She was indelibly imprinted on every thought, every feeling like a tattoo on my soul. The memory of her voice, her laugh, the feel of her body was permanently a part of me. I blew out a breath, running my hands through my hair. I’d struggle and I’d find the will to resist this, resist her. But…we were like magnets. Tearing ourselves apart to get back to each other.
I swallowed, my throat feeling prickly. One last burst of stubborn resistance had me setting the phone aside, resolved to forget her.
Then I called myself the dick that I was, took it back up and replied.
Be there ASAP.
I got there a little over fifteen minutes later. Heath lived up in the Orange Hills, so it was a bit of a drive from my place in Newport. I did break a few speeding laws on my way up. As luck would have it, the CHP didn’t know a thing about it.
When I knocked on the door, Heath whipped it open almost as quickly. He was still wearing his pajamas. I stared at him.
“What’s going on?”
“She’s locked in the bathroom and she’s sobbing. She won’t answer me and she keeps saying your name and ‘I’m sorry’ over and over again. We gotta get her out of there, man.”
I took a deep breath and walked in. I wasn’t sure what Heath knew or what she wanted him to know. So I walked to the bathroom without saying another word. I could hear her sniveling on the other side of the door, so I knocked.
She didn’t say anything.
“Emilia,” I called. “Open the door.”
“Adam?” she answered after a long moment.
She sounded weird, her speech slurred. I looked at Heath and asked quietly, “You have any tools? A screwdriver? I need a flashlight, too.”
Heath left to go dig through a drawer in his kitchen. I turned back to the door.
“Open the door, Emilia. We’re worried about you.”
“You’re not worried about me,” she said. “You’re pissed off at me.”
“I can be both at the same time. Open the door.”
“They keep coming out the same. Every one of them.”
Heath returned with a huge screwdriver and a flashlight. I tried to fit it inside the small hole in the doorknob. I shook my head at Heath. He left and returned with the entire drawer, having pulled it out of his cabinet. I began digging through the tools to find something that would work.
I chose a thin screwdriver and held the light up to the doorknob, sticking it into the hole. “Emilia, you need to come out. Open the door.”
“You said you didn’t want to talk about it. That you were done.”
“I’ve had some time to cool off.” Heath waved to get my attention, frowning and mouthing, What the hell?
So that answered that. He didn’t know. Emilia was still keeping secrets. She was crying again, in a muffled way, like she was weeping into her hands or a towel. I twisted the screwdriver. I almost had it. “We can talk about this now. Let me in.”
The doorknob clicked and I quietly turned it, slowly pushing open the door. Emilia was inside the bathtub with only a bathrobe cinched around her. All across the counter, a multitude of pregnancy tests were lined up. All different brands, colors and shapes—she must have spent hundreds of dollars on them all. Every single one of them was used. They all showed the exact same result in different ways; some had pink lines, some had blue, some had a red “plus” sign and some just said the word “pregnant” on mini digital screens. Well, that answered that question. She must have been up half the night peeing on them.
And from the look of her, she hadn’t slept since the last time I’d seen her. I went to sit on the edge of the bathtub and she looked up at me with pathetic, red-rimmed eyes. “Emilia, you need to sleep.”
Heath walked in, looked at the counter and his jaw dropped. He shot a death look at Emilia. “What the fuck is this?”
Emilia didn’t move, just pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes. I turned to Heath. “Hey, man, I got this. Do you mind—?”
And that’s when he grabbed me by the shirt, pulled me up and shoved me back against the wall.
“Did you do this to her?” he said, getting in my face. I pushed him off of me. Heath was a big guy and easily had twenty or more pounds on me. It wouldn’t go well for either of us in a fight and I sure as hell wasn’t in the mood for this bullshit now.
“Get the fuck off of me—”
“What the fuck did you do, man? Did you get her pregnant?” Heath’s face, only inches from my own, was murderous.
Emilia was now standing in the tub. She reached over and grabbed Heath’s shoulder. “Heath, get off of him!”