“Nah, thanks though. I just need to pick up some new shampoo. I don’t like how the one I have made my hair feel all tangly. I won’t be long.”
“Okay,” he said as he kissed me on the cheek and then headed off toward the bedroom. “I’ll take a shower and who knows, maybe I’ll still be undressed when you get back.”
The thought of it made me want to salivate with desire.
“Hurry home,” he grinned invitingly as he took his shirt off while he walked away.
When I got to the drugstore, the cashier looked at me with a longer glance than normal as she rang up the pregnancy test. I thought at first that it might have been my imagination, but then she handed me the bag and said “good luck” with a half-smile that only curved up one side of her mouth. Why did people say that when someone might be pregnant? Like how was that comment even supposed to be received? Was it a compliment or well wishes for something they thought you wanted and had planned? Or was it the kind of “good luck” that someone says right before you go off to do something terrible?
I tried not to think about it on my way back to the apartment. Just before I got to the door of the apartment building, I remembered what had happened the last time when Michael found the test that I had thrown into the trash can. I didn’t want to relive all of that. First of all, he would be upset that I kept the concern of it from him again. And secondly, he would worry. Even when it comes up negative, he would still worry about the fact that it had even been a consideration again. I wondered if he even remembered that night in the woods that we needed each other so badly that we risked it just to feel our bodies connected in that passionate moment. Regardless, I couldn’t take this test up into the apartment, and I didn’t want to walk all the way back to the store to use the restroom there.
I looked down the hallway at Adam’s apartment. Before I gave myself a chance to think better of it, I found myself knocking on his door.
“Hey,” Adam smiled as he opened the door. “What’s up?”
“Is Anna here?” I asked.
“Nope, just me. She went home this morning to get some things ready for work tomorrow. Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” I said with nervously darting eyes. I knew that he could tell I was acting strangely. I could see it in the way that he was looking at me. “Can I use your bathroom?”
He looked over my shoulder at the door to my apartment just a few doors down. Then he looked back at me in confusion. I could see his mouth start to open and his brow furrow. He was going to ask me why in the world I was coming to his apartment to use the bathroom, when my own was within a few steps from me. But then he looked down and saw the drugstore bag in my hand.
“Of course,” he said softly and wrapped his arm around my shoulder as he walked me inside.
I had to hand it to him; Adam didn’t ask me a single question about it. He just sat down on the couch while I went to the bathroom and waited for me to come out.
I took the test, left it on the bathroom sink, and set the timer on my phone. I wondered if Michael had started to think that maybe I was taking too long at the store, but I figured I still had some time left before he actually got worried. He wouldn’t think to come look for me here, so I didn’t need to worry about that. I had a few minutes of peaceful solitude as I waited for the test results to finish processing.
But I found myself not wanting solitude at all while I waited. I wanted to sit with Adam. I opened the bathroom door to come out and then closed it halfway behind me. Then I walked out into Adam’s living room with my phone gripped in my hand as the timer counted down. Adam didn’t say a word when I sat down beside him. He simply put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me into a hug against him as we waited together.
19
“Hey,” Michael said, coming up to give me a kiss when I walked into the apartment.
He was already fully dried and dressed from his shower since I had taken a while.
“Everything okay? I was starting to worry that I would have to come look for you since you took a while.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I just couldn’t decide which kind of shampoo I wanted to get.”
Michael looked down at my empty hands and clearly noticed that there was no shopping bag and no shampoo. Fuck. I had forgotten about it altogether.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I still need to get used to the fact that running late doesn’t mean someone has been kidnapped. Old habits die hard.”
“Yeah,” I chuckled, trying not to make it sound artificially forced. “It takes a bit of getting used to. I’m glad that we don’t have to worry about those things anymore though.”
“So am I,” he said. “So what was the verdict?”
“Huh?” I felt instantly dizzy and the room felt as though it was closing in.
“On the shampoo,” he said as he motioned to my hands. “It doesn’t look like you found one that you liked.”
“Oh, right,” I said with immediate relief. “Yeah, I hated all of the ones they had at the store. I’m just going to order one online.”
I walked past him and toward the bathroom.
“Did you want to have that celebratory champagne tonight?” he asked.
“Yeah, sure. That sounds fun.”
“You okay, Lisette?”
“Yep, I’m fine. Just going to take a shower and then I’ll be out.”
“Didn’t you already take one this morning?”
“Yeah, but I just feel like another.”
“Must be that crappy shampoo, huh? You should go ahead and order a new one when you get out.”
“I will,” I lied with a nervous smile as I went into the bathroom and closed the door.
I stood there for a second inside the small and quiet bathroom before turning the water on. Then I undressed slowly and stepped into the shower. The warm water felt good and comforting as it ran down over my body. Instinctively, as if it had somehow just become the natural thing for me to do, I placed the palms of my hands over my stomach and held them there.
I don’t know what I was expecting to feel. It wasn’t as if my stomach would feel differently in my hands, at least not yet. When the tears started to fall from my face and mix with the falling water of the shower, I didn’t know why I was crying. I sighed and tilted my head back in the shower to let the water run down the back of my head. I might have been crying for several reasons at once.
