His hands reached out, almost without him thinking about it, and alighted on her hips.
A phrase ran through his head: the cradle of life. He didn’t know why he thought that. When he wrote song lyrics, he tried to be spare and simple and terse with emotion, Hemingway-like, and he would never have written such a metaphorical phrase in a song as the cradle of life.
Yet here she was, her body cradling a living child who was both of them.
“Raji?” Peyton’s voice cracked as he tried to maintain his decorum.
She said, “You know? This can wait. Your flight isn’t until tomorrow afternoon. We can talk over breakfast tomorrow. Heck, we could have an early lunch before you go. There’s no reason to talk about things tonight.” She picked his hands off of her body. “Come on. Let’s go to the bedroom.”
Peyton wanted her to tell him. He wanted to be right. He wanted to stop the vagabond lives they both had been cobbling together and figure out how to be with her and how to be a family. “Tell me.”
Raji sucked in a breath. “Promise that you won’t be mad.”
“I could never be angry with you.” He held her fingers, hoping his hands weren’t shaking.
“Well, about a month ago—”
“Yes.”
“—and you know that the condom—”
“Tell me, Raji-lee.”
“—I think I might have gotten pregnant,” she sighed.
It was purely training, what he said after that. Even though his heart and his body yearned to say anything else, Peyton said what he had been taught to say because he was an upper-class New Englander and so very civilized.
He couldn’t have said anything else. He was progressive. He had been educated at elite private schools. He was sensitive to others’ needs and damage and aware of his extensive privilege and his noblesse oblige to the country and society, and so he said what he had been trained to say, even though his caveman soul was bellowing for him to throw this woman over his shoulder, take her to his cave, and guard her for the rest of their days.
Peyton said, “It’s your body, and I will do whatever you want me to do to support you.”
Raji looked at the floor and away from him, her arms woven across her chest. “I’m still doing my residency. I have another year and some. I can’t stop now. I can’t give up.”
“No one should ever ask you to do that,” Peyton told her.
“It’s just a clump of cells. It’s no big deal. It happens all the time.”
“Has it happened to us before?” he asked, his heart frozen.
Raji said, “No.”
His shoulders relaxed. “I want you to know that I am supportive of whatever decision you make. It is your body.” His words felt stilted even as he managed to say them.
Raji stepped forward and wrapped her arms around his waist. She buried her face in his chest. “I haven’t been able to talk to anyone about it. No one gets pregnant during their residency. It’s stupid. You just can’t. Everyone will think that I’m foolish and stupid and not committed to being a heart surgeon.”
Peyton folded her in his arms. “You’re the smartest, most dedicated person I know. I trust you to make the right decision.”
When Peyton looked back later, maybe that had been the phrase, the right decision, that had doomed their relationship. Maybe she read more into it than he had meant. Maybe she had misunderstood and thought he meant the exact opposite of the thoughts that were galloping through his mind.
A child, a child with Raji, a child who would cement them together so that she couldn’t run away from him at every opportunity.
A little, logical, half-lizard child.
He could watch her grow large with his child, be there when the baby was brought into the world, and raise the child together.
Peyton was quite sure that when he brought Raji home to Connecticut to meet his parents, they would be thrilled that he was marrying a doctor instead of a flighty musician or artist.
But that’s not how it happened.
Chapter Thirty-Two
First Proposal
* * *
Raji huddled in Peyton’s arms.
She knew what “the right decision” was.
Of course, she did.
She had been planning to make that decision all along.
She was glad he supported her decision because all she wanted from him was comfort and understanding. And maybe a car ride. Perhaps some chicken soup.
Right?
She said, “I’m sorry I told you. I didn’t have to lay this on you.”
Peyton stroked her back. The calluses on his fingertips caught on the black silk of her dress. “I’m glad you told me. You shouldn’t go through this alone. I’m here for you.”
“I haven’t told anybody else. I can’t tell anyone else.”
His arms firmed around her, holding her more closely. “I’m glad you told me.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I’m being supportive, right? I’m not a caveman who would throw you over my shoulder and haul you off to my cave. I’m woke.”
Raji giggled against his chest a little at the slang phrase. Yeah, Peyton wasn’t the kind of guy who would take an unreasonable, chauvinistic stand and insist that she have the baby and thus give up everything she had worked for her whole life. Raji wanted to be a doctor. It wasn’t the money or prestige she wanted. She genuinely wanted to make people well, though she needed the money, too. Cardiac surgery almost always helps people, and it helps them a lot. After cardiac bypass surgery, after people recover from having their ribcage broken and a bunch of veins sewn on their hearts, people feel much better and live such better lives. Heart transplants improve people’s quality of life so much that within weeks, far before they have recovered from the surgery, patients feel better than before she cut them.
She had never even considered oncology. Raji might be a logical, emotionless lizard person, but she wasn’t heartless.
Wait. Yes, she was.
What was she even thinking? Raji was a cold-hearted, reptilian lizard person who thoroughly enjoyed cutting people open and had no warm, fuzzy, weakling emotions at all. She had no problem with any of this. She was totally fine with it.
Peyton was acting exactly how she would want a guy to be: supportive, egalitarian, helpful, and kind.
She wouldn’t want some guy to drop to one knee and insist that they marry and she should stay home to raise a frickin’ baby.
No, Raji hadn’t hoped for any of that at all. She wasn’t that kind of girl.
Raji held Peyton’s waist even more tightly, while his hands stroked her hair and back.
“Um, it occurs to me—” Raji said.
Peyton’s hand covered her shoulder as he pressed her against his body. “Yes?”
“Well, we’ve both been checked lately for infectious diseases—”
“True.”
“—and I can’t get any more knocked up than I am.”
Peyton’s lungs filled with air under her ear. “Go on.”
“So, if we ever were going to throw caution to the wind and do it bareback—”
Peyton bent to the side, and his strong arms grabbed her around her back and under her knees.
“Oh, my God!” Raji shrieked as he lifted her and cradled her against his chest.
“See? I’m not a caveman who would throw you over his shoulder. I’m a gentleman who would carry you to the bedroom like a lady and then ravage you.”
“That’s so much better, I’m sure,” she laughed. From where she was cradled against Peyton’s massive chest, Raji peeked over his arm at the carpeting far below.
She had been hanging out with Peyton for so long, sitting around his house in New Jersey or her apartment in Los Angeles or any of the dozens of the hotel rooms across the country where they had been furtively meeting, it was easy to forget how shockingly tall Peyton was. While they were sitting or lying down, he didn’t tower over her.
The floor was so far below her tha
t she felt like she was standing on the back of the couch.
Raji grabbed Peyton’s neck as a moment of vertigo whirled her around.
“I’ve got you.” Peyton strode toward the bedroom door and knocked it out of the way with his foot as he swept her inside.
He dumped her on the bed and clambered on top of her, his mouth grabbing her lips and his hand pressing her ribs and waist as he held himself above her.
Raji reached for him, holding him, but his hands on her felt different than usual.
His fingers stroked down her side.
Usually, he possessed her, owning her body while he took her, penetrated her, and fucked her into submission and surrender.
This time, his hands soothed her, stroking her with a gentleness and kindness that he’d never shown before.
When he sank into her, moving inside her, Raji breathed with him as he studied her. His startling sea-green eyes softened, and he whispered her name.
It must just be the lack of a condom, she rationalized mistily. Guys didn’t get bareback sex very often. He must be surprised at how she felt.
Even as he moved inside her, he kissed her quietly, caressing her lips with his mouth. His body, golden skin and black scrolls of tattoos on his arms and chest, rose and fell above her. She pressed her hips up, answering him with her movement.
Peyton was bracing himself on his elbows around her head, first stroking her forehead with his thumbs, then tightening his fists around her hair on the bed.
His rhythm quickened, and Raji’s core tightened around him. She was panting, keening as she breathed, and he bowed his head near her shoulder and thrust into her.
Her whole body bowed under his strength, an instinctive response to seek friction on her clit and comfort in his arms. His breath heated her neck as he panted, grunts rough in his throat that sounded like her name.
She closed her eyes. The darkness squeezed her, her body straining, until a brightness burst and blew through her like a wave, tossing her away, and yet she was still safe in Peyton’s arms.
Raji caught her breath, gasping. It hadn’t been like usual, the submission of her personality to his and moments of bliss and relief from the crazy tension and stress that rolled through her life.
The softness in his teal eyes as he gazed at her was a shock, and the vulnerability in his deep voice when he had called her name had left her shaking.
His arms still twined around her, and his hard skin was slick and warm against hers.
Raji stroked his broad back.
Near her ear, Peyton whispered, “Will you marry me?”
Shock sparked through her.
“I can’t do this,” she gasped, her throat closing on the words so that they were choked and meaningless.
Peyton pushed himself up on his arms. “What did you say?”
“What did you say?” she countered. Surely, he wouldn’t repeat it. Surely it had just been a slip of the tongue during sex, pillow talk or dirty talk or something, and he wouldn’t say it again.
He looked back and forth between her eyes, searching. “It’s not because of the baby.”
“But what you said—”
“I asked you to marry me,” he said. “Let’s stay together instead of running away from each other after just a day or two. Let’s make it real.”
But Raji would finish her residency in another year, and then she would need to go to whatever hospital wanted to hire a cardiac surgeon, somewhere in the US or maybe even abroad.
She couldn’t have a kid and a husband in tow. Doing that would actively sabotage her career. She had gotten straight-A’s in high school to get into a good college and got straight-A’s there so she could get into medical school, where she ground down hard and got straight-A’s so she could get into a prestigious, integrated surgical and cardiothoracic residency (six years of post-medical school training instead of eight) rather than separate residencies. When her first residency hadn’t worked out after three years due to the New York hospital committing Medicare fraud, she leaped and had gotten into the California program and made sure that she received credit for all her years so she could finish on time.
Training to be a cardiothoracic surgeon was not a fucking whim.
Raji had hustled.
Raji was working her plan.
Only people who worked their plan survived in this field. Cardiothoracic surgeons were assholes and would shove her out of the way to get ahead if they sensed any weakness.
She had only survived by being a cold-blooded reptile and not deviating from the plan.
If she made it, people were going to live, thousands of them, because she was a damned talented surgeon who was working her ass off to give them another chance at life.
If she made it, she and her mother wouldn’t have to worry about goddamn pennies anymore.
One condom breaking and suddenly having a baby and a husband to accommodate were not parts of the plan.
The other residents and the faculty would murder her career.
She would not marry some guy who would just walk out on her one day, leaving her heartbroken, destitute, and helpless to care for her child. She would fucking not.
“I can’t!” Raji pushed at his shoulders, panicking. “Get off me, get off!”
Peyton rolled away from her, the weight and warmth of his muscle and skin suddenly gone.
Raji sprang away from him, leaping off the bed and stumbling for the wall. “I can’t do that. I can’t. I can’t. It’s just a lark to you, playing house. If it doesn’t work out, you can just walk away. If it doesn’t work for me, I’d have a baby or a small child and no one, no one will be there for me. I’m trying to build this career that I have sacrificed for, that I have gone half a million dollars in debt for, so I can save people’s lives. It’s not a game to me!”
Peyton was lying on his side, the sheet draped over his slim waist and long thighs. “I know it’s not a game to you.”
“This would be a person’s life! We can’t just pretend to make a go at it and shrug if we fuck it up.”
“I didn’t mean it that way, Raji.”
“A kid deserves a home with two parents, with love, with a big, extended family all around them who puts the kid first, not themselves.”
“It sounds like you’d be a wonderful mother.”
Raji ignored that. “And if we divorced, I’d probably end up paying you alimony.”
Peyton laughed. “I doubt that very much.”
“You have no idea how much I’m going to make as a heart surgeon,” she snapped at him.
He laughed. “I’ll sign a prenup that assures you that I would have no claim on your future earnings, if you’ll sign one with the clause that you have to make love to me whenever you’re angry. God, you’re beautiful with your dark eyes flashing like that, and your body flushed with emotion. You look just like that when I’ve been playing with you, when you’re pleading with me to fuck you.”
The faint starlight of humor shone into Raji’s darkness.
She snorted. “You are so full of yourself, sitting over there with your shredded abs and ripped pecs and impossibly blue eyes.”
“And you, standing over there with your lovely, lush body and your sweet lips and your soft, silken skin. Also, my eyes are green, not blue,” he said.
“It’s these lights.” She gestured at the dimmed LEDs recessed in her ceiling. “They look dark blue.”
He held out his hand. “Come back to bed.”
Raji did as he said because that was what she always did. She sat on the edge of the bed.
He stretched her out beside him. “Don’t answer me now. Wait a week before you decide. Whatever you want, I’ll be here for you. If you need someone to drive you to the doctor and take care of you for a day or two, I’m your man.” He tucked her close to his warm body. “And if you want to marry me and have our child, then I’m your man.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Not Bad Sushi
* * *
Ra
ji and Beth were in the locker room after sewing veins on some old lady’s heart, chatting while they changed out of the scrubs they wore under their protective suits.
Other surgeons chattered among the rows of lockers, their conversations in several languages bouncing around the wooden cabinets.
Raji hadn’t quite worked up the energy to strip off her scrubs yet. She felt puffy, like she had eaten too much broccoli with cheese sauce all at once. Her hands still smelled like the rubbery, non-latex gloves, and the powder crusted in her knuckles.
Beth tossed her blue scrubs in the biohaz bin in the corner where the banks of lockers met. She sat in her bra and underwear on the wooden bench. “You feeling okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Ate some bad sushi or something.” If she had said that she was just generically sick, Beth would have insisted she describe her symptoms in order to diagnose her and prescribe ameliorating pharmaceuticals. However, nobody wanted to hear more details about diarrhea.
Beth scrunched up her nose and upper lip. “My bachelor’s is in microbiology. I never eat anything raw.”
“Yeah, I did general biology and philosophy. Guess that’s why I eat stupid things.”
“Oh, God. Remember the Malaysian Chicken at the Asian Students’ Association’s All-Asia Night? Five hundred people got salmonella. The ER was full the next day. I’m still surprised nobody died.”
Raji bit her lip, deliberating. “Yeah, it may not have been the sushi.”
Beth rubbed a deodorant stick on her armpits and waved at Joshua, the pencil-necked anesthesiologist, as he walked in. He walked around to the next bank of lockers to change because he was too prudish to get naked in front of female colleagues. Beth asked, “What do you mean, it wasn’t the sushi? Did you eat something else at room temperature, maybe some nice British mad cow steak tartare?”
“No, I don’t think that was it.”
“What then, one of those Japanese fish dishes where the fish is still flopping around on your plate?”
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