The Girlfriend (The Boss) (2 page)

“Whatever you pick will be fine, really.” Why couldn't we just talk like normal people right now? Why couldn't we just say what we wanted to each other, instead of speaking like strangers?

“All right. I'll see you then.” Before I could hang up, he added, “Sophie?”

“Mmhm?” I didn’t trust my voice.

“I- look forward to seeing you.”

Not “I love you.” Not “I’m sorry.”

I stared down at the phone in my hand long after I'd hung up, willing it to ring again.

It didn't.

* * * *

That night, I took a taxi to Neil’s apartment, the glossy printout from the doctor’s office in my lap the entire way.

I considered the little shape on the ultrasound image. It didn’t look like a baby. It looked like a snowman with flippers.

The doctor at Planned Parenthood had been super nice, answering all my questions about the fetus on the screen. She’d been very gentle about not making assumptions with regard to my intentions. Which was great, because I had no idea if my mind would change once I talked things over with Neil.
 

I’d never had to make a decision like this in my life. I’d never thought I would. When I was in Catholic school, it had been my life’s ambition to go hang out in front of clinics and scare women away. I’d vowed then that no matter what happened in my life, I would never have an abortion. Of course, that all changed when I’d grown up a little and realized how big an impact a baby makes on a woman’s life. I’d consistently used contraceptives with my partners— except for this one, stupid time— and I’d decided that if I got pregnant, I would do the responsible thing for myself: I would have an abortion.

Thinking about abortion in the hypothetical had lulled me into false senses of “never” and “always” at those very different stages of my life. Now, stuck between my devout upbringing and my current state of mind, I was facing a “maybe” I had never prepared to face.
 

You don’t know what you’re going to do in a situation until faced with it. Life lesson learned. I was going to have to banish “never” from my repertoire.

The doctor figured I was about eight weeks along. Eight weeks. It didn’t seem possible. I really had lost track of time. But there it was, in black and white.

I did the backward math and decided that it had probably been that night Neil had come back from England. In our altered states— him on Klonopin for his flying anxiety, me drunk from celebrating the new job I’d already lost— we’d decided to throw caution to the wind. After all, I’d been on birth control then. And how often did that fail?

“Plenty,” had been the doctor’s answer. And it hadn’t helped that with all the stress of a new job and an unexpected relationship, I hadn’t exactly been religious about my pill taking. This whole thing could have been avoided if I had just been paying more attention.

The car pulled up outside Neil’s pre-war apartment building on Fifth Avenue, and I guiltily stuffed the printout in the back pocket of my jeans. I paid the driver with a wad of bills and didn’t tip him as well as he was probably expecting, given the address.

I didn’t know how I was going to break the news, even as I crossed the lobby. The amount of time I had to figure it out was getting shorter with every step I took. The doorman called up for me, I got in the elevator, and I braced myself for the oncoming awkwardness.
 

How do you tell the guy who just tried to break up with you that you’re pregnant with his baby?

When the doors opened on his floor and I stepped into the softly lit vestibule, Neil was there already, waiting for me.

When I saw him, my stomach dropped like I was in the backseat of a minivan going over a bad hill. He was pale, he looked tired, and the smile he gave me was worried and forced.

But he was still
Neil
, so handsome and tall, with his in-between-blonde-and-brown hair and his gorgeous green eyes. My heart flip-flopped, like it always did, since that first moment we’d met at LAX over six years ago.

“Hello, Sophie.”

“Hey,” I responded in a short, friendly monotone as we moved into the inner foyer. His apartment, which I had just begun to feel comfortable in before our near-breakup or breakup-in-progress, whatever was happening between us, suddenly seemed like a stranger’s home. I’d had a difficult enough time getting used to the fact that my boyfriend lived in a Fifth Avenue palace with checkered marble floors and a freaking home movie theatre. Now I felt like I had to be on my very best behavior.

Neil helped me with my coat. “You look very pretty,” he said softly.

I hadn’t changed out of the crème-colored cowl-necked sweater and soft old jeans I’d worn to the doctor’s office. I didn’t feel particularly pretty, but I murmured a thank you all the same. I noted his salmon button down. “It’s not pink, it’s salmon,” he had argued with me a few weeks ago, before we’d tumbled playfully into his bed.
 

I blinked back my tears at the memory. “You’re not so bad yourself. Did you go to work today?”

“No, I was just so tired of hospital gowns. I needed to get dressed or end up deeply depressed.” His laugh was short.

I wanted to touch him. I wanted him to touch me. I just wanted everything to be okay between us.

He led me to the kitchen, where Sue had laid out our neatly plated dinners. “Halibut, I hope you don’t mind.”

“It smells amazing.” It actually smelled awful, but I didn’t hold that against his housekeeper. It was the uninvited guest in my uterus. It made everything smell ten times stronger than usual. I looked around the kitchen. The counters were scrubbed clean, the light was off over the stove. I slid into one side of the breakfast nook. “Sue’s gone for the night?”

“I didn’t ask her to stay on past seven.” He went around the wide, marble-topped island and reached into the cooler beneath, coming up with a bottle of white wine.

“None for me, thanks,” I said, too quick. He gave me a strange look, and put the bottle away.

That was weird. He usually liked wine with dinner.

Oh god, he was probably staying sober to let me down gently when he broke things off for good. The wine was for me, to drown my sorrows, if necessary.

I completely lost my appetite.

“So...” He sat down across from me and unfolded his napkin. “It’s been a while since we’ve talked. Any developments in the job hunt?”

I knew what he was asking me. “I didn’t take the job with Gabriella.”

He nodded, and poured ice water into my glass from the carafe on the table. “Were her terms—”
 

“You know why I turned it down.” My hands clenched in my lap. I was more angry than I thought I would be. I’d been preparing for this moment, steeling myself against hurt and disappointment so that I could walk away with dignity. Instead, my emotional control snapped like a rubber band and I accused, “How dare you.”

“Sorry?” He looked like a man staring through the windshield of a car that was nanoseconds from hitting him.

“You did it again. You pushed me into making this huge decision, but you acted like you were somehow protecting me. You did it when you stole my plane tickets six years ago. Now you tell me that I have to take this job because it’s a wonderful opportunity, and you magnanimously declare that you’ll let me go if you have to.
 

“You didn’t even ask me what I wanted. You didn’t tell me what
you
wanted. It’s like you don’t care about the outcome, you just don’t want to feel responsible for it.”

“Magnanimous?” he repeated, outraged.

My hands were clenched to fists beneath the table. If we were going to break up, then we might as well raze this fucker, salt the earth, and poison the ground water. “If you didn’t want to be with me... then just break up with me. Don’t force me to make the choice for you.”

He was struggling to control his temper as he said, measured and controlled, “I wanted you to slow down and think about what you were doing, and where we were headed. You keep pushing me away - “

“I keep pushing
you
away?” I snorted derisively. “When I got to the hospital the other night, I was so worried about you. Then, you basically break up with me and try to make it seem like it was for my own good. For four days, I felt like I couldn’t call you or see how you were doing, while you were in the fucking hospital. I had to get updates from Deja, and all of those were total bullshit. Exhaustion? You don’t get exhausted.”

“On the contrary, I was quite exhausted,” he said quietly.

I looked up, and I knew he could see how furious I was from the way he slightly flinched when our eyes met.
Good
.

I reached into my pocket and fished out the ultrasound image. I placed it face down on the table and slid it toward him. “I needed you. I called you eleven times because I was freaked out and scared about this. And I came down to the hospital afraid something really horrible had happened to you, and I was thinking about all the stuff I would miss about you if you died. And what the hell was I going to do about this?”

He lifted the photo and turned it over. It took a moment for him to register what it was. I saw a surprising mixture of emotions in his expression, things I didn’t expect. I’d been prepared for angry, or scared. Maybe cold, or strained and polite. Instead, his eyebrows lifted and he blinked in momentary shock. The slightest smile twitched at the corner of his lips. He looked pleased, maybe even a little proud.

I clasped my hands together under the table to stop myself from trembling. The longer he looked at the photo, the more the color drained from his face. There it was. That was more like what I had expected.

He looked up, throat moving as he swallowed. His eyes met mine, and a sick feeling of dread curdled my stomach. Whatever he was going to say, I knew it was going to be bad. But it was so much worse than I had expected.

“I have cancer.”

CHAPTER TWO

“Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia,” he continued slowly, looking back to the ultrasound print-out in his hand. I noticed it was trembling. “I have had, for some time. With medication, I’ve been in remission for quite a while. Now, it appears my condition is accelerating, and needs more attention. I’ll be flying back to England next week to spend Christmas with my family, and then I’ll be staying in London and starting chemotherapy after the new year. My prognosis is quite good, though. It might only take a few months to get back on my feet.”

I felt a lot of things I wanted to say– well, scream— rising up my throat. But I thought if I opened my mouth, I might vomit. Or call him a fucking idiot for thinking he’d get over cancer in a few months. Or demanding to know why he hadn’t told me in the first place. But I guess it really hadn’t been any of my business when we were just messing around for fun before. And how do you bring that up, without making things incredibly awkward in a new relationship?

Neil has cancer.

Fuck.

His gaze flicked back up to my face, and he quickly forced a cautiously neutral expression. “When is it due?”

It was difficult to find my voice. All I could hear was a litany of
Neil has cancer, Neil has cancer, Neil has cancer
, running through my mind like a sick taunt. “I— I don’t know. I mean, I know. July sixth. But I don’t know if I’m having it.”

He carefully placed the photo on the table and tucked one hand under his opposite elbow. He regarded the image as he rubbed his forehead, considering.

“Sophie, if you want to have this baby, I will support you without question. It isn’t as though I haven’t done this before. And having Emma was enormous fun.”

“Really?” I couldn’t imagine parenting being fun at all. And while it was great that he was in instant supportive mode, I was still pretty pissed off. “You kind of have a bad track record of getting chicks knocked up.”

“Not at all. This is only the second time. As a percentage, it’s really not so bad.” I noticed his split-second glance at the photos of Emma on the wall beside the table. “I didn’t plan on having more children.”

“Then it’s probably best if we didn’t have this one.” I stated it firmly, for both our sakes, because the idea of Neil with a baby, with
our
baby, was a dangerously sweet image in my mind. But then, I reminded myself of all the really not sweet parts of having kids, the responsibility over another human life, and the fact that my relationship with Neil was so new... and possibly over. “I want to have an abortion.”

“Right. The timing of this is...” He stopped mid-sentence, his expression softening, becoming apologetic. “You have my unconditional support. That’s absolutely the right decision. And I am so sorry for my part in this.”

“It’s okay. I could have hunted through Holli’s room for a condom. Or gone to the drugstore.” I shrugged. “We fucked up. But we’re going to take care of it.”

“How do you need me to help?” he asked. “I don’t want you to be solely responsible for this.” He gestured toward the picture, but he didn’t look at it.

I smiled a tight, close-lipped smile at him. “Well then it’s your lucky day, Mr. Moneybags. I need help paying for it.”

“Of course, think nothing of it.” He picked up the ultrasound picture again, giving it one long last glance. “If things were different... If I didn’t have— “

I shook my head an emphatic no. “It has nothing to do with that. I don’t want children. And I thought you didn’t, either.”

“I didn’t. I enjoyed fatherhood, and I wouldn’t trade a moment of that experience, but I’m comfortable in my life as it is now. This...” He dropped the printout. “It caught me off guard, is all.”

So, it was settled. Relief took the wind out of my anger sails. I was just so glad that conversation was over— though it had gone way worse than I’d expected— and that our decision was made. However, I was a bit surprised at Neil’s reaction. I’d thought he would either want to keep the baby, or not. I’d never imagined he would feel conflicted between the two options.

Somehow, the sneaky knot in my chest had tightened up again, binding me in all my doubts. It slipped a little now. “You’re not brutally disappointed, then?”