“You liked that, did you?”
“I loved that,” she replied, in a low, sultry voice that had me ready to turn her around and bend her over. “We’ve got to go, so we can get loud.”
I chuckled. “Again, Fal? Really?”
“Mmhmm,” she nodded. “My cycle is coming soon, so we have to do enough to get us through that.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “I don’t think it works like that, but whatever you say.”
We fixed our clothes as best we could, then snuck out of the dressing room and into the bathroom to clean up. On our way out – looking a lot more disheveled than when we came in, we crossed paths with Ayden, who stopped in her tracks to narrow her eyes.
She looked from me, to Fallon, then back to me, then to the damp spots over Fallon’s nipples. She shook her head, then walked off, muttering “Y’all so damn nasty” under her breath.
I wasn’t sure where it went wrong, but I knew the exact moment that I realized it.
Only two days had passed since we made that decision to leave our status undefined, and as far as I was concerned, Fallon and I were going strong. I was content, she was content, and everything between us was good. We were vibing, it was relaxed, we were doing what came natural, all the stuff she’d said. Then – and maybe it was just in my mind – everything shifted.
I was laying in the dark, in what would eventually be Charlie and Nixon’s office at the Pot Liquor site, after tripping, falling, and damn near bashing my head in. I was pretty sure I didn’t have a concussion, but I did have a nasty gash that Nixon had clumsily bandaged for me before giving up to go find somebody who knew what they were doing.
Of all the people on the block, his ass went and got Fallon.
When she saw me lying there, her eyes went wide, and I could practically see her heart leap up into her throat before she went into action. Washing and bandaging, and fussing at me about not practicing “safety first”. She was so worried, and so mad, but still so caring, and gentle, and so damn beautiful, that it hit me, right then. Fallon met my gaze, and her eyes were filled with so much, the type of emotion I’d longed for, yet never seen from my ex-wife, and I knew in that moment, that I was falling in love with her.
And it scared the shit out of me.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?” she asked, her forehead wrinkled with concern. “Sean, this gash looks ugly. Sean? Sean?”
I shook my head. “I’m good. I promise.” I couldn’t tell her the reason it had taken me a second to answer – because I was dazed from the realization I’d just had. Not even three months. I hadn’t even known her for three months yet, yet I was already thinking about the “L” word?
This was exactly how I’d fucked up with Olivia.
We met, I asked her out, and it was fun. We had hot, crazy sex, and she was gorgeous. She was career-driven, and vibrant, the kind of girl that was very easy to fall in love with. But I realized too late that she wasn’t capable of loving me back. She was one of those people who took, and took, and took, but never gave, but she was so pleasant that it took a minute to see it. And even when you did see it, it was hard to hate her for it.
When she dropped that little bomb on me, that she wanted a divorce, that she’d been fucking somebody else for over a year, that she’s never loved me, she just thought I was sweet… I wanted to kill somebody. Not her, ironically, cause she was “so sorry”. I wanted to kill him, because what kind of man fucks another man’s wife? The only thing that saved his ass was her refusal to tell me who it was, other than that it was somebody from her past.
Even now that I could clearly see the situation for what it was, I believed that she was honestly contrite. She was just too damned selfish for my feelings to matter enough not to cheat on me. She regretted that it hurt me, but it worked for her, so… whatever, I guess.
That’s not who Fallon was.
I knew that, for a fact.
Yeah, we’d only known each other a short time, but I knew her well enough to understand that “selfish” wasn’t in her makeup, not like that. And after the betrayal she’d gone through, it was the furthest thing from my mind that she would do something like that to me.
Still.
The thing with Olivia… it went too far, too fast. If I’d slowed down a little, maybe I could have seen our relationship for what it really was – great sex that should have remained just that. Maybe, I would have seen her for who she was – not the type of woman I needed to marry.
I didn’t want to make that same mistake again. It wasn’t fair to me, and it wasn’t fair to Fallon. So two minutes after I realized I was falling in love with this girl, I realized that we needed to pump the brakes, and slow this thing down.
And at some point, we’d have to talk about it.
Eleven.
“Sorry Fal. Crunch time at the Pot Liquor site, and it’s taking everything out of me. The only thing I’m down for is crawling into my bed to sleep. I’m sorry, beautiful. – Sean K.”
“You look bad.”
My eyebrow twitched as I looked up from my phone to see Yves standing in my doorway, holding the empty chocolate tray. I pushed out a sigh, then dropped the pen I was using to fill out inventory forms onto my desk. “What a confidence boost, thank you.”
“No,” she said, stepping into the office, and putting the tray down in front of her as she sat across from me. “I said that wrong. I mean, you look like you feel bad. You have all this week, actually. Are you okay?”
I tried to pull my mouth into a smile, but it shifted into a grimace on cue as the hot, sweeping pain of a cramp filled my lower abdomen. I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, and willed myself not to cry as the pain built, fast, then took much longer to dissipate. Worst cramps of my life, and they’d been like that, and getting progressively worse, all week.
“Just the period from hell,” I mumbled, shaking my head as I reclined back in my chair. “Heavy, everlasting, and agonizing.”
“Have you taken anything?” Ayden asked, bouncing into the office with a big smile on her face as she dropped a large box onto the floor – new products. “You know I can get you whatever you need.”
I playfully rolled my eyes. “Okay Breaking Bad, thanks for the offer,” I teased, even though I knew she was dating the owner of the pharmacy, and really could get me anything I needed. “I’ve already taken everything I can over the counter, and you know I hate taking medicine anyway. I mean, it’s a period. It can’t last forever, right? I’ll be fine.”
But honestly, I wasn’t so sure.
When I got home that day, I ran a hot bath, and climbed in to soak. The steaming water helped me feel a little better, but what I really wanted was a little attention from Sean. We hadn’t been together like usual in the week since I had to rush from my store to the Pot Liquor site to bandage him up. He hadn’t been acting differently, not really, but he was suddenly always too busy or too tired to get together.
But I couldn’t worry about that right now.
I was used to relatively light periods that lasted 3-4 days at most, with minimal cramps. I was on day seven with this one, feeling like I was being stabbed with a rusty ice pick, and bleeding like it too. Something was off.
I managed to get to sleep, but first thing in the morning, I was on the phone with my OB, Dr. Portia Morris. After explaining everything, she insisted that I come in, so I shifted my responsibilities to Ayden, and took my butt to the doctor.
“Fallon… are you still with me?”
I gave a slight nod, then turned my unfocused eyes up to Dr. Morris’ face as her mouth tipped into a sympathetic smile. The last three hours had been a blur of information, and my head was swimming as I tried to process it all.
When I climbed up on the exam table at my appointed time, I’d mostly been expecting to hear that nothing was wrong, that I should just take some ibuprofen and wait it out. Dr. Morris had been full of happy chatter as she talked me through the questions that started the exam, and then lif
ted my shirt to check my abdomen. Her cheerful expression died on her face when she pressed a certain spot and it hurt so bad I came up off the table.
“Let me grab what I need for an ultrasound.”
She left the room, and the word ultrasound bounced and echoed in my head. Ultrasound? Seriously?! Sean and I used protection every single time we were together. There was no way I was pregnant!
When Dr. Morris came back, she had a nurse with her. The monitor faced away from me as the nurse squeezed warm ultrasound jelly onto my stomach, so I couldn’t see what was going on. Their eyes were glued to the screen as she passed the ultrasound wand over the area that seemed to be the largest source of pain. The two women looked at each and nodded, then the nurse whispered something to Dr. Morris, who quietly agreed before whispering something back.
“Um, hello?!” I snapped. “I’m sitting right here, can somebody tell me what the hell is going on?!”
I didn’t mean to be rude, but they were scaring the shit out of me. Was I pregnant? Had I been pregnant, and wasn’t anymore? Or something else? Something worse? I gave urine samples, blood, and answered an insane amount of questions before Dr. Morris ushered me into her private office and sat down beside me, instead of across from me at her desk.
Large fibroid…. pedunculated… on a stalk inside your uterus… may be pinched… dying… source of pain… nothing you did to cause… very common… MRI to examine… heavy bleeding… anemic…
“Fallon?” Dr. Morris repeated, and this time, I actually focused on her.
I shook my head, trying to clear away the fuzziness. “Yes?”
She gave me that smile again, then reached forward, covering my hand with hers. “I understand that you’re concerned, and probably a little scared, but you’re going to be fine. Like I told you, fibroids are extremely common, especially in black women. You’re going to be just fine. We’ll do some more tests, get you in for an MRI so we can see it a little better, and then we can determine the best course of treatment for you.”
Again, I shook my head. “I… I just don’t understand how I wouldn’t have known about something like this until now. Why now?”
“Well, most women don’t know they have fibroids until they cause a problem,” Dr. Morris explained. “And they can grow very rapidly, so it could easily go undetected between your normal yearly visits. The one that we’re seeing on the ultrasound is about the size of a lemon, and it’s kind of resting against the walls of your uterus. When your uterus contracts, like when you’re having cramps, it’s actually twisting the stalk the fibroid is attached to, which cuts off the blood supply. Because the fibroid is actually living tissue, cutting off the blood supply causes that severe pain you’re feeling.”
I pushed out a breath, dropping my head into my hands as another cramp reared up, and with the new visual I had of what was happening in my body, it seemed like the pain was even worse. Dr. Morris moved her hand to my back, resting it there until the pain subsided, and I sat up again.
“Can you get home?” she asked, her brow creased in concern.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Okay. I’m going to write you a prescription for some pain management. I want you to go home and rest, and I’ll call you back this afternoon about getting you scheduled for an MRI, okay?”
I agreed, and thirty minutes later, I was in my bed, ready to do just that. After swearing Ayden to secrecy, I told her what was going on, and she picked up my prescription for me. She brought me food, lowered the lights to make the room comfortable, and asked if I wanted her to call anyone.
No.
I absolutely did not.
I still wasn’t completely clear on what was happening, so I didn’t want to cause any undue alarm. If I told Donnie, he would undoubtedly tell my parents, who would undoubtedly freak out. They’d insist on coming to stay with me if I sprained an ankle, so I didn’t want to imagine how they’d react to this. My mother was already just itching for a reason to move in, since she suspected I was seeing someone. I’d never get her to leave if she found out this medical issue was serious.
Besides not wanting roommates, I didn’t want my parents worrying about me. They were getting older, starting to have issues of their own. They didn’t need to expend their energy worrying about me. And Donnie was busy. He’d just been asked to be an official background dancer for Pixie, and he was expected at all of her shows. If he knew I had an ailment, he’d want to be here, missed opportunity be damned, and I didn’t want that for him.
Charlie and Viv were both in the last stretch of pregnancy, so I didn’t want to lay my baggage on them, not when Ayden had me covered in the home girl department. So no, I didn’t want her to call anybody – what I really wanted was Sean, but he was, as usual, unavailable.
I checked my phone to see if he’d texted or called at all since the “good mornings” we’d exchanged earlier in the day, but there was nothing. Even that was unlike him, when I’d grown used to random texts about nothing and everything, at all times of the day. So what the hell was going on? Had I offended him? Was he over me, was I just a fling? Did he not want to be around me while I was on my period? So many questions flooded my mind that it started to give me a headache.
I tossed the phone across the bed as Ayden closed my curtains and blinds, darkening the room. Sean was the last thought on my mind before I drifted to sleep.
The first thing I did when I woke up was call Dr. Morris back to schedule my MRI. I’d missed several calls while I was asleep, but that was the most important thing. After I had a time set for tomorrow – she wanted to hurry and get me in, because my blood tests showed that I was a little anemic – the next thing I checked for was a call, message, anything, from Sean.
Again, nothing.
And that pissed me off.
“Hey. What’s going on with us? Is there something I need to know?”
I sent that to Sean, then sat back, cringing as another cramp swept over me. By the time I came down from that, and opened my eyes, he’d texted me back, and his response made me cringe all over again.
“Can we talk in person? – Sean K.”
Not, “Nothing, beautiful. Everything is Fine.”, or “I think we shouldn’t see each other anymore.”, or even no response at all. Can we talk in person, which, with Sean, I suspected meant I wasn’t going to enjoy this conversation very much at all. Sean wasn’t a stupid man. He knew what had happened between me and Ray, and that I’d been broken up with over the phone. It wasn’t a coincidence for him to ask me if we could talk in person. So before I even texted him back, I already knew Sean was about to break my heart.
I agreed to talk to him anyway though.
When I opened the door for him, he pulled me into a hug and kissed my forehead, but didn’t venture down to my lips. My eyes pricked with tears over that, but I managed to smile anyway as I invited him inside.
“So how have you been?” I asked, sitting beside him on the couch. “I haven’t really seen you lately.”
He shrugged, then looked down at his hands to avoid meeting my gaze. “Just… you know… busy I guess.”
When he did look up, his eyes were filled with a lot. Guilt, regret, unhappiness… and for some reason that made me angry.
“Why are you lying to me, Sean? Is that what we do now? That’s what you are, a liar?”
He looked at me, then swiped a hand over his mouth and sighed, but didn’t respond.
“Just tell me what the hell is going on, Sean? Are we over? Is that what’s happening here? We’re breaking up?”
“That’s not it, Fal—”
“Right. We’re not together. I’m not your girl, so I guess we can’t really break up, can we? Is that what this is about? Me saying I wanted to leave it undefined? Because I—”
“Fallon,” he interrupted, holding up a hand. “No, it wasn’t that. It wasn’t anything you did, you’re… you’re amazing, Fal, I just… this is moving too fast.”
I closed my mouth, swallowing hard as
I waited for him to keep talking.
“I know I’ve pulled back a lot over the last week, and that wasn’t cool. I just didn’t know how to say this to you without hurting you. But, I knew it wasn’t okay for me to keep on like before, kissing you, making love to you, as if everything was fine when I knew it wasn’t. Not for me.”
I couldn’t look at his eyes.
If I looked at his eyes, I would burst into tears, so I closed mine, just in time for a cramp to tighten my stomach.
“Fallon,” he said, when I didn’t respond after a moment. I looked up, and he reached for my hand, but I pulled it away. He sighed, then sat back, shaking his head. “Fallon, can you at least say something?”
“Say what, Sean?” I asked, biting my lip, and clenching my fists to keep any anger in check. “What is it that you want to hear from me? What do you want me to say? What can I say, if you’re telling me this is over for you?”
He shook his head. “Not over. Just… not as intense, you know?”
I laughed. “Ohh, not as intense. I get what you’re saying now.”
“Don’t be sarcastic.”
“I’m not,” I insisted. “Not really. I’m serious, I get what you’re saying. You want to eat, and talk, and screw like before, just without all the pesky feelings. I get it.”
He scoffed. “Really? That’s what you think I’m saying to you?”
“Isn’t it?!”
“No!” Sean shook his head, scrubbing his hand over his face again before he slid it back to rub his neck. “I’m just saying… I don’t know how wise it would be for either of us to go all in with this.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Ohh, you just don’t want to go all in?”
Sean’s shoulders lifted in triumph. “Right!”
“Wrong!” I frowned at him as his shoulders sank back down in defeat. “Sean, I can’t speak for you, but I don’t have a damned dial on my feelings like that. I can’t just decide not to be invested, I feel how I feel about you. That’s it. I’ve been with someone before, where I was all in and they weren’t. It’s not a good feeling, and I’m not going to sit here and agree to let you hurt me!”
The Way Love Goes (Serendipitous Love Book 4) Page 12
