The Proposal

by R. R. Banks

  What we hadn't talked about, though, was actual life. It didn't tell me what I was supposed to feel or think. It also didn’t detail what life was going to be like when the baby was an actual little human rather than an abstract concept written out on paper. If I had learned anything in my life, it was that nothing could ever really be expected. There was never a guarantee, no absolute promise that things were going to work out exactly the way you thought they were. Much less the way you wanted them to. I liked to think of the universe as a living, breathing entity, blissfully ignorant of our existence. This is why it dictated things how it wanted to, changing courses on a whim. Though we could do our best to be prepared, things changed, and you never actually knew what was going to happen or how you would respond, until you were there right there living it. Then you find your heart telling you what your mind could never have predicted.

  I glanced toward Jess's building as I entered the complex, checking to see if her car was parked in its usual spot. The buildings didn't have assigned parking spots for the tenants, but she somehow managed to always get the same prime spot right at the entrance to her building’s breezeway. I often wondered if she made herself a stencil and painted "Reserved" across the spot in sidewalk chalk to keep it locked down when she wasn't there. The nose of her distinctive purple compact was visibly sitting just where I expected it to be. Her car – much like Jess – was just a little bit off normal. It was one of the things I loved about her. I reached for my phone, tempted to call her and see if I could stop by, but I hesitated. I hadn't talked about any of this with her yet. I knew I would need to soon. She was my confidante, the rock that kept me going when I struggled, even if she might not seem very strong to others. She was also my unexpected voice of reason and logic. Talking through things with her always helped me to see the situation in another perspective and come to the right conclusion.

  That was part of why I tucked my phone away and headed to my apartment. I didn't know what she was going to say about all this, and I felt like this time, I needed to do it on my own. Before she could tell me why I shouldn't.

  The next week and a half seemed to drag by, but by the morning of my doctor's appointment, I wished I had some of that time back. I was starting to feel nervous and knowing that I was going to see Gabriel after so long didn't help. We never talked about our night together and I was wondering if the window for that conversation had passed us by and things would just be awkward between us now. I couldn't decide if that was the way that I wanted it to be, or if I actually wanted to talk about it.

  But if he did want to talk – what would I even say?

  I gripped the bar on the elevator wall and closed my eyes, taking a breath to settle the nervous churning in my stomach.

  "Are you okay?" Gabriel asked.

  I nodded.

  "I'm fine. Just anxious. I don't like needles. Or doctors. Or doctor's offices, really."

  "You probably should have mentioned that at the beginning of all this, Cherry."

  "Would it have changed anything?"

  "No, but at least I could have prepared something to try and make you feel better."

  "Well, you know now. Make me feel better."

  Gabriel thought for a second before he started jumping up and down, shaking the elevator car.

  "Earthquake!"

  I gripped my stomach and held up my hand.

  "Stop!" The elevator stilled, and I felt relieved. "What the hell was that, Gabriel?"

  "An earthquake," he said.

  "Why would you do that?"

  The elevator stopped, and the doors slid open.

  "It made you not think about the doctor for a minute, right?"

  "That was just so comforting. Thanks." We walked out of the elevator and toward the waiting room. "What's the plan if you ever need to make me feel better about an actual earthquake?"

  "Throw you in the shower and call it a hurricane?"

  Our eyes met, and my heart skipped a beat thinking about being in the shower with him. It certainly was as powerful as a hurricane.

  "Cherry Spencer?"

  I looked toward the door that led into the back of the office and saw a nurse waiting for me. I looked at Gabriel.

  "I didn't even check in."

  "I called ahead," he said.

  "Does everyone, not only your staff, do exactly what you tell them to?"

  He leaned down over me and whispered in my ear.

  "You’re the only who dares to disobey me, Cherry Spencer.”

  I didn't know why, but that sent a tremble through me.

  The nurse ushered us into an examination room and gave me a gown to put on, instructing me to take everything else off. I thanked her, and she left the room to give me privacy. I waited for Gabriel to leave, but he didn't. He dropped down into one of the chairs at the side of the room and seemed to settle in for the experience. Even though Gabriel and I had seen each other very naked recently, I didn’t appreciate the thought of him watching me take off my clothes and change into a sterile hospital gown in this unflattering fluorescent lighting. I glared at him and pulled the privacy screen out to separate us, making the awkward shift between my clothes and the less-than-elegant lavender and powder blue gown as quickly as humanly possible. Once my gown was on, I opened the screen, and got up on the table.

  The doctor came in and glanced over at Gabriel. I knew he had carefully chosen the medical team that would take care of me during the pregnancy. I wondered how much they all knew about the situation. Considering the extent of the arrangements he had already made, I assumed they were well-informed. She gave me a brief overview of what she would be examining today and had me lay back. Gabriel came to the side of the table as she wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm and started asking questions. She chatted with him as she jotted down the results of each vitals tests and I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with his presence in the room. I didn’t know he was going to be so involved. I knew that it was his baby and that he had the right to know what was happening at each stage of the process, but I felt removed from it all.

  Having him in the room was at once too personal and not personal enough. Gabriel had touched and awakened my body like no other man had, and yet in that moment, I felt like no more than an incubator to him. I felt like a piece of machinery that was being serviced before heading to work. It was a reality of the arrangement that I hadn't considered before, and I knew I would have to find some way to work through it. Finally, she had made her way through the basic tests. I even survived the nurse drawing what felt like an ungodly amount of blood. The doctor lowered the back of the table and asked me to put my legs up in the stirrups and I shot another glare in Gabriel's direction.

  He stared back at me blankly as if he couldn't possibly understand that I wanted him to leave the room. The doctor finally seemed to catch on to my discomfort and looked his way.

  "Mr. Reed, why don't you go ahead and take a break and leave us girls for a little chat?"

  I would probably have put it somewhat differently, but Gabriel complied, and I felt myself relax.

  "Thank you," I said.

  "Not a problem," she said. "Now let's see what we can find out."

  I stared up at the ceiling during the examination, trying to not think about how awkward it was. It was taking much longer than I had anticipated and worry began to creep into my mind. It never occurred to me that the examination might uncover anything problematic. I hadn't even thought about the fact that this might not work out before we even got started.

  "Is everything okay?" I finally asked.

  "When was your last period?"

  "Um. About three weeks ago? Two maybe."

  "You don't seem too confident about that, Miss Spencer."

  "I've never been that great at keeping track," I admitted. I never had to before three weeks ago. "I know my last one was pretty light though."

  "Lighter than usual?"

  "Yeah. It didn't last as long either."

  "I might ha
ve an explanation for that," she said. "Let me go grab something and I will be right back."

  I was even more worried than before and starting to regret having Gabriel kicked out of the room. Even though I didn't necessarily want him to be witness to this, I also didn't want to be alone if I was going to get terrible news. A few minutes later, the doctor came back into the room with a small machine on a cart. She picked up a wand from the cart and I realized she had gone to find an ultrasound machine.

  "What's going on?" I asked.

  "Please relax," she said. "I just want to check on something." A few moments later she made a sound like she was affirming something to herself before turning the screen toward me. "That bleeding wasn't your period," she said. "That was implantation."

  "Implantation?" I asked.

  She pointed at the screen. I didn't see much but a dark circle and a little bright speck.

  "You see that?" she asked.

  "I think so."

  "That's your baby. Congratulations. You're pregnant."

  I couldn't possibly have heard her right. I came in here expecting to be examined to make sure I was healthy enough to undergo the IVF process, not to find out I was already pregnant. My mind was spinning so quickly that I barely even noticed when the doctor stepped out of the room. She mentioned that the baby was measuring at five weeks, which meant that I conceived three weeks before. I thought back to the night in the rain and realized that the condom we used must have failed. He came into the room and walked up to the side of the bed. I didn't even care that my legs were still up on the stirrups.

  "Is everything okay?" he asked. "Dr. Larkin gave me a weird smile when she walked by but didn't say anything. Did the examination go alright?"

  He sounded like he was starting to feel the same nervousness that I had, but I was still too shocked to say anything. I held out the photo printout the doctor had taken from the ultrasound machine and Gabriel took it.

  "What's this?" he asked. "What am I looking at?"

  "Our baby," I finally murmured. "Your baby."

  Everything that happened after the appointment was a whirlwind. And two weeks later, as I stood in the middle of the living room in my apartment, watching an incredibly efficient moving crew whisk my belongings into the truck waiting outside, I still couldn’t believe what was happening. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that I was pregnant.

  "I can't believe you're leaving," Jess said as she came into the room from the kitchen, clutching an oven mitt to her chest. She had lit that same mitt on fire making brownies just a few months earlier. "What am I going to do with you so far away?"

  "It's not that far," I reassured her. "Mom needs me to be with her, and besides, it's a lot more space. You can come over and we can have sleepovers."

  "You know me, Cherry. I'm an adult," she said with a sniff. "I don't do sleepovers."

  "So, you'll bring the popcorn?"

  "Regular and kettle."

  She walked out of the apartment and I smiled wistfully. It was sad leaving my apartment, but I knew the house that was waiting for Mom and me was going to be vast improvement. Gabriel had purchased and furnished a new home for us just as he promised. In fact, we would be settled in by the end of the day. Besides, I had more to think about than the nostalgia of leaving my home for the last few years. I still hadn't told Jess or my mother about the pregnancy and I was wondering when I would find the right moment.

  Gabriel and I had gone back to the doctor the day before and had another ultrasound done. I was astonished at how much the image had changed in such a short amount of time. In only two weeks, it had gone from a tiny bright speck, that I could barely differentiate from the rest of the blurred image, to something that resembled a happy little Tic-Tac. Gabriel held my hand tightly as we stared at the screen, taking it in, both of us completely amazed by the miracle that had happened. This morning he presented me with a modified contract, bringing me back down to Earth. I knew I needed to tell them. They were two of the most important people in my life and would be the ones I would turn to during this whole experience, but I still hesitated. For now, Tic-Tac, Gabriel, and I were the only ones who knew, and I wanted to keep it that way for as long as possible. When I told the two of them, everything would be real. Not just the baby. Not just the pregnancy. But the transaction. I would have to justify it to them. I had no doubt what I was doing was the right thing. For both Gabriel and myself. Everything was going to work out. But I wasn't quite ready to hear how it was going to affect my loved ones around me.

  Another month passed, and I was almost accustomed to the new house. I had managed to convince Mom that I had arranged with the Reed family to live in a property they managed. It was a lie. A complete and utter lie. Even though she was never particularly close to Gabriel's family, she knew them well enough and trusted them as much as anyone else. She was immensely grateful to them, particularly when she learned she still owned the house where I had grown up. It had been difficult for her to live there in those aging surroundings with all the memories, but it wasn't something she was ready to let go of yet.

  The house itself was exquisite. It was more like two houses attached by a screened breezeway than one house. It featured everything I could have ever possibly imagined I would want in a home and more. I was overwhelmed with happiness when I saw I had my own laundry room. Not just a washer and dryer shoved into a closet, but an actual room devoted entirely to a sparkling new smart washer and matching dryer, a long counter for folding, and a bank of cabinets I would never be able to fill up for the rest of my life, no matter how hard I tried.

  The clawfoot tub Gabriel had installed in my master bedroom actually brought me to tears. I told myself it was my first rush of pregnancy hormones, but I knew that it was actually because I had told him about the tub in my apartment only once and was sure he had forgotten. But not only had he remembered and put value in what I said, he made sure I had one in my new home. It meant more to me than I could have ever anticipated, and I was beyond thankful for it. I was even more grateful for the oversized tub during the cool baths that were the only way to battle the fierce nausea that took over right after midnight and faded by noon. This baby apparently took the idea of morning sickness very seriously.

  By the third month, I felt better and knew it was safe to start telling people I was expecting. I knew that Gabriel planned to tell his father as soon as we cleared the first trimester, so if I didn't want an official public announcement to be how my mother and Jess found out, I needed to go ahead and take the plunge. I went to work the morning I was officially twelve weeks along, feeling optimistic and happy. I didn't realize I had been so worried or anxious during the beginning of my pregnancy but waking up and realizing Tic-Tac and I had gotten through the first three months safely brought a sense of relief and excitement. The milestone made the pregnancy and the baby that much more real. I knew that it would still be several weeks until I was able to feel the baby moving but knowing I had gotten to this point and carried it this long felt like a tiny victory in itself.

  I stopped by the coffee shop that had become my obsession in the last several weeks, buying my usual cinnamon roll and decaf peppermint tea. The thought of that flavor combination would have made my stomach turn if I wasn't pregnant, but now it was something I thought about all day. Sometimes I would even get out of bed super early in the morning just so that I had time to get it. That morning I grabbed an extra cinnamon bun and a cup of the plain black coffee that Gabriel loved. I didn't know how I was going to justify this as part of the healthy lifestyle that he wanted me to maintain while I was pregnant, but I felt like we needed a celebration. The baby had been our secret for so long. It was something that was just ours and that only we knew about. Sometimes we would exchange glances during the day and I knew he was thinking about the precious little treasure growing within me.

  Our relationship was getting stronger and I felt myself beginning to rely on him more as we got closer. He would often come over and bring food
and we'd spend the evening watching bad TV and talking about what we think the baby would be like. We went back and forth between thinking it was a boy and a girl. There were days when I was absolutely positive I was carrying our son and started envisioning tiny suits and the same little smile as his father. Other days my body autopiloted into the baby girls' section of the clothing store and I would lose the afternoon cooing over little pink bows and sweet ruffled dresses.

  We had kept each other at a distance after we found out about I was pregnant. The closest that we got to each other was sitting on the couch and occasionally falling asleep against each other. I still wanted him. My body trembled when he was near me and even now, I craved the taste of his kiss. But it felt like we were where we needed to be, and I didn't want to do anything that might change it.

  That morning I walked into the office and grinned at the security guard like I did every morning. Her eyes went to the coffee shop bag in my hand and then to my midsection before waving at me.

  "Good morning," she said with a knowing smile.

  It was the first time that someone seemed to notice a change to my body. I walked directly from the elevator to the bathroom. Putting the bag and cups on the vanity behind me, I stood in front of the huge mirror and turned to the side, pulling the blazer I wore back so that I could look at my profile. The black shirt I wore clung to my body and I noticed a slight swell. It wasn't much, just enough to make me look like I had gained a few pounds packing in the cinnamon buns, but I knew it was something else. I ran my hand down it, spending a few more seconds admiring the tiny bump before gathering the cups and bag and hurrying toward Gabriel's office.