“What?”
I was pulled so far out of my orgasm that my body went rigid and my mind was soaked in adrenaline. He might as well have screamed Stop in my ear. I yanked my hands against the ties with a motion so violent, I heard stuff clatter and clunk as it fell. He got up on his knees, and I saw the fullness of him.
His cock was streaked in red. It wasn’t supposed to be. Not unless something was broken, and we weren’t doing broken. We were doing celebration. This was wrong. Everything was wrong. I pulled again, even as he reached up to get the scarf undone.
“Monica! Stay still. Give me a second.”
But all my yanking and pulling had tightened the knot, and he growled as he tried to pick it loose and failed.
“Say it’s from hitting me,” I begged. “Please say it’s from—”
“I don’t know what it’s from. Just stay still.”
I couldn’t. I had no control over my body. I yanked and pulled, trying to slip free, but my husband knew knots like he knew ice cubes and sore bottoms. If he’d set up the knot to keep me from slipping out, I wasn’t slipping out.
“Jonathan,” I said without anything else to say. Him, I just wanted him. I wanted to say his name to gather strength. He got up, and I had a full view of his beautiful, bloodied cock. “Don’t leave me.”
“I’m not.” He walked away.
“Don’t leave me here!”
But he did. He walked away, and I didn’t know why I felt so bereft. Some need to run away, coupled with the inability to even lower my arms, made me panic. I could feel something dripping down my leg. And he wasn’t there. He was going to the fucking kitchen.
Then I heard knives clack and his footsteps coming back toward me. I calmed. Barely. He came back a bread knife and leaned over my hands.
“Stay still,” he said. “Please. I don’t want to cut you.” He put the knife to the scarf.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” His concentration stayed on my bound wrists.
“I don’t want to lose it.”
“Me neither.”
“It’s from spanking me. That’s all. You hurt me worse than I thought. Let’s not do that again, okay?”
“Sure.” He laid his hands on my wrists, pressing them apart and making the fabric between them taut. He sliced the scarf open with a snap.
I got my arms under me and started to get up, but Jonathan pushed me down. I resisted. He pushed harder.
“Hold on. Gravity,” he said.
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“I know, I know.”
He put his arms under my shoulders and my knees and carried me to the couch. I was sore where he’d hit me. That was the reason for the blood, but he seemed worried, and I wanted to respect that. I didn’t want to be dismissive or call him silly, but his knotted brow and the taut line of his jaw made me want to stroke away his fear.
He leaned over me and caressed my cheeks. “Can you wait here while I get dressed and get you some clothes?”
“Why?”
He got up and plucked his clothes off the floor. “We’re going to the hospital.”
I got my elbows under me to sit up, and with only one arm in his shirt, he rushed to push me down.
“It’s nothing, Jonathan. I’m sure of it.” I said it to calm him, but I wasn’t sure if I believed it out of anything but necessity.
“Then humor me. Lie back.”
I did, and when he saw I’d obeyed, he trotted upstairs. I looked down at his name inside my thighs. I was drawn on like a cinderblock wall in gangland. Jonathan’s dominion over me was written in black Sharpie, his territory marked in permanent ink.
Was I losing the baby? And so what if I was? What was the big deal? I didn’t even want to have children right now. I wanted nothing to do with it. Jonathan was going to die after a tortuous wait for a second heart before the kid was in high school. What kind of selfish bitch creates a child to go through that?
All I had to do was go back to the me of a few days ago. Nothing had changed.
Except everything. Having carried that baby knowingly for two days, I’d had a cellular alchemy. The shape of my brain and my heart had shifted, grown. I wasn’t the same person. I wanted that baby. I wanted it so badly, and I didn’t even know it.
I wanted this to be nothing, an embarrassing symptom of rough sex play, but the twitch in my abdomen, the tightness told me otherwise.
Jonathan came down the stairs dressed, with a dress over his arm.
“Do you think they can save it?” I asked, my voice breaking on “save.”
“I don’t know.” He sat on the edge of the couch. “Arms up.”
I raised my arms, and he put the long, modest dress over me. He snapped out a pair of simple cotton underwear and slipped them over my ankles then drew them up my legs and over me.
“I was supposed to get rid of all that underwear,” I said.
“Sometimes you need it.” He stood beside the couch.
I heard the crunch of tires on pebbles outside. “Is it Lil?”
“Yes. I texted her.” He put his arms under me and picked me up, carrying me toward the door. “I don’t think I can drive.”
“Thank God for her.” I looped my arms around his neck, and he carried me out.
“Sir,” Lil said as she opened the back door. “Mrs. Drazen, I hope you’re all right.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing.” I didn’t know why I said that. As the minutes passed, I started to think that was some whitewash of hope on a steaming pile of tragedy.
Jonathan held me tight and somehow got me in the car without putting me down. I shifted down and put my head on his lap.
Lil looked into the back. “Sequoia?”
“Yes.”
“No!” I said, rigid. I looked up at Jonathan. “No. Anywhere but there. Please. I can’t.”
“It’s the best obstetrics unit in the world, Monica.”
“I don’t care. I can’t go back there. I can’t. Let’s go to Hollywood Methodist.”
“It’s a different ward entirely.”
“Do you know how far out of my way I go to not drive past it? And it’s on Beverly, so yeah, I’d rather be late than see it. I’d rather go to the urgent care clinic on Sunset. I’d rather see the witch doctor in Silver Lake than go anywhere near that hospital. It smells like death. It’s hell. Nine stories of fucking hell, and I won’t go.”
Jonathan looked at me for a second then back at Lil. “Drive.”
“Jonathan!” I said as Lil closed the door. I tried to get up, but he pulled me down.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I know how you feel. Believe me, I get it. But that was enough blood to scare the hell out of me, and it wasn’t enough to convince me this is completely over. If we lose this baby because we went to a second-rate hospital or nowhere at all, because we were scared… well, I’d like to know how you’re going to forgive yourself. Because you’re going to have to teach me.”
I looked away from him. His gaze was going to break me. It was a wall of resolve. He was doing what he wanted to do, and I had to go along. From my angle on his lap, all I could see was the grey-blue glass of the sky, streetlights, and telephone poles zipping by. A speck of bird or plane.
He was right.
Fear was fungible, and death was forever. Overcome one to face the other. Blah blah. I didn’t want him to be right. I wanted to fall down a hole of despair or climb a pillar of hope, and reason and rationality were distractions from the choice.
Reaching for the hope, I touched his face. “I’m sure it’s fine. We’re just overreacting.”
“I hope so.”
“Didn’t Jessica miscarry? What happened?”
He turned toward the window. “We were throwing an event at the house. Some fundraiser for the artist co-op she was in. She just takes my hand and brings me into the house. Doesn’t break a beat. I’m following her, and I can see the blood inside her stockings. I picked her up and carried her to the car, but it was too late. It was a mess before we even got there. So much blood. I never saw her cry except in the front seat of my car. The pain was so bad, and you know, I asked her how long it had hurt before she told me.”
“Could they have saved it?”
“The doctor wouldn’t guarantee anything, but just said that next time we should come right away.”
I relaxed into that, watching the fancy streetlights of Santa Monica turn into the more urban, less fussy designs of the west side of LA. “I had pain yesterday, but I thought I had the flu.”
“Let’s see what happens.”
“If we lose it, do we try again?”
“I don’t know.”
That didn’t help. If he pulled back from getting what he wanted most, what he’d always wanted most, then I didn’t know who he was anymore.
“Did you try again with Jessica?” I flinched from my own question. It sounded petty and mean. Our situations couldn’t have been more different. But I wanted to know what to expect from him. Did he give up or truck on?
If he heard the question as cutting, he didn’t show it. “We both got checked out. I was fine, but her uterus had a shape that made it hard for her to go to term. We were fine, but it never took again. In a way, it improved things between us for a while.”
I cupped his face in my hands, and he looked down at me then leaned over and kissed me.
“This won’t end us,” he said. “I swear, if it’s the last thing I do, I’m keeping you.”
The car stopped.
“I’m ready,” I said. “If you stay by me. I’m ready.”
Lil opened the door, and Jonathan carried me through the sliding glass doors into Sequoia Hospital. Hell on earth. I closed my eyes, but the smell was still there, and the ambient noise. When something somewhere beeped, I clung to him.