay, but no lifting heavy things. Just lie on the sofa and binge watch some Grey’s Anatomy or something.”

“Okay,” I say. That doctor’s voice echoes in my head again, even though it was such a long time ago that it all happened. I don’t even remember the doctor’s name, just the words he left me with--that it would be too hard for me to have a baby on my own. Even as a doctor—a woman of science—it doesn’t seem like anything could be fine with this.
 

Even though the embryo is right where it’s supposed to be.
 

Even if it’s healthy and strong and has a strong heartbeat.
 

Any gynecologist would have told me it’s a threatened miscarriage, that it could all go south in the blink of an eye.
 

And the fact remains--I don’t trust my body to hold onto anything, let alone something this important.
 

No, I’ll keep my secret for now. And later, when there’s something more to see—maybe then.

The tiny spec of hope seems like it’s gone—out the door, fleeing far, far away.

 
Present Day

Dr. Summer Colington is acting weird as
fuck
. Not that she’s ever really
normal
. She’s a mess, leaving keys all over the apartment and absentmindedly rearranging my spice rack so it’s not alphabetical. She’s taken to eating noodles with butter as her sole source of nutrition, and she rushes out of the apartment in the mornings like an absolute madwoman, like the hospital might disappear and vanish if she’s not there at least an hour early.
 

When she walks in the door in the evenings, she’s quiet, absorbed in looking at her phone or studying her textbooks.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was keeping something from me. But that’s all over now—isn’t it? I
know
we’re fucking broke, and we know the whole history, both of us.
 

This night is no different.
 

My phone is buzzing in my pocket when she opens the door, and I ignore it again. The woman standing in front of me takes my full attention. There are dark circles under her eyes, and the space beneath her cheekbones looks hollow. She’s as skinny as when I met her in New York, jeans hanging off of her body. She glances at me and then averts her eyes like she’s ashamed. She’s worse tonight, worse than she has been. It’s like someone has taken the light inside of her and snuffed it out, replacing her enthusiasm and charm with dark gray worry.
 

“Sunshine,” I say. I stand behind the sofa and watch her as she unpacks her things. It almost looks like her purse is weighing her down.

“Hm?” She looks at her phone absently, and collapses in one of the chairs.
 

“What’s going on?”

“Oh, nothing. I have a stomach virus or something. I’m not sure what’s going on.” No eye contact, and she starts with her hands, twisting them in circles. “But I think that’s it. I haven’t been sleeping great since we talked...” Her voice trails off and she stops, her face growing even paler, if that’s possible.
 

“I told you that time isn’t an issue. We’re not leaping into it—the uh, parenting thing.” The words feel strange rolling off of my tongue. Before Summer, I’d never even considered being part of a family. Cullen’s fucked up family was my fucked up family. I was the only child of an Irish mobster, deeply in debt to a bigger, meaner Irish mobster. After I failed at fighting, I did the only thing I could do and went to pay the family’s debt.
 

It was Summer who made me see a way out of it. It was Summer who made me realize that staying in New York would leave me in the clutches of Cullen’s men forever.
 

And in the three years she was gone, I dreamed of her. Often, the dreams were about her freckled skin, her breasts in my hands, her body crashing into mine and begging for more.
 

But once, I dreamed of her holding a child, a toddler with bright blue-green eyes and wispy copper hair. And then the dream came again and again.