Page 91 of You + Me – Against the World

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. Well, no. I don’t know…”

Sniffling, I clutch the phone to my ear. I wish he was at my window. That he would suddenly appear in my room. I could curl up against him and let the hours, the days, the years pass by.

“Alma, are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“I looked into it, and apparently you have to do a blood test to confirm…”

He doesn’t finish his sentence, as if he wants to spare me the big word. And I’m grateful to him for it.

“I know a free lab where you can do it anonymously. I’ll come with you.”

“Okay,” I say. “Tomorrow morning?”

“I’ll come pick you up.”

The silence that follows feels endless.

“Vadim?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

I picture his tender smile and anxious eyes as he listens on the other end of the phone.

“I’m so sorry you have to go through this, Alma,” his husky voice murmurs. “If I could, I’d switch places with you.”

“Eight o’clock tomorrow?”

I hang up, then fall apart.

The next day, he doesn’t let go of my hand in the car. Or in the waiting room at the lab. Not even when I come back out, with a small, white bandage on my arm.

I used the blood draw as an opportunity to get an STD test, and Vadim did the same.

On our way out, we walk for a bit before sitting down on a café patio. We order two lattes, which neither of us touches.

Vadim is the first to break the silence. “How long has it been?”

“Not even two hours. They said they’d call me.”

Silence settles over us again. We wait and wait some more, without saying a word. My head gradually comes to rest on his shoulder, and his arm wraps around me. Our bubble protects us. Until my cell phone comes to life and bursts it.

In a daze, I listen to the woman from the lab give me the results. I mutter a quick thank you, and then hang up.

“It’s negative,” I murmur. “Our other tests, too.”

I burst into tears. Overwhelmingly relieved, yet also caught up in a wave of sadness. The top half of my body crumples onto the small table. Vadim sits me up and pulls me against him.

“Alma, it’s going to be okay. There, there. Easy…”

Between sobs, I try to speak. “She said the embryo must have stopped developing.”

“You must be relieved.”