The Boss

by Abigail Barnette

  "You're clones of each other," I pointed out.

  "Yeah, well." She grinned at me. "Turns out I must be one narcissistic bitch, because I fucking love my clone."

  "A narcissistic model? You'd be the very first." I made a finger gun at her. "I'm happy for you. Really happy for you."

  "Don't worry about this." She waved a hand at my midsection. "If you decide to get rid of it, we can hang out and have a post abortion slumber party with ice cream and cake."

  "You and cake." I laughed to myself, even though the thought was horribly depressing, in my frame of mind. What would my mom say? What would my super Catholic family think of me?

  "And if you decide to keep it, I'll help you pick out the color for the nursery. Provided, of course, that you find an apartment with a room you can make into a nursery." She took a sip of her tea, making a face at what I assumed was the six pounds of sugar she'd nervously dumped into it. "I mean, you can't keep it here. No pets allowed, it's in the lease."

  The door opened, and Deja stepped in, Holli's keychain dangling from one hand, a plastic bag in the other. "Okay. I have the test. Are you going to do it now, or in the morning?"

  "What's the difference?" How I managed to stop myself from lunging across the room and snatching the bag from her hands, I would never know.

  "Well, they say you're supposed to take them in the morning, because that's when the highest concentration of hormones is sitting around in your pee." Deja held the bag out to me. "But I figured you'd want to know right now, so I got a two pack."

  "How much do I owe you?" I went for my purse, and she shook her head.

  "Just go take the test, okay? We'll figure that out later."

  That's code for, “I'm not going to ask you to pay me, because you just lost your job," but I wasn't in the mood to be particularly prideful at the moment.

  I took the bag into the bathroom with me and ripped the box practically in half to open it. My hands were shaking, which didn't make it easy to get the foil packet undone. When I held the damn thing, it seemed utterly wrong that I should be so terrified of a tiny chunk of cheap plastic. This stupid little thing held so much power over my life. My entire future, possibly.

  I sat on the toilet and tried to figure out what angle would work best. Unlike most men I'd ever met, women don't generally have a bizarre childhood history of peeing on things, so I'd never had any practice. Then, I had to overcome my nerves to actually get things flowing. I managed to force a few drops, and peed on my hand.

  "You have to be fucking kidding me," I muttered under my breath. It was hard enough taking a pee test at the doctor's office, and that little plastic cup was a much bigger target.

  I looked at the sink. The gleaming porcelain cup we used as a toothbrush holder tried not to make eye contact with me.

  "Sorry, Holli, I'll buy you another." I emptied our toothbrushes into the sink then sat back down, positioned the cup between my legs, and urged myself to relax.

  I didn't get much, but I hoped it would be enough. My heart in my throat, I dipped the cotton-ish tip thing on the end of the test into the bottom of the cup.

  Watching the test saturate and the wet mark creeping through the little plastic window was not unlike watching a car accident from the sidewalk. I knew what was going to happen, but I was powerless to stop it from happening as the horror unfolded before my very eyes. As my urine washed across the test strip, there it was, clear as day. Two bright, unmistakable pink lines. It didn’t even need a few minutes to develop.

  "No." I shook my head and set the cup on the floor. At least I had the presence of mind to put the cap back on the test, so it wouldn't dribble as I shuffled, my pants still around my ankles, to the torn instruction sheet on the floor. I compared my test with the diagram, certain I'd made a mistake reading it. But there it was. One line for negative. Two for positive.

  I really was pregnant.

  My ears were ringing. I looked up at my reflection in the mirror, my eyes wide, my face pale. I looked back at the test in my hand, and flung it to the floor in disgust. "You're a liar!"

  Holli knocked on the door. "Soph! Are you okay?"

  I slid down the wall and covered my face with my hands. The door opened just a little bit. "Soph?"

  "I'm not okay." I wiped my tears from my cheeks on the back of my hand. "I'm pregnant."

  "Oh, honey." Holli sounded just as upset as I felt. That added guilt to my reaction. Could I be any more dramatic?

  Okay, so I knew that having unprotected sex wasn't a great idea. I'd done it anyway. But this wasn't the worst-case scenario. I could fix this.

  I stood up, dumped the cup into the toilet, flushed, and said, "I'm pregnant, and we need a new toothbrush holder."

  "Yuck. I'll give you a minute." Holli closed the door, and I welcomed the space. I just needed to think.

  There was a fucking baby in me.

  Jesus Christ.

  A real baby? Like a rip out of my vagina Aliens-style baby? What was I going to do about that?

  I thought about the pictures in Neil's kitchen. Emma with her puppy. The first day of school. Neil had obviously been a part of her life. He didn't want to have any more kids, though. I had no doubt he would financially support me if I chose to keep it, less doubt that he would walk away from me and a baby without providing emotional support, as well. But when I tried to imagine what life would be like living on Fifth avenue with a baby and a nanny while my older, more successful husband made billions of dollars... the picture didn't look appealing.

  I liked my apartment. I liked my room. I liked my bathtub. And I really, really liked not having a human being I didn’t even know using me for life support.

  But it was a baby, right? It was our baby, half me, half Neil. Shouldn't that magically undo all my worries? Shouldn't I be happy that I made a baby with the guy I loved? Didn't everyone want this?

  Was I supposed to want this?

  I put our toothbrushes in the medicine cabinet, washed my hands then stepped out of the bathroom. Holli and Deja were waiting in the living room, and I held up one finger to stave off their questions. "Wait. I just want to try Neil one last time."

  In my room, I opened my recent calls. Ten of them so far. I was looking a little obsessive. But I was pretty sure he would understand, once he knew what they were all about. This would be the last call tonight.

  "Neil... I really need you to call me." I took a breath, and I knew he would hear my teary snuffling. "It's super important. I... I don't know what to do. I just really need to hear your voice."

  Okay. So not my best moment.

  Hopefully, pathetically, I took the phone with me into the living room. He said he was sick. He's probably in bed right now. That didn't make me feel better.

  "Are you okay?" Deja asked as I entered the room.

  I nodded. "I'm in shock."

  "I understand that, believe me."

  Holli's head whipped up to look at her with a bad attempt at disguising her curiosity.

  Deja sighed. "Yes, I got accidentally pregnant once. It's not something I put on my résumé."

  "What did you do?" I asked, because I knew Holli wouldn't, and I really needed to hear someone say they had all the answers.

  "I had an abortion." Deja shrugged, her wide eyes bouncing between me and Holli. "What? It's no big deal. I was at a party, I'm pretty sure someone put shit in my drink, and then next morning I'd woken up and I’d had sex with this guy."

  "That’s not sex," Holli said gently. "That sounds more like you got roofied and raped."

  "I know," she said, looking slightly embarrassed. "And I’ll talk to you about it later. This isn't the rape conversation, it's the Sophie is pregnant conversation. I'm trying not to steal her thunder."

  I laughed at that. I don't know why. "Sorry. It just strikes me as totally insane that we're having this discussion."

  Deja gave me a closed-lip smile of sympathy. "You're going to be okay. You have somebody to go through this with you. Mr. Elwood isn
't going to leave you stranded."

  "And while we both think it's creepy and weird that you have a boyfriend we have to call 'Mr. Elwood,' I agree with Deja," Holli said with a decisive nod. "He's going to support you with this, no matter what."

  As if on cue, my phone buzzed. "It's him." I didn't leave the room to take the call. I didn't figure I would be breaking the news to him over the phone. I would wait and do it in person, tonight, if he let me. "Neil?"

  "This is Emma."

  I frowned. "Emma... what are you - "

  "Dad is in the hospital." There was a faintly hysterical quality to her voice. "They just gave me his things, and I saw you'd tried to call him."

  "In the..." Wait, this was all wrong. I was the one having a crisis. We could only have one crisis at a time. "What happened?"

  She made an impatient noise. "I don't know. He was unconscious in the back of the car when Tony found him. Look, are you going to come down here? You've been calling all night, you must have been worried."

  I had been, but for reasons I didn't care to discuss with her at the moment. "Which hospital? I'll be there as fast as I can."

  "Presbyterian, east sixty-eighth."

  "Is he okay?" Of course he was okay. It was impossible for Neil to not be okay. It just couldn’t happen.

  "I don't know, I haven't seen him. He wasn’t awake when the ambulance arrived. Now I'm waiting for the bloody doctor to come out and bloody talk to me," she snapped impatiently. "I'll know more by the time you get here. Come through the emergency entrance, I'll wait for you there if I can."

  She hung up without saying goodbye, and I numbly hit the disconnect button. I stared back at Holli and Deja, a paralysis of fear and disbelief leeching the blood from my veins. "Neil had some kind of collapse. He's in the hospital."

  "What?" Holli squeaked. "What the hell is going on, Soph?"

  "I don't know." I reached for my purse, dropped my phone into it, grabbed my keys and headed for the door. I wanted to say something else, but I just couldn't. "I don't know," I repeated, and then I dashed out the door.

  Every step I took down the stairs jarred all the way to my skull. He’s okay, this is nothing, he’s fine, tumbled through my mind. This wasn't happening. This wasn't my life. I wasn't pregnant. My boyfriend wasn't in the fucking hospital. None of this was real.

  But it was. Disturbingly, awfully real.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  True to her word, when I got to the hospital Emma was waiting by the emergency room doors, bundled up in her winter coat. Her eyes were red, like she had been crying.

  "Is he okay? Is Neil okay?" I asked, as if she wouldn't know whom I was there to see.

  "They've moved him to a room, I can take you up." She gestured to the automatic doors behind her, and we went inside.

  With every step I took, my nerves gripped my stomach tighter, twisting it into knots.

  "Visiting hours are over, but since he was just admitted they said they'd make an exception," Emma said quietly in the eerie silence of the elevator.

  "Thank you for calling me." I wanted to hug her. The thought that Neil could be in here for days without me knowing made me panicky, even though it hadn't happened. “Do they know what’s wrong with him?”

  “Um…” Emma’s gaze darted away, her brow wrinkling in concentration. “They’re running some tests.”

  I had the feeling she knew more than she was saying. Then again, I was pretty paranoid at the moment.

  We stepped out of the elevator, and I wrinkled my nose at the hospital environment. The quiet, interrupted only by soft, far away beeps. The suspiciously clean smell even though you knew the place was crawling with germs. Someone had made a bag of popcorn in the break room; as we passed by the open door, the scent wafted out to mix with the sharp, unnatural odor of disinfectant, and I gagged.

  A nurse was standing outside one of the rooms, writing in a patient chart. She looked up, slightly annoyed, and said, "Visiting hours are - "

  "We have permission," Emma said authoritatively, and she led me past the nurse. I envied people who could do that. Just walk around a hospital like they owned the place. Emma was far more comfortable here than I was.

  Neil was in a huge corner room. The lights were low, and the curtain around his bed was pulled when I peeked inside.

  "Come on," Emma said gently. "He was awake and talking to me not long ago."

  I knew I probably wasn't her favorite person. I couldn't blame her. But she'd taken the time to call me, and she was being so kind, despite her discomfort around me. At that moment, I had to really fight my urge to hug her.

  "Dad?" Emma pushed back the curtain a bit. Neil was lying flat in the big, weird hospital bed. There was a heart monitor on, beeping steadily, and two big bags of clear fluid hanging from an IV pole next to him. He opened his eyes just a little, then a bit more, then squinted at us, and I realized he probably wasn't wearing his contacts.

  "It's me, baby," I went to his side and leaned down, brushing my lips across his forehead. "What the hell happened?"

  "Oh, Sophie." He half-laughed, half-wept, his arms coming up to hold me. I stepped quickly back, so he didn't tangle me in his IV tubing. He dropped his arms and rubbed one hand over his face. "They've given me enough sedatives to kill a whole pack of elephants."

  "He's had a spinal tap," Emma explained. "And painkillers for the headache."

  "Oh my god, why didn't you tell me you were so bad? I never would have let you leave by yourself, if I had known." I sat down in the armchair beside his bed and took his right hand, the one that didn't have a bunch of tubes in it.

  "I didn't know I was." He blinked a few times as he remembered. "I didn't feel all that bad until I woke up in the emergency room. My god, I'm so relieved you're here."

  "Emma called me." I looked up at her with a grateful smile.

  "You should put her on your emergency contacts," Emma told him. "If I had been in London- "

  "Thank god you were still here." My relief was so acute, I could cry. Neil was... alive. I had honestly thought, from the way Emma had looked when I arrived, that he might have been dying. "What do they think is wrong with you?"

  Neil squeezed my hand. He was coming around a bit, but his speech was halting. "They… don't know. I am most definitely anemic. The headache had them worried, until they found out I wasn't having a stroke."

  "Okay. Okay, those all sound fixable. I'm just thankful that you're all right." And that I wasn't carrying a recently deceased billionaire's heir. But I wasn't going to tell him that now, or he really would have a stroke.

  "I'm going to go get some coffee," Emma said quietly, excusing herself from the room.

  Once she was gone, Neil lifted our entwined hands to his lips and kissed the backs of my fingers. "I'm so glad she called you. I've been medicated out of my head since I got here."

  "I just feel bad I didn't get here until now. You had all these painful things done to you - "

  "And you weren't here to get queasy and throw up while they were happening?" he asked with a wry chuckle. I remembered the morning he'd cut his hand, and now I couldn't remember if I'd been sick over the blood, or because I was pregnant.

  I rubbed my hand up and down his arm. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do to comfort him. "Was it awful?"

  "Truthfully, it wasn't that bad. They do hand out painkillers like candy here. But I was thinking, on the ride home..." He paused, his gaze flicking briefly to my face, then down again. "I want you to consider Gabriella's offer."

  "I couldn't work with them. They're a bunch of assholes." I tried to laugh, but my stomach was still in knots. Every time I finished a sentence, I had a moment of panic, thinking, Did I just tell him I'm pregnant?

  If he knew right now, he would want to give me money or some other job in his company. I didn't want either. Besides, the man was already hospitalized, he didn't need more stress.

  "Those assholes are going to build an empire. You can't miss out on this chance." His quiet
intensity set me on alert. He might have been drugged, but he'd obviously put some clearheaded thought into this.

  "Well..." I began cautiously. "Gabriella told me I don't get the job if I'm involved with you, so..."

  He still couldn't meet my eyes. "Then it might be for the best if we're not involved with each other."

  The pain and disappointment hit me first, starting as a squeezing ache in my chest and ringing in my ears. I seriously wondered if it were possible I was having some pregnancy-related heart condition. And even though I'd heard him, I still uttered a hoarse, shocked, "What?"

  "I don't want to be the man who ruins your life." His voice was thick with held back emotion. "I love you too much to let something so important pass you by."

  "You're on drugs. Maybe we shouldn't have this conversation right now," I said, pulling my hand back.

  "I'm not that drugged." He made a noise of disgust. "Well, I am that drugged, but truth be told, I made this decision before I ever came to the restaurant, before I knew about Gabriella's stupid proclamation. Being with me while working for her is only going to complicate things for you."

  “Neil, I’m not going to work for Gabriella. I don’t even want to - “

  He cut me off. “Listen to yourself. This is Tokyo all over again. You have a life changing opportunity in front of you, but you’re making the easy choice.”

  “This is nothing like Tokyo,” I whispered, the vise grip feeling in my chest tightening down hard. “I was a stupid kid then, making a dumb choice for emotional reasons.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  Oh god. That was how Neil saw me: a stupid twenty-something who was making a bad, emotionally driven choice without thinking of the consequences.

  He didn’t trust me enough to make up my own mind.

  “You told me that working for Gabriella was unhealthy,” I reminded him through my painfully tight jaw. “You were furious at the thought I would throw you over to work for her.”

  “That was when I thought you were going to be offered a job as an assistant. Assistant creative director is… you might have worked at Porteras for fifteen years without reaching that position.” His voice broke a little as he continued, “Your career matters too much to you. I can’t stand by while you miss this chance.”