“True. Well, you know him better than I do. If you think it’s safe,” she responded.
“Yeah. I’m still on the fence, though. I have an appointment with him in a couple of weeks for my breast augmentation. I guess I could go and tell him about our child.” I sighed. I really wasn’t looking forward to seeing him. I knew how he felt about me.
18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Archer
I was shocked when I saw Tiffany’s name on my appointment list for the day. I really figured she would just disappear from my life. I had tried to call her when I got back from Maui, but I had hung up before she could pick up each time. I felt like a coward; however, she was the one who had left. So I wouldn’t force her to be with me, no way. I could get any woman I wanted, but the truth was, I wanted her. I hoped she would show up, and we could talk. However, I didn’t know if I could ask her why she left Maui, and I doubted I wanted to hear her reason anyway. I didn’t want to know that she hated me and that she felt we had made a mistake.
I walked into the room, and she was there. Like a light in the middle of the darkness, she’s glowing and looks fantastic. My loins react to the memories of what it had felt like to make love to her. I longed to pull her to me and ravish her.
“Hello, Dr. Roman,” she spoke to me politely.
“Hello. So you’ve decided that you want the procedure?” I asked her. No other words had come to mind. I wanted to yell, “You left me! Why?” But it didn’t seem that appropriate in my office, and it would have most definitely not been professional.
“Well, I can’t do it. I’m not able to take painkillers right now. It seems like I am having a child,” she told me.
I was shocked. Had I heard that right? I wanted to say something, but I was unable to.
“Don’t worry. I won’t ask you for anything for the baby. I don’t want to burden you with something you don’t want,” she continued. “But I would like for you to at least be in the child’s life. He or she is yours after all, and it is only fair. I will not give up our child or get an abortion. So don’t try to talk me into either one of those options. I understand if you want nothing to do with me, but this is an innocent little child…”
I kissed her to make her stop talking. I had longed to kiss her from the moment I had seen her name on my list of appointments.
“I’m happy we have a child,” I told her once our lips parted.
She looked at me, her face showing her incredulousness. “I don’t believe you. I heard you talking on the phone. You said you couldn’t stand me and that you wished I would just go away. So that is what I did; I left. I wasn’t going to be where I wasn’t wanted anymore.”
I looked at her. “What are you talking about?” I asked, genuinely confused and lost.
“The night I left Maui, you were on the phone, and I heard you say my name, and after that, how much you hated me.”
I thought back to the night I had gone back to the room and she wasn’t there. I had been on the phone with Landon, and the only person I had said I hated was Jasmine. But I had also talked about Tiffany and how much she meant to me.
“I never said that about you. That’s the problem with only hearing one side of the conversation. I was talking to my best friend, Landon. I was telling him how much I hated Jasmine. But I was also telling him how much I cared about you,” I told her.
She looked at me, uncertainty shining brightly in her eyes. I pulled her closer. “Look into my eyes and watch them. If I lie, you will see me blink,” I told her.
She nodded her head. “Okay.”
“I was talking to my friend, Landon. I had just said your name. He had asked me who I loved…and my answer was you. I hate Jasmine. Her behavior helped me realize just what type of a person she was. I just wanted her to get the hell away from our family. I hate how my parents always had her around. It just rubbed me so wrong, and I’d had enough of it at that point. By the way, you left me alone, and I went to supper that night and went off on them all,” I told her.
“What do you mean?” she asked me.
“My father, my mother, and Jasmine – all of them. I’d had enough of them acting like she was the one who had been wronged in our relationship. I showed them that video she sent me. The one where she was screwing another man and screaming my name.” As I told her, a wicked feeling rose up in me, just like it had that night.
“You didn’t?” she laughed and asked.
“I did, and you know what? I would do it again.”
“So tell me, what happened?” she pleaded with me.
“I shouldn’t. If you had just talked to me then, you could have seen it all live,” I told her jokingly.
She kissed me on the mouth and begged, “Please tell me…Archer.” She said my name just like she did when I made her orgasm, and I was putty in her hands. I would share my whole story with her, and anything else she might want to partake in.
“My father made some sort of comment about me hiring you; he called you a prostitute, so I went off on him too. I told him that you were a school teacher and even pulled up your picture off the internet. I told him that he really needed to stop thinking I was him. I didn’t want the same things from my life as he did. I wanted to be happy, not grumpy, when I was his age. I said that he should take the stick out of his ass and stop comparing everyone to the Lord Almighty. I swear, it’s what he does. Anyway, he was drunk, but he shut up. Then I moved on to my mother. I wasn’t as ruthless with her. But I did tell her that Jasmin was a psycho bitch and that if she kept inviting her to family functions, they would never see me again. I also added that she needed to focus on her own children more. Well, my mother and father were already disgusted by the video and were looking at Jasmin like she was trash. Jasmine’s finance had run off, and she had followed him. She came back to tell us that he was leaving, and their wedding was off. If you can believe it, my parents didn’t coddle her, but instead told her she deserved it and that she should leave too. She was no longer welcome. My brother and sister were so proud of me,” I told her the whole story.
Tiffany laughed. “Wow, I am proud of you too! I would have loved to have seen it in person…”
“I wish you had been there too. My parents wrote me an email. Here, I’ll read it to you. I was shocked by it. I forwarded a copy of it to Mark and Kelly. They told me they couldn’t believe my father had written the words he had,” I told her.
“Can I see it?” she asked.
I opened up my email on the computer in the room and motioned for her to sit down. Then I reread the email for about the fifteenth time over her shoulder.
Archer,
I think I owe you an apology. It seems as if you feel like I have always compared you to me. But that is not the case. I set standards for myself, as you should too. I guess the goals that I set for you in my own mind are not the same as what you have set for yourself. For this, I am truly sorry.
She looked up at me as she paused reading the email. “This isn’t really an apology, is it?” she asked.
“No, not really, but just keep reading. I have come to realize that I will never live up to what my father wants me to be, but I am more than okay with that. So these words of his, I will let them roll off my back as well as I can and move on,” I said to her.
“I think that is a good idea,” she said as she looked back at the email.
Your mother and I never realized how horrible Jasmine was to you. If you recall, she wouldn’t often say much to you around us.
“Wait! Didn’t you say she joined in demeaning you with your dad?” she asked.
I was impressed that she had paid so much attention to the things she’d been told by my siblings. I hadn’t shared much with her about Jasmine and me – nothing really at all, honestly.
“Yes. Which one of my siblings told you?” I asked.
“Umm, both told me a little bit, but not a lot,” she admitted.
However, the sex video and the incident of pulling a knife on you
speak of a much bigger issue with her. So we have agreed to not have her around during family functions. In fact, she may be banned from our home from now on. You must understand that your mother adopted her when your sister first moved away. She looked at Jasmine as another daughter, and for that reason, it may be difficult for your mother to adjust. If she slips up, you should forgive her for it.
“Well, it seems like they are at least trying, kind of,” she stated.
“Yeah, well, it is more than I have ever gotten from either one of them when I brought this up in the past. So I think it is a good step forward,” I told her. “Keep reading, there is a bit more.”
As far as Tiffany is concerned. We both think she is a very sweet young woman. We welcome her into the family with open arms.
Mom & Dad
She looked down, and I could see a tear threatening to fall from her eye. “Do you want me in the family too?” she asked, barely above a whisper.
I picked her up and kissed her. “Tiffany, my love, you are my wife. I don’t want to change that. I don’t even want the whole ‘let’s date’ thing anymore. You being gone made me realize how much I cared about you. That and my conversation with Landon. He knocked some sense into me. He made me realize that if we loved one another, that’s all that matters. I would love for you to stay married to me, and we can have our first child and build our own family. We will not let anyone stand in our way at all. I don’t care if my dad continues to put down my cosmetic surgeon choice or not. All that matters in my life is you, me, and that little peanut growing inside of you.” I smiled, meaning every single word.
She hugged me, and we kissed. “Yes, I would love that.”
My day couldn’t be any better, and I couldn’t wait to share the news of our little bundle with the family. My parents, who still were acting differently, would be thrilled.
I thought about names, knowing it would be a joint decision that both Tiffany and I would make. However, I secretly knew that I would give her anything she wanted. The pain of how it had felt when she’d left Maui was still fresh in my mind. I had hurt all over, and my heart had felt as if it were cracking minute by minute. Each breath I’d taken had hurt, and I had cried for her. I had literally had tears running down my face for a few days. I had avoided some of the family functions when it had sunk in that she wasn’t coming back and I might never see her again. At that point, I’d realized that I loved her like crazy. She had grown on me quickly, and the loss of her by my side had almost been too much to take. I had broken down in my room more than one time from the heartache of her leaving.
There was a bit of time when I had been angry with her too. I would switch between being mad at her and wanting to kill her. Then I would go back to crying out her name and wishing she would walk back in the door. I really had felt like I was going crazy for a few days.
Thankfully, my brother had talked to me. He had recently gotten a divorce from his wife of eight years. “Come on. The pain will go away after a while. I would tell you to move on, but you have to let this work out of your system too.”
“But at least you know why your wife left…I have no idea why she went,” I had told him.
“Well, that is true….” he had said, and I could tell he was looking for some words of wisdom to offer me.
“I may never see her again, and it feels like my heart is being ripped to shreds with each breath of fresh air. I can’t get her out of mind, and I don’t know if I want to. She was the best woman I’ve ever found, and now, she’s gone.”
“I’m going to be honest with you, Archer. Tiffany seemed like a really nice woman, and a good one. I think that if you go home and talk to her, you might figure this all out.” That had been one of the last things my brother had told me before I left Maui.
I smiled as I realized just how right he was. I was with the woman I loved, and she had listened, and we had figured it out.
“Archer, what would you like? A little boy or a girl?” I heard Tiffany ask me.
“As long as it is ours and we are together, I don’t have a preference.” I kissed her, and she smiled.
“I really missed you when you left. It felt like my heart was being ripped out and shredded. I didn’t enjoy that feeling at all,” I told her.
“I felt the same way. And as I was crying about how much I thought you hated me, I found out I was pregnant. I doubted you would want anything to do with the child,” she admitted.
“Why would you think that?” I asked her.
“Because I thought you hated me,” she whispered, a little cry coming out.
“Oh, Tiff, I don’t hate you at all. I love you, so much more than I thought I ever could in such a short amount of time. I think that the instant connection we had in Vegas was more than just lust…it may have even been love then,” I told her.
A fresh batch of tears began to litter her cheeks. “That was the sweetest thing I have ever heard. I love you, too, Archer.”
19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Tiffany
It has been eight months now, and I am as big as a house. Archer and I moved in together a month after we made up. I had to sell some things, and we had to try to fit all of our things into his apartment. We finally fit everything by moving a few things into a storage room. We knew we had to get a bigger apartment, or house, before the baby. But honestly, the months had flown by, and other things had come up.
About six months into my pregnancy, I received an offer from a school in Hong Kong. Since I had always wanted to see China, this seemed like the perfect opportunity. The children had seemed so sweet in the videos that the principal had taken and sent to me. That was what had convinced me that I wanted to go. Archer had not been certain about giving up his practice in Phoenix at first. But we’d talked about it many times, and he had done some of his own research. I still recall the night he broke the news to me that he was coming along.
“Hey, Tiff. Can I show you something?” he had asked me. He was seated at his computer as he had been for a few nights in a row, every day after work.
“Yeah, sure.” I had gone over to him and looked over his shoulder.
“So this is what I was thinking.” He pulled up a webpage; it was a page he must have had made. It was for him for a practice in a Hong Kong location: “Dr. Archer Roman, Cosmetic Surgery, including cleft palates and more.”
“Wow, really?” I had asked.
He pulled me into his lap and kissed me deeply. “Did you ever really think I wouldn’t be right there with you?”
I’d smiled at him and shook my head no. “I was hoping my gut feeling was right. I was close to cancelling my contract with the school,” I had admitted to him, and that was the truth.
I’d been talking to Kim the day before and had complained that I didn’t think Archer wanted to go to Hong Kong. “I don’t want to be without him, Kim. I still remember the way I felt when I came back from Maui. Remember how I showed up on your porch, crying my eyes out?”
“I know. I remember. But I really think he will go with you,” she had told me. “He loves you a lot; you can tell when he looks at you.” She added, “It is the same way that David looks at me.”
I smiled. I had seen the look she was talking about. It was one of love and devotion and possibly an adoration of the one you love. It was the way I looked at Archer.
I pulled myself up from the couch and walked to the kitchen to get a drink. I was craving some chocolate milk and just had to have it. I laughed as I thought of all of the late night cravings and of Archer running out to get me a variety of different things. I had craved everything from eggs, to milk, to liver. I had always hated liver before, and eating it had seemed almost sacrilegious to me, honestly. But I had devoured at least a cow or two worth of liver during this pregnancy. I took a step and felt a pull in my stomach and something on my feet. I looked down and realized that my water must have broken. “Archer,” I yelled out to him.
Accidentally Married Page 23