by Bella Grant
My head ached where he’d butted me with the gun when I’d tried to run as he’d parked at the apartment. I’d taken a chance on him not having the guts to shoot me, and although he hadn’t, pain had exploded in my head at his abuse. I would have given way to hysterics and given up already, except I wasn’t fighting to survive for myself but also for the baby and the relationship I wanted with his or her father.
I was determined that if I took my last breath today, it would be a result of me doing everything in my power to prevent it.
As I scanned the room desperately, searching for something to use as a weapon, my eyes fell on the window. I ran over to it and pushed it open and peered outside. I thanked God he hadn’t thought to nail it shut. It made me realize he had been stalking me for a while and seized the opportunity when Liam and I had fought. The whole scheme seemed ill-prepared, which also made me nervous. The last thing I wanted was to trigger him into using that gun.
Even though the drop from the window wasn’t far, I hesitated because I was worried if I fell badly, I could hurt the baby. Formulating an escape plan, I snagged the sheet from the bed along with the fitted sheet and knotted the ends together. I wrapped one end around the huge bed post and tugged at it with all my strength. It didn’t budge. Good. It would be sturdy enough to sustain my weight as I climbed through the window.
The sheet didn’t go all the way to the ground, but it would have to do. Halfway down the wall was all I needed; the short drop from there shouldn’t prove life-threatening. I searched in the drawers of the bedroom and found a pen. I stuck it between my boobs and started climbing out the window.
I was halfway out when the bed groaned and shifted. Holy crap, it was scraping across the floor from my weight. I hurried through the window as I heard the bang of the bedroom door as it flew open and hit the wall behind it. My heart in my throat, I made a hasty but careful descent. A short scream erupted from my lips at Jake’s glowering eyes as he pushed his head through the window and saw me. I let go of the sheet and dropped the rest of the way to the ground, landing on my butt. I couldn’t help it. I sat for a while and tried to catch my breath from the fall. Normally, such a fall wouldn’t even be felt, but with the pregnancy, I felt like I’d fallen from way higher.
I scrambled to my feet and ran, my feet bare since he’d decided to take my shoes. I ignored the uneven pavement digging into the tenderness of the bottom of my feet. I ran from the apartment building, although what I wanted to do was pound on any of the doors of the apartment. Except people wouldn’t get involved in other’s affairs, and I didn’t expect anyone to want to help.
“Come back here!” I heard Jake’s growl. I sprinted around to the front of the apartment building where I could use the driveway. The main office was closed at this hour or I would have sought refuge there.
Frustrated tears gathered in my eyes when Jake grabbed me by the hair and pulled me. I screamed, feeling strands of my hair break at the root. I stumbled and fell to my knees on the pavement. I was frustrated and didn’t care if he had a gun. I turned and lashed out a foot at him, but it didn’t connect.
“I can never trust you!” he shouted at me and punched me in the head.
“Jake, please stop!” I begged as he punched me again. “Let me go.”
“I’m going to fucking kill you!” he screamed at me. “You’re not worthy of my love. All you want is him! You fucking cunt!”
“I love him,” I groaned. “Please, Jake—ahhhh!”
A cry tore from my lips as he dragged me by the hair, still on my knees on the pavement, which scraped the flesh from my knees and other areas of my legs. He continued to drag me, and it was by sheer luck that I stumbled to my feet. I fought him, lashing out with my fists, but even though they connected, he felt nothing.
I realized he didn’t have his gun on him, which made me resist more when I saw the opened door of his apartment. If he got me inside and reached his gun, that would be the end of it.
“You’ll go to prison!” I screamed at him, pulled the pen from between my breasts, and raked it down the arm dragging me by the hair.
He wrestled the pen out my hand and threw it away, acting as if he didn’t feel a thing even though his arm was bleeding. “No, I’ll be dead right alongside you,” he spat at me. “If we can’t be together in this life, then we can be together in another.”
Horror filled me along with dread. “Jake, please,” I begged him. “You can’t do this. You’ll take the innocent life of my baby. Please!”
He stopped and stared at me. “You’re pregnant?” he demanded with deadly quietness.
Fear jolted through me. I shouldn’t have told him I was pregnant. “Jake—”
The words were stolen from my lips along with my breath at the foot he lashed out to kick me hard in my abdomen. I collapsed in a heap to the pavement as pain lanced my body. Tears sprang to my eyes, and I dry-heaved, vaguely hearing an approaching car.
“Emily!”
Liam’s voice. I was certain that was Liam’s voice, but I could barely lift my head from the nausea and pain wracking my body. I clutched my abdomen and fought the dizziness that threatened to overwhelm me.
I heard the screech of car tires and running feet on the pavement, right before Jake’s foot landed on my stomach again. He pressed his foot down hard before somebody rammed into him and bodies hit the ground. I turned my head and hurled as painful shudders wracked my body.
“Emily—oh, my God, Emily.”
I tried to focus my eyes on Miranda, who leaned over me, her tears falling on my face.
“Miranda,” I gasped and heaved again. I felt like my whole body was shutting down. “Tell him I’m sorry. I should have told him.”
I spoke so softly, I wasn’t sure if she heard me, but before I could repeat it and make an effort to speak louder, I fell into a black chasm.
A groan emitted from my lips as my eyes flickered open. I felt like I’d had a fight with a shredder and lost. As I tried to connect the pieces of the puzzle, I recalled everything that had happened before I’d blacked out. As my pupils dilated to adjust to the light in the room, I saw Liam standing over me, his hand holding one of mine. His eyes were red-rimmed as if he had been crying.
“Thank God,” he breathed deeply. “You worried me. You’ve been out for so long. How are you?”
“Horrible,” I responded with a smile. “But I’m alive and I’m grateful for that.”
His face hardened. “I could kill him for what he did to you, Em,” he professed, brushing loose tendrils of hair from my damp forehead. “Thank God for Alexander, or he wouldn’t be alive to face trial for what he did to you.”
Tears pricked my eyes. “I’m just glad you guys got there in time. How did you find me?”
I listened as he told me what he’d left the apartment to do and how he’d roped Miranda and Alexander into going with him to Jake’s apartment.
“I should have told you I was trying to take your advice,” he told me with his head bowed. “I hope you can forgive me for that. I wanted you to feel proud of me. I was afraid I might fail, and if I did, you wouldn’t have to know about it.”
“I am proud of you, Liam,” I corrected him. “I wanted you to do something with your life for you, because you’d somehow convinced yourself you weren’t worth success and didn’t even want to attempt to do something risky. That’s why…that’s why I didn’t tell you about the ba-baby.”
Tears slipped from my eyes as I placed my hand over my belly. My body ached, and I knew the baby was no longer there.
“I wish you’d told me,” he agreed, tears glistening in his eyes too. “But we can’t undo our poor judgment and past decisions. We have to move on. I love you, Em, and we’ll have other babies.”
The tears came faster as sobs wracked my body. “It is gone, then? The baby is gone?”
“You were bleeding so much,” he responded, kissing my cheeks. “The doctor said little chance exists that our baby survived.”
“I
wanted our baby, Liam,” I cried as he sat on the bed and pulled me in his arms to hug me.
“So did I,” he whispered against my hair, his voice choked. “Since Miranda told me, I knew I wanted our baby too.”
I wasn’t sure how long he held me while we grieved the loss of our baby, a child we would never know.
“Ahem.” The clearing of a voice pulled us apart.
I wiped my eyes with my hands until they were clear enough to focus on the white-uniformed doctor who had entered the room. She was a brunette with kind gray eyes and a reassuring smile.
“Miss Swanson, I’m Dr. Young,” the doctor introduced herself. “I’ve already spoken to your boyfriend, but I’ve some news for you both.”
“Okay,” I swallowed and looked from her to Liam and back to her.
“You had a lot of internal bleeding when you were brought here,” Dr. Young explained. “And when I learned you were pregnant, of course, that triggered alarms. Blows like the ones you sustained and such trauma often result in miscarriage.”
“I know the baby is gone,” I said softly, trying to make it easier for her. She was using an awful lot of words to state the obvious.
“But that’s the thing.” She smiled. “Somehow, your little trooper in there survived the whole thing.”
“What?” Liam and I exclaimed in unison.
The doctor chuckled. “It’s true. The ultrasound we performed when you were out has returned and your baby is alive and well. Of course, we will have to monitor you closely for a day or two since a miscarriage is still a possibility.”
“How much of a possibility?” Liam asked, and I heard the nervousness in his voice.
“It depends on the trauma sustained by the uterus,” the doctor explained. “Within the hour, a nurse will take you to the examination room to perform a chorionic villus sampling, basically a prenatal test which we will use to examine your uterus. That will tell us all we need to know.”
“It’s going to be fine,” Liam whispered, hugging me to him when the doctor left us, stating he had to attend to other patients. “Whatever the outcome, we’ll get through it, Em. I swear we will.”
I hugged him back hard and smiled, believing him. I would always be hopeful about us because if we survived all this— crazy ex and past demons— we could survive anything.
Epilogue
5 years later
Emily
Smiling at the picture in front of me, I placed my finger over my lips in warning to the four-year-old boy who held my hand. He was the spitting image of his father—the black hair and the blue eyes, the same shape of face and mouth. At four, it was also evident he would one day have singing talent, just like his dad.
We stood at the door of the nursery because Kyle, our first born, little trooper who had survived such a crazy ordeal five years ago, had wanted to get another look at his baby sister. Liam sat in the rocking chair, as he sang a lullaby he’d written for our three-month-old daughter Casey—another unplanned miracle which had happened on one of Liam’s tours.
So much had happened in our lives over the course of five years. My pregnancy with Kyle had gone much smoother than I would have thought, given that both Liam and I were young parents who knew nothing about raising a family. Liam had signed with the record label and boosted our income, and he had coaxed me to resign from Hollister so I could rest between my studies at UAB and being a mom.
I had finished my degree and established my own marketing firm with the support of my husband, who had invested in my initiative. What had started as a one-woman business had expanded, and I now had eight full-time employees and interns on and off. I had scored some major accounts, including working to design and manage campaigns for Hollister. When I’d resigned and shared my ideas with Reggie, he’d implemented them. Instead of taking the credit for the sales the ideas had generated, he’d mentioned my name, and the company had started working with me before I finished UAB.
With other employees around, I could travel with Liam when he went on tour. When they were far away, we left Kyle at either his grandparents’ house or waited for the first grandparent who managed to grab him. They all vied for the attention of their grandchild.
Liam had confessed to me that the night I’d been in hospital, he’d called his parents and asked them to pray for me. That had been working to mend their relationship, and they spent as much time as they possibly could with Kyle. I allowed them to have him more often than my own parents because I understood they had lost so much and were trying to find their way out of grief. They had been touched by our decision to name our son Kyle in memory of an uncle he would never know.
“Ah, she’s no fun now Daddy’s put her to sleep,” Kyle grumbled. “Can I go back to my room to play?”
“Sure, sweetie, but remember to put away your toys when you are finished.”
I ruffled his hair affectionately before he bolted to his bedroom, never minding how often I told him not to run in the house. Liam and I had bought this beautiful home almost two years ago. We’d spent another year living at the apartment we’d leased together before moving to a rented house, and now, we had bought our own.
I walked into the nursery, hearing the tiredness in Liam’s voice as he struggled to stay awake. Poor thing. He’d performed a concert last night and had rushed home to be with his family. He was like that, always rushing to be with us, and I suspected he wouldn’t be in the music business very long despite the strides he had taken. He’d produced a number one single and two albums in that period, and had been nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammys, and although he didn’t win, we were all proud of him.
“Babe, let me put her down for you,” I told him, and he smiled gratefully at me as I took our chubby daughter from his arms. All our kids seemed determined to favor their father. Casey had the same black hair and blue eyes. I walked her to her crib and placed her on her tummy with her head turned to the side. My heart swelled with love at the blessing of being a mommy.
“Now we need to get you to bed,” I said, walking over to my husband and pulling him to his feet. Because he had rushed home from his concert to be with us, he’d had little time to catch up on sleep.
“If you join me.” He smiled and bent his head to kiss me. I groaned as electricity shot through me at his touch. Five years later, and the passion which blazed between us had not fizzled but sizzled even more with the passing of time and knowing each other more intimately.
“Let’s go,” I told him, feeling the bulge in his jeans. I muffled my laugh against his shirt in an effort not to wake the baby as Liam swung me up in his arms and headed for our master bedroom.
It was increasingly difficult to maintain our intimacy with two young children and one active little boy underfoot who popped up at the most unfortunate times. We had taken to quick fixes wherever we could and as often as we could.
“Have I told you lately that I love you?” Liam sang as he placed me on the covers of our bed.
“I wouldn’t mind you showing it to me,” I teased and pulled him down onto the bed to lie on top of me. And as our lips met and held, I lost myself in this man who had taught me how to compromise. We had started on shaky ground, each flawed, but in the end, we had made each other into stronger individuals.
“I’m so glad I chose you as my roommate five years ago,” I said between kisses.
“And I’m glad I convinced you to reconsider and choose me for your roommate,” he returned.
What had seemed like a dumb thing, falling for my roommate, had evolved into the best thing of my life.
BABY DUTY
BELLA GRANT
1
Amelia’s heart pounded when she heard the bell clang in the clock tower. Late again. How did she lose track of time like this? As the clock chimed, she grabbed her bookbag and made a mad dash across the sprawling front lawn of the university, leaving the brilliant red canopy of the trees behind. “Crap!” she muttered, hurrying towards the literature building, her bag thumping pa
infully against her leg with every step.
When she reached the second-floor seminar room, Amelia tried to slip in unnoticed to the senior English class, an invitation-only seminar taught by the new lecturer, Professor Bell. She sweated a little beneath her plaid, flannel shirt—dug out of the closet early because she loved October, even if it was still too warm to necessitate flannel—and the red ribbon she had used to tie back her long brown hair had come undone.
The door creaked loudly when she entered, and Amelia mentally cursed its betrayal. As she took her seat among the other eleven people at the conference table, she flushed red as she apologized for being late and scrambled to open her texts. She scanned the diagram on the board to catch up on where the discussion was leading. They had been dissecting iambic feet in… What poem was this? “We Are Seven?” Luckily, she knew this one, and she flipped to her notes from the night before with a little sigh of relief.
Despite this being a seminar class, the other students seemed completely disinterested in the readings. Professor Bell lectured at the board, carefully diagramming each fascinating point of the poem, asking questions of his unresponsive audience.
As each question fell on deaf ears, Professor Bell’s optimism seemed to waver, and Amelia hated to visibly see a professor giving up on his students. Still, he continued to ask the questions, hopeful that someone would eventually answer him. Amelia scanned her text annotations, mentally compiling a thoughtful response to each question he asked. When she looked up from her book, he was staring at her.
As the students around her doodled in their notebooks and gazed absently out the window, Amelia looked back at him, unblinking. Her face grew warm as the skin on her cheeks reddened.
Amelia told herself she was blushing because she was embarrassed for coming in late, but that wasn’t exactly it. She was often caught off guard by these moments, deeply personal moments she shared with Professor Bell as they exchanged looks through the crowded classroom. She knew he hoped she would answer and put him out of his misery. Amelia was embarrassed because she was the only student he could ever depend on to answer, and that made her feel like a teacher’s pet.
