by Vivian Wood
“If you want to move to a hut in Tibet, I can do that, too,” he said. “I’ll go wherever you want to go. Do whatever you want.”
Harper stood up and tossed the shirt onto the floor. He could barely make out anything beyond the unbelievable curves of her body’s outline. The last of the day’s sun hugged her silhouette like a halo.
“What are you doing?” he asked as he swallowed his desire.
“After what you just said, I’m going to fuck you like never before,” she purred. “I’m going to fuck you all the way until dawn.”
16
Harper
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sean asked desperately. He was almost impossible to hear over the beeping machines and the stern orders of the doctors and nurses.
Harper was being wheeled down a hallway with long tubes of fluorescent lights in the ceiling. “She’s losing a lot of blood,” the matronly doctor said. “I don’t know if we can save—”
I wanted to tell you. I tried to tell you. She opened her mouth, but the words wouldn’t come out. Sean looked down at her, confused and terrified.
“Are you her husband?” one of the nurses asked him.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sean asked her again.
“Sir! Are you her husband?”
“What? No, I’m—”
“If you’re not immediate family, you need to stay in the waiting room.”
Harper opened her mouth again to tell them he was wrong. Just confused. He was her husband, how could they prove otherwise? “It’s not yours.” She didn’t know where those words came from. It didn’t even sound like her voice. But as soon as the words spilled out of her mouth, she could see his heart crack in two.
“It is mine,” he said, though his voice was small.
It is yours, of course it’s yours. It was too late. She’d already been wheeled through a wide pair of double doors. The last she saw of Sean, he was held firmly by overbearing male nurses or hospital security guards. He’d stared after her, open-mouthed and unbelieving.
This side of the hospital looked decades older. Harper’s head lolled to the side and she caught sight of dirt and grime buried into the tile. As she swung her head back to the ceiling to stare at the unforgiving lights, she saw that her swollen belly was uncovered. Four perfectly formed hands pressed against her stomach like they were trying to escape. But they were larger than a baby’s should be and awkwardly shaped. The fingers were twice the length of the palm and even through her flesh she could see they came to dagger points.
“What is that?” she asked. “What’s inside me—”
“You need to be quiet and stay calm.” The doctor leaned over her, a purple face mask obscuring the lower half.
“What’s inside me?” Harper yelled as tears ran down her face. They’d pulled her into a cramped room with a single ugly light overhead.
“Strap her down,” the doctor barked. Harper felt cold hands at her ankles and wrists. Someone jerked her knees upward and spread her legs apart. The chilled bite of metal on her bare skin shocked her. Am I naked?
“What’s inside me? Where’s Sean?” She tried to look around the room and realized one of the straps had been placed against her neck. All she could do was whip her head side to side.
“Who’s Sean?” someone out of her line of vision asked.
“The baby’s father—” she tried to explain.
The doctor let out a mean laugh as she picked up a pair of long scissors that looked more like hedge clippers. They seemed dark and rusty. “Sean’s not the father,” the doctor said. She tsked disapprovingly at Harper. “And those aren’t babies.”
“What?” Harper strained to see her stomach. Surely those long fingers and talons at the tips hadn’t been right.
“We’re going to have to remove the parasites,” the doctor said. “Unfortunately for you, no anesthesia is possible for such a procedure. Bite down on this if you need to.” Somebody shoved a ball gag in her mouth. It was too big and instantly she couldn’t breathe. “Hold her legs open,” the doctor said. The purple mask leaned over Harper once again, this time from between her legs. “This is going to hurt.”
Harper woke with a start, her body drenched in sweat. She reached down to inspect her stomach, but it was flat and smooth. “Jesus,” she whispered. Sean shifted next to her in bed. She could tell by the light that it was early morning.
Quietly, she slid from bed and padded to the living room. Harper clicked the door shut behind her and grabbed her phone. It was five o’clock in the morning. She tiptoed to her own en-suite and locked the bedroom door. P would kill her for this, but she had to talk to someone.
“Fuck, bitch,” P moaned into the phone. “This better be important. Like, you better be dead.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered into the phone. “I didn’t have anyone else to call.”
“Harper?” he asked, suddenly awake. “What is it? Do I need to help move a body? Is camouflage required or will black suffice?”
“I’m pregnant.”
“You’re what?”
Why couldn’t you be that succinct with Sean? “I’m pregnant,” she repeated. “And I … I don’t know what to do.”
“Is it Sean’s?”
“Of course it’s Sean’s! Who else’s would it be?”
“I was just checking! God, the pregnancy hormones are already raging, aren’t they? So … what are you doing to do?”
“I … I think I want to keep it.”
“If you want to keep it, you need to stop dieting,” he said.
“That was blunt.”
“That was real. And you’ll probably need some help to get there. Professional help, I mean.”
Harper chewed her lip. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe this is all a big mistake. Maybe I’m being a fucking idiot. I’m already jobless. Being jobless and fat at the same time might not be the best idea. Isn’t that how most women get dumped?”
“Bitch, shut the hell up,” he said. “First of all, there’s a big difference between being pregnant and being fat. You need to get your pretty little head around that. You hear me?”
“I hear you,” she mumbled. She knew P was right, but her logical side and every other part of her were at strong odds.
“Really?” he said. “Because I don’t think you do. Look, baby, I’ve thought for a long time you needed a little expert intervention. I mean, it wasn’t a huge deal when you were twenty years old. A little excessive dieting, maybe even a few bumps at a party to keep your appetite quiet—”
“I never did coke,” she said.
“Oh. Maybe that was me. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is back in the day you didn’t have any responsibilities. And your body was so young, it could take a little abuse.”
“So you’re saying I’m old? Being old and pregnant isn’t exactly the best combination either.”
“Bitch, if you’re old then I’m geriatric. And I’m not geriatric or old, you got me? All I’m saying is … maybe it’s time to start taking a little better care of yourself. And that baby if that’s the path you’re taking.”
“Do you think I’m making a mistake?”
P breathed into the phone. “No,” he said. “If you’re asking if I think keeping the baby is a mistake, then no. What is a mistake is if you keep abusing your body like that. Baby or no baby.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I know.” Harper’s ears perked up. In the kitchen, she heard Sean start the blender. “Hey, P, I need to go.”
“Yeah, just go ahead and wake me up with a bomb like that and take off,” he said. “Call me when you figure it out. Or if you need me for anything at all. Okay?”
“Okay, love you,” she said.
“Love you, too, whore.” Harper made her way to the kitchen.
“Hey,” she said with a smile.
“What were you doing in there?” Sean asked.
“Nothing, I just didn’t want to wake you.”
“I wouldn’t have minded,” he said a
s he sipped a green concoction. “I’m going for a shower, if you want to join me.”
“Actually, I thought I’d make breakfast,” she said.
“Oh.” Sean looked surprised. “Alright. I can make it for you, I won’t be that long—”
“No, it’s okay,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
When she heard the shower turn on, she pulled out a pan and began to whip three eggs into it with a splash of milk. Harper folded in a handful of spinach, but paused at the cheese. An omelet was already fatty enough. Finally, she added a sprinkling of parmesan instead of the shredded pepper jack or cheddar Sean kept in the fridge. Baby steps, she reminded herself.
She slid the fluffy omelet onto a plate and halved a few strawberries to go alongside it. Harper managed a few bites of the omelet, and willed herself to eat all of the fruit. The shower turned off, and she quickly spread the breakfast across the plate. It thinned it out, hopefully enough that Sean wouldn’t notice.
You’re getting fat, the voice inside her head taunted. Her hands roved across her stomach. It was definitely less concave than this morning, the fat from the eggs and cheese already glued to her insides. Fucking cow. You barely deserve Sean as it is, and then you go and screw it up by getting pregnant? If this baby survives, you’re just going to fuck it up like Mom did with you.
If she just kept restricting like she used to, maybe everything would take care of itself. It would look like a natural miscarriage, and maybe Sean wouldn’t even find out. Why tell him until the third trimester anyway? A lot of people keep pregnancies a secret until then, what with miscarriages being so common in the first trimester …
“Stop it,” she muttered to herself. Harper piled another bite of omelet onto her fork. It quivered before her lips, a slick glob of yellow. A wave of nausea flooded her, but she forced it into her mouth anyway.
You’re so fucking pathetic. She began to retch and spit the partially chewed blob back onto the plate.
Harper rushed to push the remainder of the food down the garbage disposal. She ran the water and turned on the grinder while she rinsed the plate.
Sean appeared just as she flicked off the disposal. “Already done?” he asked.
“I was hungry,” she said with a smile. “There’s some extra eggs for you if you want it.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Are you going to the gym?”
“Do you think I should?”
A look of hurt spread across his face. “Not necessarily … you just usually do this time of day.”
“Oh.” She was flustered and scurried to cover it up. “I don’t know.” The least you can do is skip the gym today. It was the kind voice, the one she rarely heard. Give your body a break. Give the baby a break.
That was some comfort. She watched Sean polish off the eggs in a few fast bites. “You don’t need the gym,” he said with a smile as he put the pan into the dishwasher. “Come on. I’ll give you a workout in bed.”
She grinned as he picked her up and carried her into the bedroom.
17
Sean
Harper stretched her limbs on the couch. She moves like a cat, he thought as he tore off the charcoal sketch from the pad. Languid and smooth. Once she’d become used to his eye on her, she’d relaxed. Sean set up the stretched canvas on the portable stand and began to mix the acrylics on the same board he’d used for over a decade. It was stained a cocktail of colors, layers deep.
He’d already had every line of her ingrained in his memory, but it was different to allow those lines to flow from his head—from his heart—through his fingers and onto something real. Something tangible. Something he could keep if he loosened his grip and she slipped away.
Now, his fingers full of the muscle memories of her, he could begin the acrylic painting that would keep her. Immortalized.
“What are you doing?” she asked. Harper had tucked into a thick book, long ago given up hope that he’d let go of this project.
“Moving onto acrylic.”
“The charcoal’s done? Isn’t that enough?”
He gave her a half smile. “Charcoal is just a warm-up,” he said.
“Can I see?”
“Later. I’d rather you see them both at the same time.”
She gave him a faux pout. “Fine,” she said.
It took him ten minutes to blend the perfect reds and browns together to capture her hair. It caught fire in certain lights, but burned a slow and deep ember in others. The yellow undertones of her skin, so contrary to the rest of her and cradled below the nearly constant pink glow of her blushes, also took plenty of experimenting.
“Tell me something honestly?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“How many other girls have you painted?”
“None. Not like this at least.”
“Then how?”
He shrugged. “You know. Live models. I took quite a few classes when I was a kid and a teenager. In college. Occasionally I’d hire my own private models.”
“Oh.” She worried at her lip.
“Jealous?” he asked.
“No,” she said, too quickly.
“Aren’t you going to ask what those private models looked like?” he asked.
“No. But if you really want to tell me …”
He gave a laugh. “There weren’t that many. One weighed four hundred pounds. I know because she was quick to tell me. One was a double amputee from a car accident.”
“Wait, what?”
“You wanted to know,” he said. “I was interested in capturing what we don’t usually see in art. What we don’t normally consider beautiful. Trust me, it was much more challenging, and enjoyable, than the usual wannabe models that showed up for figure classes. No offense,” he said quickly.
“None taken,” she sniffed. “I think I worked hard enough to warrant not being envious of a wannabe model. So … how many times did you paint them? The private models?”
“I met with each of them maybe three to five times each.”
“Where are those paintings now? Can I see them?”
“Sure,” he said. “But they’re in storage, back on the East Coast. Eventually I’ll have everything shipped here. They’re not the most outstanding in terms of sheer artistic merit, but they’re interesting.”
Sean’s phone vibrated angrily on the glass dining table. “Shit, sorry,” he said. “I thought that was on silent.” He reached over to switch it off, but paused at the name. Seeing Ashton’s name light up his screen shot him back months in the past.
“Who is it?” she asked. Harper sensed the shift in the air.
“I think it’s Ashton,” he said.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, hold on.” He paused and considered taking the call in the other room. But what was the point? It was the two of them now, Harper and him. She might as well listen. He held up a finger to his mouth and answered the call with speakerphone. “Hello?”
“Sean?” He thought maybe Ashton’s voice would have changed since the accident, though that didn’t make any logical sense. But it was the same voice he’d known for over a decade. The same voice that egged him on in college, that was cool and soothing on the nights his parents drove him nearly over the edge.
“Hi, hey, Ashton,” he said. “How’s it going? Sorry, that’s kind of a stupid question.”
“Yeah. It is,” Ashton said. There was an edge in his voice that hadn’t been there before. Sean couldn’t tell if it was reserved just for him, or maybe it was permanent. “Although I guess I could say I’m better than I was a few weeks ago. Or at least I’ve been told.”
“Ashton … I’m sorry, man,” he said. “For everything, for that night, for taking so long to come and see you.” He could feel Harper’s eyes on him. When he looked up, she gazed at him with empathy in her eyes.
“You’re sorry?” Ashton gave a curt laugh. “Sorry’s for bailing on the bar tab. That doesn’t really cut it.”
“I’m … I don’t know what else to say,”
Sean said.
“You can start by saying you’re not going to cause trouble with the lawsuit. I don’t have the time—or the energy—to make this a huge ordeal in court. So I’d appreciate it if you’d just suck it up and do the right thing.”
“The right thing? Wait, you’re moving forward with the lawsuit?” Sean hadn’t heard anything from T, and he knew she wouldn’t waste any time if she had news. “Has your attorney talked to mine? Do you—”
“That’s a question to ask your lawyer,” Ashton snapped. “Regardless of what bullshit they discuss though, I can promise you that yes, the lawsuit is moving forward. You’re not getting out of this with some kind of deal or plea bargain or any of that crap.”
Anger began to simmer in Sean, but he willed it down, swallowed it like an uncomfortable lump in the throat. “And what exactly do you think I’m guilty of?” he asked. “I don’t know how much you remember of that night, but you were driving. We were both drinking, but those were your drugs. The blow, the pills—”
“Oh, were they?” Ashton asked. “Can you prove that? The pills were stolen. I know I was the only one with coke in my system, but can you prove you didn’t provide it? That you weren’t the dealer, not just mine but a shitload of other people’s?”
“You know that’s not true,” Sean said slowly.
“Does a jury know that’s not true? How do you think that would look to them? And since I was so messed up, on drugs that it appears you supplied, don’t you think you should have taken charge of the situation? Not let me drive? Wouldn’t that have been the responsible thing to do?”
“This is bullshit and you know it,” Sean said. “What are you getting out of this?”
“Well, for starters, I have a six-figure hospital bill that needs to be paid. But beyond that, my lawyer says I have an equally high amount of pain and suffering he’s more than happy to assign a dollar amount to.”
“Hospital bills?” Sean asked. “What about your insurance? What—”
“Insurance?” Ashton asked with a laugh. “Yeah, you rich kids take that shit for granted. I was a twenty-something recent college grad and an entry-level job! What kind of insurance did you think I had?”
