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Vicki’s ex-fiancé’s baby.
What a cruel joke.
I tore my gaze from Alex and directed it over his shoulder to the glass window in the door that looked into the hallway. The last thing I needed now was for Vicki to come through that door.
What would she do if she found out? Fire me? No. That was too subtle, toonice. She’d kill me. She’d lunge her tiny body across the room and gouge my eyes out.
I shivered.
“You need to leave, Alex,” I said, stepping forward as if I could push him out of the gym, press my palms against his chest and shove him out of my life. Then, for a split second, my mind wandered—what would it be like to touch him again? To feel the ridges of his stomach and the taut bowstring muscles of his biceps? And in that fleeting moment, I completely lost myself. “Please,” I added, my voice so much softer than before, as if I was begging him to leave, not because I wanted him to, but because Ineededhim to. Before I did something stupid.
“No,” he said, his eyes locked on mine again, the muscle in his jaw twitching.
Alex looked so different from the calm, collected, crooked-smiling version of himself I had come to know over that weekend, as if the news had completely unhinged him. There was a fire in his eyes—a soft, harmless fire, embers flicking in those golden irises, while the pulse of his heart throbbed in his temple. “Not until you tell me what’s going on. If you’re pregnant and it’s mine, I want to know.”
I flinched when he said the wordmine,as if it didn't belong on his lips. In the same way, it didn't belong in mine. This baby wasn't ours, not yet, not until we fully accepted responsibility.
Alex's hand was still pressed against his lower back, knuckles kneading into the muscles. It was then that I noticed he wasn't standing completely upright, as if the pain was pushing him forward. A herniated disc perhaps.
The reason he was here in the first place.
Fine, I decided. If Alex wanted to stay, then he needed to be evaluated like Vicki had asked—especially before she arrived. Knowing her, she’d be here any minute to check on the progress of her VIP patient, or in his case, ex-VIP.
I quickly shot Becks awhat the fuck am I going to dolook, to which she responded by shaking her head and mouthing, “What the fuck are you going to tell Vicki?”
I shrugged because honestly, I didn’t have the answer to either of those questions. Not yet anyway. But standing around here wasn’t going to get us any closer.
“Treatment room,” I said, and without giving any more instructions, I spun on my heel and marched to the hallway, feeling both severely aggravated and strangely relieved when I heard Alex’s footsteps behind me.
CHAPTER 10
Alex
“So, is the pain localized at the center of your lower back or more to one side?” asked Sophie, her eyes flittering from her notes to the plinth in the middle of the room.
Everywhere except for my face.
“Center mostly,” I answered, somewhat impatiently, since we had far more important things to discuss than my pain.
Sophie was pregnant. The baby was mine—the odds were good—so why was she keeping up this charade when we should be discussing what it meant? What the future would look like?
“Any sharp pain radiating down the legs?”
“No,” I said, willing Sophie to look at me, to tell me the truth. But she kept her head down and her body turned away from me, as if guarding herself, protecting a secret when it wasn’t hers to keep.
“Pins and needles in your legs or feet?” she asked, scribbling something unintelligible.
“And have you experienced any functional limitations as a result of the pain?”
“None,” I replied, omitting the fact that I’d struggled to get into the car this morning, practically hobbled across the hospitalparking lot, and leaned heavily against the railing of the elevator. The pain had dropped from an eight out of ten on the VAS pain scale to a three at best when I’d heard Sophie’s voice—and then vanished completely when I’d learned she was pregnant. I was buzzing with adrenaline.
“And do you have any pain when coughing or sneezing—”
“Sophie, can you just stop for a second?” I said, sliding off the edge of the plinth.
“Please. We need to talk about this.”
She tilted her head in my direction, her brows faintly pulled together, her tongue running over her teeth. “We really don’t. I can very easily not talk about it.”
