“We’re not coming back here again this time, right?” Rob asked.
“Right,” I said. “Never, ever again.”
It felt good to get in the car this time. We weren’t running from anything. We weren’t leaving each other. We were simply closing the door on all of this and heading toward a new future. This time it was a choice, not a reaction. And this time we were all equally on board. There was no one calling the shots; we were all equally vested in the futures that we would create.
“I can’t wait to get back to the cabin and crack open that first bottle of whiskey,” Michael said.
“Hopefully sans the poison this time,” Adam chuckled sarcastically.
“Yes, definitely without the poison.”
I looked out the window as we pulled away and my stomach churned a little bit. I felt good about everything that we were doing, so it wasn’t nerves. In fact, this was the most at ease that I had felt in months. Hopefully it wasn’t a bout of carsickness, but thankfully Asheville wasn’t that long of a drive.
“You okay?” Michael asked as he sat beside me.
Rob was driving this time, with Adam in the passenger seat, and Michael and I in the back. Michael reached his hand over to hold mine against my lap.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just tired, I think,” I said as I looked out the window and watched the tree line blur by as we drove.
I rested my head against his shoulder and dozed off for a little bit. When I opened my eyes again, I felt too nauseous to ignore. I sat up straight and tried to calm my stomach by looking straight ahead in the car instead of at the moving horizon outside of the window.
“Lisette,” Michael said with concern. “You look really pale. Are you sure you’re feeling okay?”
I looked up and saw Rob staring back at me through the rearview mirror. Adam turned around in his seat to look back at me too. All three of them wore the same look of concern on their faces.
“Yeah, actually I don’t feel so well,” I said.
“Rob, pull over,” Michael said. “I’ll get some cold water from the cooler in the trunk.”
When the car pulled the side of the road, Michael got out to grab me some water, but it wasn’t in time to calm my stomach. I got straight out of the car and stumbled over to the side of the road and threw up. Michael immediately came over to me and held my hair until I had finished, and then handed me a cold bottle of water. I stood up and felt dizzy and weak. The cold water felt good as it ran down the inside of my rough throat. Michael rubbed my back as I stood outside for a minute and leaned up against the car. Adam and Rob got out to stretch their legs and check on me.
“I’m not sure what came over me,” I said. “I feel better now; it just kind of hit me like a wave.”
After that, I was fine for the rest of the ride to Asheville.
19
The sickness kept coming in waves, even days after we arrived in Asheville. Some days I would feel fine, and others I would wretch my guts out. The guys decided to stick around and not go looking for their own places until I felt better, so that they could be around to comfort me while I was feeling ill. It was crappy timing to have fallen sick. This was supposed to be our time to enjoy together before the guys headed out on their own paths. Rob was still working on his cycle, which he was having shipped up to the mountains in a couple of weeks, and he was even thinking about maybe opening up a shop to restore and customize old motorcycles since he had enjoyed working on it so much and seemed to have a knack for it. Adam had decided that he was going to start freelancing. He always had an artistic talent and now, nestled here in the mountains, it would be the perfect time for him to explore that passion and maybe craft a living out of it. There was more excitement and contentment for a new start, than there was any animosity left between the guys. I was just bummed that on most of the nights, I didn’t feel well enough to join them for a glass (or several) of whiskey by the bonfire. It was nice though, to see them all acting like friends again and watching them laugh and talk into the late hours by the crackling fire.
It wasn’t until about a week into being back in Asheville, that I realized it.
With everything that we had gone through back in Charlotte, it was just so good to feel relaxed and free, that even being sick hadn’t caused me any reason to worry. Until, that is, I realized how late I was. My period had always arrived like clockwork. I’d never, ever been late before. I hadn’t been paying any attention to my cycle at all. But then, when I reached for the pack of birth control that I was usually pretty good about remembering to take; I saw that I had already swallowed all of the green placebo pills and was starting back up on the white ones again. The only problem was—my period had never come.
Suddenly I started to panic, as I put together the sickness with the late (or missing) period. As scared as I was about the possibility of being pregnant, I was still too scared to tell the guys. I would just wait it out and see what happened. Eventually, the sickness would either stop, or not.
Eventually, I would either get my period, or not.
But the more that I tried to ignore the possibility of it, the more worried I became. Until finally, I couldn’t stand not knowing anymore.
“Hey, can we take a trip into town to go to the drugstore?” I asked as we all sat around the table eating the amazing venison stew that Adam had made. Who knew he was such a great cook?
“Of course,” Michael answered. “You want me to just run and pick up whatever it is that you need so that you can stay here and relax?”
“No thanks,” I said as I tried to sound casual about it. “I just feel like browsing around a store a little bit.”
“The drugstore probably isn’t the most exciting store to browse,” Rob chuckled.
“Yeah, probably not,” I said with a small and completely fake laugh. “But I need a few things from there too.”
“Want to go tomorrow?” Michael asked.
I nodded as I put another heaping scoop of stew into my mouth.
That night, since I was feeling better, I was able to join the guys out by the bonfire. When the whiskey started getting poured, I wanted some—badly. But the lingering thought of possibly being pregnant kept me from taking a glass.
“Are you feeling sick again?” Rob asked when he saw that I wasn’t taking a drink.
“A little,” I lied. “But not too bad. I think I’ll just take it easy for another day or so, just to be safe.”
“Good idea,” Rob smiled. “Never hurts to go easy on the body.”
I sat and stared into the flames of the bonfire and was mesmerized by the popping embers as I got lost in my thoughts. I couldn’t be pregnant. I hadn’t even thought about having a baby, especially not anytime soon. I wasn’t ready. I felt like I had just finally found myself, and I needed time to focus on who it was that I wanted to be now that I had let go of the life that I had been trying to live for my mother. I needed time for myself, and time with Michael. I needed time to enjoy what we were becoming together and to think about what I wanted for a change, instead of what I didn’t want. I couldn’t be pregnant now. And to make matters even more complicated, how would I even know who the father was? After that erotic night in the garden, where I made love to all three of the guys; there was no way to tell who would have been the one to impregnate me.
At the store the next morning, it was a challenge to meander my way through the aisles and pretend like I was trying to choose between brands of tampons, while really sliding a pregnancy test in-between the things in my hands and getting the cashier to ring them up before the guys managed to catch a glimpse of things. When we got back to the cabin, I went to the bathroom to unpack and put away all of the toiletries that I had bought, carefully tucking the pregnancy test behind a pile of other things in the cabinet. I paused for a moment, thinking about taking the test right away, but then I walked back out and tried to take my mind off of it. That test was a last resort. I would give it a few more days, or at least until my nerves couldn’t stand it anymore. That was my plan anyway; it didn’t last long. By mid-afternoon, my nerves were shaking with anticipation and I found myself sporadically pacing the cabin for no reason. The guys were busy outside, building a greenhouse. It was Michael’s idea and both Adam and Rob got behind it. It would be a reminder of our precious, albeit turbulent time on the rooftop of the aquarium, and also a very useful and sustainable resource to use for growing our own food. Now was the perfect time for me to take the test. No one was around, and the guys wouldn’t even have to know anything about it.
When I got into the bathroom, I pulled the test out and sucked in a deep breath to mentally prepare myself. It was highly unlikely that I was actually pregnant. I rarely missed a birth control pill in the morning, so I was mostly covered. I tried to remember if I had taken the pill the day of the intimate garden interlude with the guys, and I was pretty sure that I had. I knew that it worked best when you made sure to take it every day at the same time, but still; I had to be mostly still protected against pregnancy. I had been under a lot of stress lately, which could totally explain why my period was late. That was a completely normal and reasonable explanation. But the more that I tried to talk myself into knowing that I wasn’t pregnant, the more panicked I became that I was.
