Something came over his face, and before he could put voice to it, a frazzled looking older man rolled into the room. Along with Gary and an ultrasound machine.
“If your estimations are correct,” the doctor said without preamble, “then we should be able to do this over the belly and not transvaginally.”
I blinked as the doctor rolled over, flipped my shirt up, then said, “Lie back.”
I did, mostly because he was already squirting on the goo that would allow the ultrasound to see the baby better.
Gary hit the lights, and all of a sudden, I couldn’t breathe.
Because my baby was on the screen.
“Holy shit,” Bram breathed.
I looked over at him to see him absolutely transfixed with the screen. Our baby.
He looked like he’d been punched straight in the solar plexus.
As if he’d just been given a glimpse of the best thing in the world.
Then he moved that gaze from the screen to my face and caught me staring at him.
I looked away, but not fast enough. Not fast enough not to see the look of pure joy in his eyes.
I swallowed hard past the lump in my throat, then watched the screen.
For all of two seconds.
The doctor ripped the monitor off my belly, then said, “Looks just fine. You’re free to go whenever.”
Then, without another word, he tossed the wand back onto the computer and made his goodbyes without another word.
He even left the goo on my belly.
I was about to reach for my own wipes to get it off when Bram moved, catching three paper towels from the dispenser and coming my way.
I held my breath as he gently wiped it clean as Gary the nurse started to chuckle.
“Now you know how awesome our OB is,” he said sarcastically.
I snorted. “He’s not terrible, I guess. I mean, at least he didn’t give us a bunch of bullshit. I would’ve liked to look at the baby some more, though.”
Because I’d just found out about said baby this morning.
After I’d thrown up for the fifth time and realized that something was definitely wrong with me.
You didn’t just have a stomach flu that lasted ten days, and only at three in the morning.
“If you say so.” Gary chuckled, his eyes taking in the man I was studiously ignoring as he wiped me clean. Something he used to do after we’d had sex. Though, that wiping clean was much more intimate than what he was doing now. “Since you’re in good hands here, I’ll go get your discharge paperwork ready. You can head out once I get your John Hancock.”
Then he was gone, leaving me with Bram who was now staring at my belly as if it held the secrets of life.
“You okay?” I asked, pushing his hand away as gently as I could.
He swallowed hard and nodded before he rocked my world.
“Give me another chance,” Bram said into the silence. “Give me one more chance.”
I looked down at the covers that were once again covering my belly.
“If you weren’t here for the papers… why are you here?” I asked cautiously, remembering the earlier phone conversation before the doctor had all but blown his way inside my hospital room.
He looked like I’d just hit him in the chest.
“I’m here because I missed you.”
I blinked.
That thought had never occurred to me.
“You… what?” I asked, unsure what to say.
Or how to react.
What did that even mean?
Then anger replaced the confusion.
I didn’t want him to be here just because of the baby. I didn’t want pity from him. I could do this on my own.
“Bram, do you know why I don’t like cilantro?” I asked quietly.
Our very last fight had started because of cilantro.
We’d been out to eat, and he’d thought the cilantro wasn’t a big deal.
I, on the other hand, did.
He frowned hard, and I could see that he couldn’t even remember why I was asking that question.
Most likely, he didn’t even realize that I was gone until he didn’t have any clean laundry.
Which means, he probably didn’t remember the fight that had sparked me to leave.
“I know you don’t like it but…” He hesitated.
“But you don’t know why I make such a big deal about it,” I found myself finishing his sentence.
His shoulders slumped. “Yeah.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and said, “Fourteen percent of the world population can’t eat cilantro because there’s an olfactory gene called OR6A2.”
I could tell he was confused, but I kept going. “OR6A2 is responsible for detecting aldehydes. There are aldehydes in cilantro. Long story short, cilantro is sometimes used to make soap. When I eat cilantro, my brain automatically tells me that it tastes like soap.”
Bram opened his mouth and closed it.
“Meaning, every time I get cilantro in my stupid Chipotle rice, it tastes like I grated up a bar of soap in it. Would you like to eat something that tastes like soap?” I asked.
Bram’s shoulders slumped impossibly further.
“That night, we got into a fight about it because they added it to my order when I explicitly mentioned to have plain white rice. I wasn’t being difficult. I wasn’t trying to be a bitch. I wasn’t being a ‘Karen’ like you accused me of being. I was trying to enjoy what I was eating. And when you threw a fit because I wouldn’t eat my meal that you refused to have them send back, you reminded me of my brother.”
His mouth fell open in shock then.
“What?” His voice had raised in pitch.
That’d been one very hard truth I’d had to share with Bram when we got married: Amon.
Amon was by far my worst torturer.
But some of my scars went so deep that I could never show them to Bram and him not see me as weak.
But there were some things that I had to tell him. There were also some things that Bram knew on his own. Like the night that he’d offered me an alibi.
The way that Amon had snuck out the previous night the verdict had been handed down and let me know in no uncertain terms that no matter what, he would find a way to make my life a living hell.
“My brother used to add it to my food for fun,” I said softly. “So when I say that I can’t eat it, I can’t. I eat it, I’ll throw up. Ask me how I know.”
His eyes looked even more tortured when he said, “How do you know?”
“Because he did it often, just to watch me get sick. Every time. Have you ever been so hungry that you eat something, knowing it’ll make you sick, yet eating it anyway?” I asked quietly. “I was diagnosed with ARFID—avoidance/restrictive food intake disorder. Pretty much, sometimes I just can’t eat. Can’t make myself eat. Because of things that he did to me in the past. One of those being tampering with my food and making me suspicious of almost everything.” I hesitated. “The fact that I can even go somewhere where I allow someone else to prepare my food is an amazing feat, according to my therapist.”
“You’re in therapy?” he asked quietly.
I shrugged. “It was either that or…”
I didn’t finish.
I didn’t have to.
“Dory…” he whispered, choking on the word. “No.”