by Lark, Jane
She nodded against my shoulder without looking up.
“Shall we get showered?” I whispered against her ear. Her head lifted.
I couldn’t see any horror or disgust in Jason’s eyes, just questions and thoughts.
I sighed. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
His fingers braced my chin. “Rach, it’s not like you’re confessing to murder… You’re not are you?” It was said in jest.
I smiled, and shook my head.
“It’s going to be okay. You, me, the baby, we’re going to be just fine.”
I nodded, sniffing and wiping away my tears, then I got up, and left him to go and shower. Yesterday had felt like the best day of my life. Today felt like the worst––but I’d had a lot of worst days in my life.
I went into the washroom, and while I was stripping off, I heard his cell ring.
“Hi Dad.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry.”
“Right.”
“Thank you.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
“Goodbye.”
I switched the shower on pretending I hadn’t been listening and remembered only a few weeks ago when we’d first met––when he’d first rescued me––how I’d listened then, to a stranger talking. He wasn’t a stranger anymore. He was my husband.
The showerhead was a broad disk, and the stream of water came out really fast. I put my hand under it checking the temperature and then stepped in. It was like standing under a waterfall. The water teemed down on my head and I shut my eyes, lifted my face, and let it stream over my closed eyes, my mouth and my shoulders.
The first I knew of his presence was his hands touching my waist as he stood behind me. Then his teeth nipped at my neck. I leaned against him and rested my head back on his shoulder as his hands slid upward over my breasts.
When he clasped them I felt a spasm of longing slip through my body. It pooled low in my belly. Then his fingers pinched my nipples and a shooting pain followed it.
His hands slid down to the tops of my thighs and held me steady as he pressed against me from behind and sucked my neck. I melted inside. Shit, Jason. He created such a storm of tension in my nerves it swept my thoughts away from anything but this …
“Jason,” I whispered as the water poured down on us.
His head lifted a little and his lips brushed against my earlobe. “You’re beautiful you know.” He turned me to face him then and I expected him to be smiling but he looked serious. His hair was wet and he had water droplets caught in his eyelashes. My stomach did a double somersault.
“Dad is giving me half the store.”
“What?”
“He’s making me a silent partner, and Lindy manager.”
“I don’t understand.” I swept his wet hair off his forehead so it didn’t keep dripping.
“I’ll get a share of the profits, and Lindy will have no permanent links. He said I’d need it now we’re married.” The emotion in his brown eyes shone, but I couldn’t fathom it.
“Is that good? Is that what you want?”
“I guess. I just didn’t want the store going out of the family… And I’m grateful. He didn’t have to set it up so we’d get money now. He said him and Mom talked. They’re going to support us.”
“But they don’t like me still, do they?”
“I think they’ve accepted I do, finally. They don’t have any choice. They have to learn to like you, Rach. I think they’re going to try. But Dad said Mom doesn’t feel like talking to me right now. She isn’t happy.”
I could read the emotion burning in his dark eyes now. It said, I love you, and I’m going to protect you and not let them hurt you.
“But that’s enough of that. I want shenanigans.”
I kissed him, ignoring the water streaming over my hair and our bodies.
Our tongues danced, and then he was pressing me back against the shower wall and lifting my thighs to his hips.
It was stupid how much I loved him, I’d never felt anything near this attraction and dependence for anyone.
Chapter Twenty One
“Mrs. Macinlay.” Jason opened the door of his apartment, and threw me a grin as he held it for me to pass.
I smiled.
“Oh no, dammit, wait, not yet.”
He pushed past me, and went in, taking the cases into the living room, then he turned around and came back to the door, grinning again.
“I can’t believe I nearly forgot to carry you.” He bent and picked me up, I squealed as my shins dangled over his forearm and my arms grabbed about his shoulders.
We crossed the threshold.
“Shall I drop you on the mattress and have my wicked way with you?”
“I want to eat first. I’m starving, and thirsty.”
“What, not hungry and thirsty for me…”
I hit his shoulder with the heel of my hand.
He set me down carefully. “Well then, we’d better go out and get some food.”
“Can we go to the restaurant? I can check what shifts they want me to work then.”
“Okay.”
I picked up the post we’d collected downstairs, and flicked through it. There was one for me. It was from the hospital.
Rachel Shears, the name made me smile. I wasn’t Rachel Shears anymore, I was Rachel Macinlay.
I gave him the others and then opened mine.
“I got my scan date.”
He looked at me, and smiled.
“Will you come with me? It’s New Year’s Eve.”
“What time?” His eyes glowed.
“First thing in the morning.”
“I’ll tell work I’ll be late in.”
“Thank you.” I hugged him. I couldn’t believe it; I was a wife now, and I was gonna be a mother soon. Who was I? I laughed. He just smiled.
~
Half an hour after Rach fell asleep, I got out of bed. I couldn’t sleep. I’d lain there with my thoughts spinning. There was so much going on. There was the marriage, and the baby, and her bipolar, which I still didn’t understand.
I picked up my cell.
In the living room, I sat on the floor, my back against the wall.
Moonlight poured in through the long window.
I turned on my cell and went onto the internet, and searched ‘bipolar.’
A part of me felt disloyal, but I wasn’t doing it to spy or condemn, only to understand.
The ten signs of bipolar… They included talking lots, and I thought of how Rach had spoken a monologue nearly all the way to Vegas. On the way back, she’d been as silent as the grave.
It talked of extremes, of different forms of the illness, hypomania and mania, and severe depression, and then it spoke about people being normal sometimes, and sometimes people not even being able to tell they were in a manic state.
Then it talked of the worst extremes. People thinking they were someone else, or superhuman.
It spoke about sex drives, too, and as I read the words my mind filled with images of Rach, when we did it in the alley in the beginning. Then there was the first night, when she’d sat naked in the bath of a stranger, and let me tend her hand.
My heartbeat thumped all the time, as I read the words.
I watched videos, too, of people who had it, and people who knew someone who had it.
They all said it was treatable, and people implied the best way to support someone was to just keep talking, and not smother them, or try to fix them, but to just be there.
I ended the internet connection.
The bedroom door opened.
“You’re up.” Rach’s brow furrowed.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
I was going to stand up, but before I could move she sat down beside me.
“What were you doing?” she asked.
I looked sideways at her. I had a feel
ing she knew. “Searching bipolar disorder on the internet. It’s what they used to call manic depression, isn’t it?”
She nodded, looking at me with eyes that asked what I thought.
My cell in one hand, my other caught hold of her hand.
With my knees still bent up, I just draped my forearm over my knee and our joined hands hung in midair.
“Tell me what your worst day was.”
“I don’t know, Jason. I don’t remember a lot when I get really down, but I spent years in deep depression during my teens. I was a mess when I left home. I didn’t have any respect for myself, or other people either. I used to just let guys treat me like trash.”
“And the worst thing you did, stabbing Declan, right?”
Her eyes widened. “I suppose, it depends on what you judge as bad. You might think it was sleeping with a load of guys at once. I’m not proud of anything I’ve done like that, but at the times I did them, I wasn’t thinking straight … ”
“And me?”
“You?” There was confusion in her eyes.
But this was the question which had been haunting me since I’d started reading all these blogs. “When we got together, the night we went out. Was that because you wanted me, or because you were high and you just wanted sex?”
Her eyes glittered in the moonlight which spilled through the long window and fell across the room. “I wanted you. I think I was already in love with you, Jason. But I didn’t plan to have sex with you. That just happened. And, yes, maybe it was because I have bipolar disorder. I don’t know any more than you do. It’s in my head. I can’t pick out which thought comes from it, and which doesn’t. I don’t know what it’s like to think like someone who doesn’t have it any more than you can imagine what goes on in my head.”
I nodded. I think I understood more now and I did believe we were just about us.
I squeezed her fingers.
“Do you still love me?”
I tugged her against me and kissed her hair. “No. I’m fucking fanatical about you… Of course I still love you.”
She lifted her head again and looked at me, a silhouette in the dark with her back to the moonlight.
“But you have to take the medicine,” I said.
“I know. I was going to ask for it, it just makes me drowsy sometimes, and I feel like it holds me back when I could be high … ”
“Until you go too high…” I lifted my eyebrows at her. I knew what that meant now. “You don’t want to hit an extreme when we have the baby. I know they’re rare, Rach, but you have to be sensible.”
She nodded. “Jason Macinlay, you’re such a good guy. Thank you for taking me in.”
“Rachel Macinlay, you’re such a special girl, thank you for being willing to share my life…”
She struck my shoulder. “Don’t mock me.”
“Who’s mocking?”
Neither of us felt like sleeping after that. We ended up playing on my Xbox half the night.
~
Jason? Hi honey.” Mom sounded bright, considering yesterday she hadn’t wanted to talk to me, but I could hardly hear her over the New York traffic.
“Hi. I’m on my way to work.” I wondered why she’d called.
“Yeah, okay. It’s only a quick call. I want to ask, what do you and Rachel want for a wedding present?” Ah, they really were going to try and accept this then. I frowned as I looked along the street before crossing the road, and pressed the cell closer to my ear to try and hear her over the crossing signal which warned me I had so many seconds left to get over.
“For a present?” I dodged the people coming toward me, and stepped up onto the opposite sidewalk and turned left, brushing past others walking the opposite way, as well as weaving between those heading the same way as me. I didn’t think I’d ever get used to the sheer number of people in New York.
“From the family, we’ll club together and get you something useful. I am still mad at you though, for doing this without a word, and far too quickly, but––”
“I only decided after we got back to New York. And if I’d told you, you’d have told me not to do it. We would have just argued.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now, you did do it, and we have to live with it, and we’re going to make the best of it.”
I wanted to tell her about Rach’s bipolar but Mom had only just started accepting her, I didn’t want to disturb things again. Now I understood why it had taken Rach so long to tell me about her illness. When was the moment to speak of a subject which no one understood? I decided to speak as I would if I thought there was nothing to hide. Shit, was I hiding Rachel’s illness… That felt wrong, but… “Rach is having her scan this week.” I couldn’t force myself to speak. I feared how my Mom would react.
“Is she?” Mom kept her voice light. I knew she was faking her interest, but I was just glad she was trying, and it only confirmed I’d made the right decision to say nothing about Rach’s bipolar.
“I’m going to go with her.”
“That’s good of you, Jason.”
“I want to be there, this is going to be my child, Mom.”
“Yes, of course, darling.”
“I’m at the office now, Mom, I better go. I don’t know what to suggest for a present, I’ll speak to Rach. Maybe it’s better to leave it until we have the baby, though. We’ll need a ton of stuff then. I haven’t worked out how we’ll all fit in the apartment yet.” I laughed, but it wasn’t really funny. It was a dilemma. We could perhaps manage for a few months, but a tiny two-room apartment wasn’t a place to raise a child. “I’ll call New Year’s Eve, after the scan, and tell you how it went.” They were going to have to accept the child as well as Rachel.
“Okay.”
“Bye.”
“Goodbye, Jason.”
I don’t think I’d ever kept a secret from Mom before.
I put the cell in my pocket.
When I walked into the office, I smiled as Justin looked up.
“What?”
I lifted my left hand and spread my fingers wide.
“Fuck, are you married? How the hell did you do that?”
“Vegas.”
“You’re kidding. You’re crazy.”
Well, Rach was the crazy one. Wasn’t she. I didn’t say it. It seemed I was now trapped into this not wanting to speak of her condition, too, in case anyone judged her badly.
But that was the stupid thing. I was as crazy as her. She’d made me love doing rash stuff. The thing that had really made me fall for her in the beginning was her edginess, her craziness. I loved that she did things without thinking and just went for it.
I could understand why she didn’t want to take the medication.
But I had to remember there was a downside to her bipolar, and that there was an upside beyond what I’d known, that meant she might be dangerous to herself, or others, or the baby, if she did have an episode like that.
But I was just as afraid as her that the medication might take something away from what we had. Yet, I’d still love her. I’d always love her. She was just too embedded in my blood for that to ever change.
Justin stood up and shouted to the room. “Huh- hum! Everybody! Our new boy has some news! He’s married!”
It was an open office. Everyone on the whole floor turned. Half of them I’d never really spoken to.
The girls about us came over.
“She gave you a ring?”
“Which girl was it you married, the one from Oregon, or the one you found on the bridge?”
“The one on the bridge, I hope,” Justin answered.
“The one on the bridge,” I confirmed. “Rachel.”
“God, that’s quick.”
“They married in Vegas.” Justin threw in, as a couple of them gripped my finger looking at the gold band. Forever mine, Rachel’s words glowed in the gold as the sunlight shining through the window caught on it.
“That’s romantic.”
“That’s wild.”<
br />
“God, I wish someone would take me to Vegas and marry me.”
“What’s going on? Did anyone say stop working?” The editor yelled from across the room.
I turned as he came over. It wasn’t him who was the bastard. It was the guy who owned the magazine.
“I got married over the holidays, Keith.”
“Very nice. But we have a magazine to get out.”
“I need some time off on New Year’s Eve.”
“You’ve just come back.”
“Just a couple of hours in the morning. My wife’s pregnant. We’re going for a scan.”
The girls, who’d started drifting back to their desks, exclaimed at this new piece of gossip, all turning back.
“Not so romantic, then,” one of them said, before sitting back at her desk.
I’d told Justin about the baby before I’d gone away, but no one else.
“You knocked her up quick,” another girl said.
I caught Justin’s eye and stopped him the moment before he declared to the entire room it wasn’t mine. It was mine.
“You can go.” Keith grumbled, “But you better be back before lunch, otherwise you’re in big trouble. Got that?” I nodded. “We have to have everything done before Mr. Rees’s party.” I nodded again, though I’d no idea what party Keith was on about.
As Keith walked away, I sat down, and Justin grinned, looking across the desks at me. “Husband and papa all in five months of moving to New York? Bet that went down well with your folks back home.”
“Not really. What party is he on about?” Keith had spoken like I should know.
“Mr. Rees’s.”
Yeah, Keith had said that much. But Mr. Rees was the asshole, the bastard who owned the magazine––the man who was rolling in money and self-adoration, and just turned up once-in-a-while to run down the people who worked for him, telling everyone they were useless, and talentless. I still couldn’t believe he’d disparaged my idea so cruelly. The sub-editor, Hilary, had liked it. The asshole wasn’t even an editor but he was the reason I’d been questioning why I’d ever wanted to come to New York.
“Has nobody told you yet?” Justin said.
He knew he was the only one who told me anything.
“They haven’t, have they? I suppose it’s because you were off before Christmas. But every year, Mr. Rees throws a New Year’s Eve party, and we’re invited. You’ll get to mix with his rich friends.”