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“I haven’t used my pregnancy as an excuse even once,” I said calmly. I wasn’t fighting tooth and nail, but I was still retaliating—just in a subtler way. I had reached the end of my very long, very patient tether. “You have to stop treating me like this, Vicki, just because you’re angry. We’re professionals.”
That was the wrong thing to say.
Vicki’s expression hardened, her lips pressing into a razor-thin line. “Get out of my face,” she said, her voice cutting. “Go home. I don’t want to see you for the rest of the day.”
“What about my patient? I’ve got Michael coming here in an hour.”
“I’ll deal with him,” she said, taking a deep breath in and letting it out slowly, as if she were trying to get back some morsel of her sanity. “Just leave.”
I didn’t fight her. How could I? It wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t make things less hostile, Vicki less resentful, and the whole situation less ridiculous.
As soon as I climbed into my car, I texted Alex and used my now free afternoon to buy groceries, fill up my car with gas, and drop off the gift—a Kings of Leon record—I’d been meaning to get to Danny for his birthday last week. By the time I got home, Alex was standing at my front door.
“It’s getting worse,” I said, climbing out of the car while Alex held the door open. “Vicki hates me. She’s either going to fire me or kill me. There’s no in-between.”
“Is she still at it?” asked Alex, walking around to the back of my car. He popped the trunk and grabbed all four bags of groceries. “I thought she was easing up on you a bit this week.”
“No,” I said, “I just told you that because I didn’t want you to worry.”
He stopped in his tracks, his expression softening. “You don’t have to do that, Sophie. I need you to tell me things, even if you think they’re going to worry me.”
I nodded.
“I’ll talk to her again,” he said, walking through the front door. He carried the groceries into the kitchen while I flopped down on the couch and lifted my feet up on the coffee table.
“It will only make things worse. You know what she did to me the last time you called her: she locked me in the gym, remember? I was there for an hour before Becks came to rescue me.”
“She’s being childish,” said Alex with a disapproving curl of his lips. “It can’t go on like this. I will have to do something.”
We had already gone over this a million times, ran through a million different ways we could keep Vicki off my back without actually reporting her to the committee.
Over the last few months, I had managed to keep face, make jokes about Vicki and all the things she had said, but right now, with my feet swollen, a nagging pain starting in my back, and my emotions running in all directions, it was just getting too much.
These pregnancy hormones were really giving me a beating.
When tears welled in my eyes, I buried my face into my hands, hoping Alex was too busy packing out the groceries to notice.
But who was I kidding? The man noticed everything.
“Sophie, ” Alex said, his voice tinged with alarm. He was beside me in an instant—I hadn’t even heard his footsteps cross the room. I was a mess, and my body shook as the tears kept coming, streaming down my cheeks.
Alex put an arm around my shoulder and shifted closer, gathering me in his arms. “I’m sorry, Sophie. I wish I could make it all better, reason with Vicki somehow.”
He pulled me onto his lap, and I didn’t fight it, didn’t move away from him. His body was hot against mine. Alex held me there, one arm curled around my waist and the other knotting into my hair, pulling me closer to him while my tears kept running.
“It’s fine,” I whispered.
“It’s not,” he replied, his arm loosening around my waist. He then skated his palm up my back, moving in comforting circles.
He was everything I needed him to be. Everything I wanted.
Five months had brought us closer, but not like this, not in this profoundly intimate way.
Especially when our focus had been on getting to know each other better.
The way Alex pressed his lips to my temple, holding them there for a moment, made it feel like our time together so far had merely been a prelude, and this, this moment was the real thing,the real connection that had been growing quietly beneath the surface all along.
I turned to look at Alex, his golden eyes so serious and apologetic, as if he was desperate to ease my pain. He blamed himself for Vicki’s reaction and her ongoing bullying—I knew that.
