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“Emma, you’re a doctor with no job. We want you in our lives, not just to have sex. We both love your company, and that is kind of amazing because we don’t agree on all that much. We don’t want to lose you, and I’m afraid that if I let go of you right now, you are going to disappear.”
“We want you to come with us,” Carl added, voice persuasive, “so we can be together all the time. We have a tour coming up, the first race is in a few weeks, and we’ll have several more lined up.”
She thought about it for about a split second. “I feel the same way about you, too. But I put all this effort into getting a degree. You guys are going to be on tour so you’ll be moving around a lot, won’t you? how am I supposed to get and keep a job in that kind of environment?”
I released one of her hands, keeping hold of the other, and touched her cheek. She didn’t move away, and I shifted my hand so I cupped her cheek, turning her face up so I could see her eyes. There was fear there, some lingering sadness, but I could also see hope, that raised my optimism a little.
“Well, yes. But in the state we’re both in, recovering from a car accident, we really could use you. The job may not be particularly lucrative, but I’ve been putting cash away in investments since senior year of high school, and saving it all up. Even made this idiot do the same. We can definitely afford to hire you.”
“And it would be super convenient having our own private doctor go with us. Accidents happen all the time, even when we’re not on our bikes. So, you wouldn’t just be wasting your degree coming with us on a joy ride.”
Carl must have gone for the sheet, he had it wrapped around him as he came up beside us, wrapping a hand around her waist so she was where we both wanted her, between the two of us and with nowhere to run.
“Just say yes, Emma. Please?”
She blinked at me for a moment. Then her face crumpled, and I thought for a second she was going to cry. But then she smiled, though it trembled around the edges.
“Okay.”
Epilogue
Emma
There were things that had to be taken care of first.
I still had my apartment, and some documents I needed to have with me. But when I voiced the concern, we just dressed up, left Libreville, and drove all the way to my place in the city. We all squeezed in my too small bed, and the next day, I packed away my life for the second time. I had about as much as I did when I left Libreville at eighteen, just a bag with clothes and my papers, only a little more added to each stack. I let Br
andi take care of everything else for me, and we promised to keep in touch.
The boys and I went on tour, with me acting as their medical doctor. They weren’t kidding when they said they’d need me, so it wasn’t a waste of a good degree, at least. I was beginning to find it might have been the best decision of my life.
The only damper on the whole thing was my lingering feelings from how I left things with my mom.
It hadn’t seemed possible after the wedding, that we would have anything to do with each other ever again. It was still something of a shock, months after it happened.
I made up with my mother. We were, more or less, friends.
It was even more of a surprise when she was the one to call me, about a month after she got married. It was like something out of a fairytale for me. Mom saying she’d realized she was too hard on me, now that she was married and actively working on moving on. She cried through the entire conversation, and it was what made me truly believe her. My mom wasn’t the kind of woman that cried easily, that I’d ever seen, and when she did, it was always sincere.
Neither of us mentioned what she walked in on, but when she asked what I was doing with myself, I didn’t hide from her that the boys asked me to go with them on their tour, and I agreed. She took it amazingly well.
“That’s good, that they have you to look after them. Frank can sleep at night knowing they won’t die in some accident and he wouldn’t know it. Are you sure you would be happy with that life, though?”
Before I could call her out on what exactly she meant, she went on, and I was stunned. “Won’t you get tired of never settling down in one place?”
“We’re happy just going from place-to-place. I never got around much, remember? Even when I left home, I took a straight route to what I thought I wanted. I’m getting a new sense of life from all the constant moving around, and I like it.”
Mom gave a wet laugh over the phone. “Well, Frank and I aren’t moving around, but I do get what you mean about getting a new sense of life. But what about when you have children, though,” she fretted. “Do you plan on having any?”
“None of us have talked that far.”
Although we probably should have. I wasn’t sure I wanted kids, but when I’d been at Central General, after witnessing a particularly gruesome scene, I’d walk by the children’s ward and see them sleeping like little, wrinkled angels, and I’d feel this longing to hold one.
“But I promise I will talk to them when it becomes an issue. It’s not necessary to stay in one place even then, but yeah, having a home to go back to when they don’t have work would be great.”
It was an issue a lot sooner than I would have realized, though.
It was bound to happen, so I wasn’t all that surprised. We’d had unprotected sex plenty of times. Carl and Abe told me they were clean, and I trusted them as much as they trusted me when I told them I was, too. Of course, I had the added advantage of having looked at their medical records when I was their acting doctor at the hospital; I had mine with me, anyway, although they didn’t want to see it even after I offered. Once I left with them, we’d conveniently keep ‘forgetting’ to use condoms, and I wasn’t on any other birth control.
Finding out I was pregnant was pretty much the highlight of my life. Even though I thought the guys would freak. They did, a little, when they came to find me on the floor and crying. But they were glad when I managed to explain it to them. I thought they even cried, just a little bit.
