“I’ll be right back, I need to use the bathroom.”
Without waiting for a response, I turned on my heel and walked as quickly as I could without running. I bypassed the downstairs bathroom, needing to put more distance between myself and the reminder of my failures.
The upstairs was quiet and dark and exactly where I needed to be right now. I hurried into the bathroom and locked the door. My frantic thoughts swirled around my head as I paced the length of the small room.
I knew I should be happy for my brother and sister-in-law. I wanted to be happy for them. And deep down, I really was, but it was smothered in layers of envy drowning in the pity I felt for myself. Pathetic questions slid through my thoughts as I fought to get myself under control.
Why not me?
When would it be my turn?
What’s wrong with me?
None of it helped and my inner dialogue was making me resent myself even more. What kind of person was so envious they couldn’t be happy for someone else’s good fortune? This was a baby, another niece or nephew that I’d get to love and spoil and all I can do is feel sorry for myself.
I was mad at myself.
I was sorry for myself.
I was sick of myself.
I stayed up in the bathroom for much longer than was acceptable, but I needed to make sure I had myself under control before I went back downstairs. As I fought to manage my emotions, I wondered where Bryson was. He must have known what sent me running for the bathroom. Why hadn’t he checked on me?
The lack of concern from my husband sent my mood spiraling to new lows.
I would have loved to splash some cold water on my face but thought runny mascara would send the wrong message. Instead, I washed my hands and gave myself a little pep talk.
I would go back downstairs and congratulate my brother and sister-in-law. I’d hug them and kiss them and tell them how happy I was for them. I’d dig a hole deep enough inside me that could hide the sadness and disappointment I felt at being witness to another pregnancy that wasn’t mine.
When I finally made my way back downstairs, I was relieved to see that everyone had dispersed to digest dinner before partaking in dessert. I made a beeline for Connor and Dina and enveloped them in a big hug.
“I’m seriously so happy for you guys.”
When we pulled apart, Connor was smiling, but Dina’s sharp eyes were assessing me.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
My smile widened into what was probably clown-like proportions, but it was the best I could do. “Of course! I just had a little stomachache, but I feel better now.”
Dina didn’t look fully convinced, but she nodded anyway. Thankfully Maddy took that opportunity to start fussing, and I was excused from further scrutiny. I grabbed my phone out of my purse and curled up on the couch beside my father who was yelling at the professional football players on the tv as if they could hear him.
There was a text icon in my notification bar that I clicked on eagerly, hoping it was Josie with some comic relief.
Mason: Merry Christmas, pretty girl.
I know it shouldn’t, but his simple compliment made me smile. With the heaviness of this day weighing on me, it felt good to hear something nice.
Me: Merry Christmas
Mason: What are you doing?
Me: Listening to my father curse the Panthers
Mason: They are sucking extra hard right now, aren’t they?
Me: I’m not paying much attention
Mason: I’m distracting you? Good.
I rolled my eyes but didn’t correct him.
Mason: So, I’ve been meaning to talk to you. I feel like we got some bad blood
I frowned. I wasn’t in the mood to have another emotionally draining conversation today.
Me: Mason, do we have to do this now? I’ve had a day.
Mason: Is it something you can just shake off?
My frown deepened. What would he know of it?
Me: Not really.
Mason: So, you’re still not out of the woods?
Me: What are you talking about?
Mason: What I mean to say is, what you’ve heard is true, but I can’t stop thinking about you.
My heart pinched in my chest as my pulse began to race. I took a quick look around the living room, making sure no one was paying attention to me before I looked back at my phone. What was Mason doing? I thought I’d made things clear the other day. I thought he understood that I was married and that nothing could happen between us.
But now that I thought back, he hadn’t agreed to anything, had he? In fact, he’d practically said he was counting on my divorce. That he planned to expedite it.
My stomach fell as I scanned through his messages again. I needed to deter him. I needed to end this. Needed to make sure he understood that nothing could happen between us.
I peeked up from beneath my lashes at Bryson across the room engrossed in his own phone.
A nasty little voice whispered should I be deterring Mason?
Was my relationship with Bryson past the point of no return?
Was whatever happening between me and Mason my future?
I didn’t have the answers. And even if I did, I wouldn’t want them.
Not now.
Not yet.
Me: I’m really flattered, Mason, but I told you nothing can happen between us.
Mason: Let’s get out of this town. Drive out of the city.
I cocked my head to the side. Why were his words so familiar?
Me: I’m at my parents’ house for Christmas dinner. I can’t just up and leave.
It felt like Mason had burst through some kind of barrier and now nothing was off limits. Like he was done dancing around the issue, and was fully prepared to pursue me, despite my efforts to remind him I wasn’t pursuable.
Mason: No one has to know what we do
My stomach pitched again at his words.
No.
I wouldn’t cheat on my husband. Regardless of whether or not we could hide it, I’d know, and I’d never be able to live with myself.
Me: Mason, please. Stop. Nothing can happen between us. I told you this.
Mason: Say you’ll see me again, even if it’s just in your wildest dreams.
My thumbs twitched to respond, but I stopped for a second. I scrolled back through his messages, my smile growing with each word. Without my consent, a breathless laugh escaped my lips, and I bit them to keep quiet.
Me: OMG are you really quoting Taylor Swift to me?
Mason: Hahaha took you long enough!
My smile was still spread across my face as my eyes slid around the room. I caught sight of Bryson again, but he wasn’t wrapped up in his phone anymore. He was staring at me. The smile slowly slid off my face as his dark eyes darted between my face and the phone still clutched in my hand.
I knew he knew who’d put the stupid grin on my face. Who’d finally made me laugh after a day full of stress and heartbreak.
Bryson’s jaw ticked, and I felt like I could almost hear his teeth grinding from where I sat across the room.
There was nothing I could say. No excuse I could give, no lie I could tell. I’d been caught red-handed.
Dread started to pool in my insides before the flames of anger rushed forward and burned up the guilt.
I had no reason to feel bad. I was talking to a coworker, a friend. It wasn’t like Bryson wanted to talk to me. Not like he even checked on me after I left the table so upset. What’s it to him if I’m having a friendly conversation with someone?
My gaze was still trapped in Bryson’s, so I was able to watch the fire burn out of his eyes and them frost over. I watched him build an icy wall between us, brick by brick. He finally wrenched his gaze away from mine and my stomach dropped.
I felt like something had just snapped. Something awful. Something irrevocable. It felt like the last nail had just been hammered into the coffin of our marriage.
The ice that had been in
his once warm gaze, seemed to penetrate me and I fought off a shiver. I had a bad feeling this was the beginning of the end.
Chapter 15
Past
My leg bounced up and down as I sat in the gynecologist’s waiting room. Bryson reached out and placed a warm hand on my thigh to stop my fidgeting, but I brushed him off. He sighed and leaned back in his seat, leaving the space between us silent and anxious.
It had taken months of irregular periods before I finally called my doctor for a follow up appointment. Surely it wasn’t normal to go six to eight weeks without menstruating. I’d thought I could figure things out on my own, that my cycle would go back to normal after a few months, like the nurse practitioner had said, but that clearly wasn’t the case.
Something was wrong, and I was fervently hoping someone could help me.
Help us.
Because this constant failure, month after month, was tearing me apart and my jagged pieces were cutting into Bryson even as he tried to hold me together.
“Thompson?”
I stood abruptly and walked over to the nurse holding the door open that led to the exam rooms. Bryson’s steady presence followed me, but I drew little comfort from it.
The nurse went about the usual routine of taking my height, weight, and then vitals once she led me to a room. When she was done, she assured me the nurse would be in soon, and left the room.
My leg began to bounce again.
“You nervous?”
I scoffed and rolled my eyes. “Of course, I’m nervous, Bryson. This is my future we’re talking about.”
“It’s mine too,” he said softly.
I rolled my eyes again. “And it’s not your body that’s the problem. Remember? We had your sperm checked and you’re perfect,” I spat.
He sighed. “I’m not perfect, Mack, just super virile.” The smile was clear in his voice and I knew he was joking, but it hit me wrong.
“And I’m not. I get it.”
He sighed again. “That’s not what I’m saying, Mack. I’m trying to lighten the mood.”
“Well, stop.”
I felt his eyes boring a hole in the side of my face as I sat there bouncing my leg, but I didn’t turn to look at him. I knew I was being a bitch. That I was speaking out of anger and bitterness and taking things out on him that he had nothing to do with, but I couldn’t help myself.
The vitriol frothed within me, like an active volcano. It burned at the walls of my insides, eating away at me. Most of the time I could suppress it, shove it down until my head could peer above it and I could act reasonably normal.
Other times, I drowned in it, let it fill my veins and poison my heart, let it spew awful blackness from my mouth that served to hurt Bryson. To push him away when all he wanted to do was be there for me.
Sometimes, when it rose too high, it was like it filled me entirely, pushing me out of my body. It possessed me, moved my limbs and spoke from my mouth, but it wasn’t me. It felt like I stood outside my body while it yelled and screamed and fought with Bryson, all while I watched helplessly. Knowing it was wrong, knowing it was digging deeper and deeper trenches between us, but powerless to stop it.
A knock on the door interrupted my dark thoughts, and I watched the nurse practitioner that we’d spoken to last time, Keri, step into the room.
“Hey folks, my name is Keri, I’m a nurse practitioner here.” She eyed us for a second with pursed lips. “You all look familiar.”
“We saw you back in October,” I offered.
Keri snapped her fingers and took a seat at the computer. “That’s right. You’re newlyweds, right?”
I nodded, a weak smile lifting my lips.
Keri tapped a few keys before turning to us and placing both hands on her knees. “It looks like you’re here for amenorrhea.” When I looked at her blankly, she smiled and clarified. “Missed periods.”
“Oh, yes. Well, I don’t know if I’m necessarily missing them, they’re just not coming very frequently.”
“You’ve been tracking your cycle?”
“Yes, I’ve tracked it using multiple apps and also used OPK’s for the past six months.”
She nodded and turned to her computer. “So, you have been ovulating.”
I shrugged. “Most of the time, but not always before I get a period.”
Keri frowned and tapped at her keyboard some more. Finally, she took a deep breath and turned to face us again. “So, here’s the deal, I could prescribe you Flomid, but we don’t know if there’s anything else wrong with you or any underlying reasons for why you aren’t always ovulating. My suggestion would be for you to see a reproductive endocrinologist and go from there.”
My shoulders fell slightly at her recommendation. I was hoping she could help me. That this would be the last stop.
Keri noticed my change in attitude and smiled encouragingly. “Trust me, you’d rather go through all the steps and find out if anything is wrong first. Flomid is known to have some pretty serious side-effects. You don’t want to have to go through all that and later find out there was something wrong, and you didn’t need it.”
I nodded. I’d read about Flomid in my endless amounts of research and I knew what she was saying was true. A lot of women complained about Flomid’s side-effects, but a lot of women had also gotten pregnant pretty quickly after starting the drug. I’d hoped to be one of those women, but Keri was right, we should find out if everything is okay first.
Keri began tapping away at her keyboard again while she spoke. “I’ll have the front desk make you an appointment with the fertility specialist we work with and we’ll go from there, okay? Any questions?”
I shook my head, but Bryson spoke up. “What are the side effects associated with Flomid?”
I turned to stare at him, surprised he’d spoken up. Surprised that he thought to ask.
Keri stopped typing and turned to us again. “Well, there’s the usual stuff like headaches, nausea, and diarrhea, but most women complain about hot flashes while on Flomid. There are also quite a few women who report mood changes.”
“What kind of mood changes?” Bryson asked warily.
I winced as I imaged what he was thinking. With the way I’d been the past few months, how much worse could it get? A hot wash of shame ran through my veins and I felt my face heat.
“Most women report increased irritability and mood swings.”
I shrunk a little in my seat as Bryson made a sound in the back of his throat.
Keri, oblivious to the strain between us, smiled wide. “Any other questions?”
I shook my head and Bryson must have done the same because she stood and offered her hand first to me, and then to Bryson. “I’m sorry things are taking a little longer for you folks, but I’m sure you’ll get there with the fertility specialist we’re sending you to.”
I smiled weakly. “Thanks.”
She left the room, and another nurse ushered us to the front of the office where we sat with someone who made our next appointment for us. Thankfully, it was for next week, so I didn’t have long to wait. I’d become painfully impatient in the past few months.
It just felt like I was always waiting for something. Waiting to ovulate, waiting to take a pregnancy test that would inevitably come up negative, waiting for my period to finally show up so I could start the whole process over again. The waiting was never ending, and I had run out of patience a long time ago.
We rode the elevator in silence and it wasn’t until we were buckled into Bryson’s car that he broke it.
“That went all right, huh?”
I scoffed. “Not really.”
“Why?”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t want to see a specialist. I just want some Flomid, and I want to get on with it.”
“But Keri said there might be something else going on. Don’t you want to know before you try anything else?” I ignored his question, and he pressed further. “And I’m not sure about this Flomid stuff, anyway. I don’t know
if it’s a good idea for you to take something like that.”
I spun around in my seat. “Why? Because I’m such a raging bitch already?”
Bryson pressed his lips together until they turned white but didn’t answer.
I laughed humorlessly. “Thought so.”
Bryson sighed and reached out to place a big hand on my thigh. I just barely suppressed the urge to shove it off. “Mack, I know you’ve been stressed lately. I know how hard it’s been on you these last few months. I know this isn’t really you.”
“You don’t know anything.”
How could he know? How could he possibly fathom how hard this was for me? How difficult it was to watch my sister-in-law’s belly grow, watch friends from high school post pregnancy announcements, while I tried everything to be in their position.
He couldn’t know. There’s nothing wrong with him. It was me. I’m the problem. Even now, I’m the problem.
He squeezed my knee three times. “I know enough about you to know you’re not acting like yourself. I know enough about the woman I married to know this isn’t her.”
His words rolled right off me, like I was made of wax and he was springtime rain.
I sighed. “Can we just go?”
Bryson left his hand on my leg for another moment before slowly retracting it and starting up the car.
I didn’t want his kind words. I didn’t want his understanding. I didn’t want anything but a baby. And if I couldn’t have that, I wanted my anger.
I wanted the rage and fury to coat my insides like a layer of paint. I wanted to bathe in my outrage, let it cover me from the inside out.
Anger was so much easier to deal with than the devastating helplessness or the crushing weight of the unhappiness that ghosted through my veins.
Being unhappy was like that, wasn’t it? It didn’t always hit you at once like a landslide, it was more like a creeping mist that infiltrated you slowly. It snaked through you, seeped beneath your skin before you even knew it was there.
No, I’d take anger over all those other emotions any day.
Another doctor’s office, another waiting room, but this time I swore I’d get answers.
Thankfully, Bryson kept quiet while I bounced my leg nervously and stared at the door leading to the back of the office. When a nurse stepped through with a clipboard and called my name, I was already halfway out of my seat.
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