Right then, at that moment—and Peyton didn’t know if it was the haunting vulnerability in Raji’s dark eyes, or the way the black silk dress clung to her voluptuous curves that he had been having trouble refraining from staring at all night long, or just that the scent of her had become yet more delicious—he knew what she was going to tell him.
It staggered him.
The concept of a child, of a perfect, soft child who was part of him and part of Raji, was a baseball bat blow to the backs of his knees and a club to his stomach.
If he had tried to walk, he would have fallen.
Because he had been raised in New England (and in Connecticut at that, the New Englandest of all of New England,) somehow, he didn’t fall to his knees.
His hands reached out, almost without him thinking about it, and alighted on her hips.
A phrase ran through his head: the cradle of life. He didn’t know why he thought that. When he wrote song lyrics, he tried to be spare and simple and terse with emotion, Hemingway-like, and he would never have written such a metaphorical phrase in a song as the cradle of life.
Yet here she was, her body cradling a living child who was both of them.
“Raji?” Peyton’s voice cracked as he tried to maintain his decorum.
She said, “You know? This can wait. Your flight isn’t until tomorrow afternoon. We can talk over breakfast tomorrow. Heck, we could have an early lunch before you go. There’s no reason to talk about things tonight.” She picked his hands off of her body. “Come on. Let’s go to the bedroom.”
Peyton wanted her to tell him. He wanted to be right. He wanted to stop the vagabond lives they both had been cobbling together and figure out how to be with her and how to be a family. “Tell me.”
Raji sucked in a breath. “Promise that you won’t be mad.”
“I could never be angry with you.” He held her fingers, hoping his hands weren’t shaking.
“Well, about a month ago—”
“Yes.”
“—and you know that the condom—”
“Tell me, Raji-lee.”
“—I think I might have gotten pregnant,” she sighed.
It was purely training, what he said after that. Even though his heart and his body yearned to say anything else, Peyton said what he had been taught to say because he was an upper-class New Englander and so very civilized.
He couldn’t have said anything else. He was progressive. He had been educated at elite private schools. He was sensitive to others’ needs and damage and aware of his extensive privilege and his noblesse oblige to the country and society, and so he said what he had been trained to say, even though his caveman soul was bellowing for him to throw this woman over his shoulder, take her to his cave, and guard her for the rest of their days.
Peyton said, “It’s your body, and I will do whatever you want me to do to support you.”
Raji looked at the floor and away from him, her arms woven across her chest. “I’m still doing my residency. I have another year and some. I can’t stop now. I can’t give up.”
“No one should ever ask you to do that,” Peyton told her.
“It’s just a clump of cells. It’s no big deal. It happens all the time.”
“Has it happened to us before?” he asked, his heart frozen.
Raji said, “No.”
His shoulders relaxed. “I want you to know that I am supportive of whatever decision you make. It is your body.” His words felt stilted even as he managed to say them.
Raji stepped forward and wrapped her arms around his waist. She buried her face in his chest. “I haven’t been able to talk to anyone about it. No one gets pregnant during their residency. It’s stupid. You just can’t. Everyone will think that I’m foolish and stupid and not committed to being a heart surgeon.”
Peyton folded her in his arms. “You’re the smartest, most dedicated person I know. I trust you to make the right decision.”
When Peyton looked back later, maybe that had been the phrase, the right decision, that had doomed their relationship. Maybe she read more into it than he had meant. Maybe she had misunderstood and thought he meant the exact opposite of the thoughts that were galloping through his mind.
A child, a child with Raji, a child who would cement them together so that she couldn’t run away from him at every opportunity.
A little, logical, half-lizard child.
He could watch her grow large with his child, be there when the baby was brought into the world, and raise the child together.
Peyton was quite sure that when he brought Raji home to Connecticut to meet his parents, they would be thrilled that he was marrying a doctor instead of a flighty musician or artist.
But that’s not how it happened.