29. Ava

Chapter 29

Ava

I hadn't been able to bring myself to reach out to him for four days after I'd turned up at his apartment.

The stress of deciding whether or not to tell him about the life growing inside of me was eating me from the inside out, devouring everything in its wake. I was nothing but a walking panic attack, and despite him calming me down for a couple of hours and enabling me to actually get a good few hours of sleep, I felt like a zombie in my own skin.

"Ava," Emily said softly, brushing my heat-curled hair away from my face as she looked at me in the bedroom mirror. She'd done everything in her power to make me look presentable—my makeup, my hair, even spritzing me down with perfume. "I'm sorry, but the…the dress doesn't fit."

She let go of the zipper on my back. The backs of my eyes burned.

"Do you have anything else?"

I reached around to my back and unzipped what she'd managed to zip up. "I'm not going," I croaked.

"You have to go, Aves," she insisted. "That will raise so many more questions."

"Just tell my dad I'm sick."

"I think he might insist you see a doctor if you use that excuse again," she sighed.

"I don't care."

"Won't Adrian be there? He'll be worried if you don't turn up." She pushed the straps off my shoulders and helped me push the dress down over my thighs. "You've got to go."

I didn't want to, though. There wasn't a single part of me that wanted to go to the stupid fucking charity event tonight. I wanted to sit in my room and cry and try to get my life under control, but I wasn't allowed to do that.

"How far along do you think you are?" she asked, her voice low as she pulled me toward the closet.

I watched as she started furiously going through my closet. She pulled out option after option, throwing them on my bed behind her as if we were children having a fashion show. "The last test I took said I should be about eleven weeks," I mumbled.

Eleven weeks set me back to roughly the first night. The night we'd spent on his sailboat. The first fucking time.

I could see it in the mirror. The curve of my stomach, even though it was slight. I'd seen it for the last week and a half. I'd panicked when Adrian had undressed me the other night, worried sick that he'd notice it and question it. But he hadn't.

"That one," I said as Emily held up one of my least favorite dresses. Long and black and A-line, with a lace-up back. It would work. "That should fit."

————

"Where have you been ?"

Adrian stood in front of me, looking down at me as I leaned against the wall of the ballroom. He looked downright magnetic in his maroon and black tux, but the worried green eyes that bore into me made me want to peel my gaze from him. "I'm sorry," I said. "I've just been dealing with a lot."

"So have I," he insisted. "But that doesn't mean I don't have space for you. You're blanking me."

"I'm not trying to." Liar. Fucking liar.

Music filled the empty space for far too long. "Do you not want this anymore?"

I snapped my gaze back to him. How the fuck can he ask me that? "What?" I croaked, my voice cracking before I'd even had the chance to steady myself. My emotions had been all over the place for weeks now, and I'd grown almost accustomed to not having a solid grasp on when they would switch or why, but right then, I felt betrayed by my own body. "I want you. I've always fucking wanted you."

"Then talk to me," he begged. "You disappeared for four fucking days, Ava. You left without much of an explanation. I've been worried sick."

Nausea swirled as I realized exactly where his mind had gone, exactly what he'd been through before. At least with Jan, he'd gotten a phone call from the police, but she had been his wife—he would have been her emergency contact.

If something happened to me, he'd have to hear it through the grapevine.

Dad's eyes met mine across the room as he stood beside a man I vaguely recognized, two whiskeys deep in conversation. His brows furrowed.

"Can we talk somewhere private?" I asked, my voice breaking yet again and fucking betraying me.

He followed my gaze, and everything about him changed. He turned more casual, plastering a friendly smile on his face, and mumbled a quick, "Yeah."

And then he was moving.

I waited until Dad's eyes left me to slink around the corner after Adrian.

The hallway was filled with staff from his company. Men and women dressed to the nines in tuxedos wandered with trays full of food, bottles of champagne, checklists, and cases of soft drinks. I followed Adrian in dead silence as he turned another corner, and then another, leading me further and further away.

The panic only rose.

He opened a door for a stairwell and held it open for me, and we slipped inside, finally finding a bit of privacy and silence.

"Talk," he said. "This is as private as we're going to find."

My lower lip shook as I tried to find the right words, but my mind was moving at lightspeed, leaving my body in the dust. There were so many things I wanted to say. So many things I needed to say. But they wouldn't form coherent words, wouldn't come together to form a sentence.

I moved toward him, looking for some sort of security, some sort of support, but he took a step back.

"Please," I begged.

"Ava," he sighed, his hands coming to rest on my shoulders. "I'm not just here to comfort you when you're feeling overwhelmed. You have to fucking talk to me."

My heart raced in my chest, my skin chilling, and chilling, and chilling—until I realized that wasn't actually a chill, it was a sheen of sweat. "I'm sorry," I sobbed, and oh, God, when had the tears started? Am I ruining my makeup? Dad's going to notice. "I'm sorry. Please. I'm sorry."

It was all I could get out of my mouth. Nothing else formed.

"You can't just tell me you're sorry with no fucking explanation, Aves," he snapped. "What am I supposed to do with that? Accept that you disappeared for four days and have basically blanked me for a week, and not worry about why?"

"I'm sorry." The words were more of a whisper, barely breaking past my lips. Everything swayed, from the floor, to the stairs, to him. It felt like the earth was turning on its axis, like my heels broke at the same time.

"Jesus fucking Christ. Why ? Just tell me why so we can figure this out!"

His voice boomed and echoed through the stairwell. I gasped for air. " Please ."

"I've put my heart on the goddamn line for you. I've been so fucking patient. I've been on the verge of breaking down the last few weeks while trying to keep my job, make sure that you were okay, and that my son had enough time with me. I know you're having problems but this isn't okay ."

Darkness crept in at the edges of my vision. "Adrian."

"I can't fucking do this with you if you won't…"

It took over entirely.

————

The scent of chemicals hit me before the stinging pain in my left hand and the light jostling of whatever I was on forced me to open my eyes.

A woman in all blue stood over me, with deep brown skin and braided hair up in a ponytail. I'd never seen her before in my life.

"You're okay," she said, patting the side of my arm. "We're almost there."

"Where?" I asked, but the sound was so muffled I almost couldn't make out my own voice. Something large and pliable rested over my mouth, and as I lifted my hand to touch it, I found a full plastic oxygen mask.

"Oh my God, you're awake."

"Stay there," the woman said, her gaze locked somewhere beyond my feet. I tried to follow it, but my head pounded, and I couldn't bring myself to look down enough. "Give her a minute."

Letting my head fall back onto the pillow, I looked up above me at the ceiling of whatever place I was in. Wires and medical equipment hung against a white background, but everything was so fuzzy, so blurry, so bright…

Just as quickly as I'd come to, I was out again.

————

The bed shook, and I was back, but so was the panic.

"Hey, hey, you're okay."

A blurry, tall figure stood next to me, squeezing my hand, their body draped in maroons and blacks. I blinked, over and over and over, and the fog started to clear. Bloodshot blue eyes met mine.

Adrian.

"Is there space for her yet?" Someone behind me asked, but I couldn't hear the reply.

"I don't understand," I said.

He leaned over me, pressing his forehead to mine. "You went down," he croaked. "You scared the shit out of me."

You went down.

The memory of it slowly filtered back in—the stairwell, the way my words hadn't worked, how he'd shouted at me when I reached for him. The blackness that crept into my vision and ate it alive. The clamminess of my skin.

"I thought you were fucking dying," he rasped.

"I'm…I'm sorry." I didn't know what else to say, didn't know what else I could say. I'd traumatized him twice, now, and that fell entirely on my shoulders.

"I couldn't find your dad," he continued, completely ignoring my apology. "I think I left my phone back in the stairwell. I don't know his number by heart but if you do…"

"No," I insisted. "Please. I don't want him here."

" Ava. "

"Please," I begged. The realization was starting to set in—I was at the fucking hospital. I was eleven weeks pregnant. The truth would come out, sooner than later. And having Adrian here was bad enough, but I needed to keep my father out of this as long as possible.

"We've got a space for ‘ya." A man in all blue sidled up beside my stretcher, a far too wide grin on his face. "We just need to run some checks on you and then we can get this all sorted. You seem to be all right, though. Looks like you just fainted. That normal?"

"No," Adrian and I said in unison.

"Right."

He stepped behind my stretcher and slowly lifted the back so I was sitting upright before wheeling me inside.

Harsh, fluorescent lighting bounced off nearly every surface as we moved in silence down the squeaky-clean hallway. I tried to wrack my brain for any other time I'd passed out from a panic attack, but I couldn't place a single time. There had to be something—something I could tell them and get sent home for without further tests.

As much as I was thankful for Adrian being here, I couldn't help but wish it was anyone other than him or my father, or even no one.

The man parked me in a small square space separated from other triage banks by hanging blue curtains. He didn't say a word before he disappeared.

"They should have your dad's number on your file, right?" Adrian asked as he slowly sank into the chair beside my stretcher. He didn't dare release my hand, but his leg bounced incessantly, his cold blue eyes fixed on me.

My eyes burned again. "I need you to not call my dad." I enunciated every word to make myself as clear as I possibly could. "You don't want him here. I can promise you that."

"I don't think he'll think it's suspicious that I rode in the fucking ambulance with you, Aves," he said, his voice a little too loud, a little too aggressive. "I'm sorry. I'm trying to stay calm."

"It's not that." I squeezed his hand half because I needed it and half to try to calm him down. Oh —that was the sharp pain. I've got an IV port. "I need to tell you something and I need you to not…"

"Ava Riley?"

A beaming woman with jet-black hair and white scrubs rounded the corner of my little cubicle. Fuck. "Hi," I said. "Can you give me a minute?"

A single brow rose. "You want me to give you a minute?"

I nodded.

"You realize you just arrived by ambulance and we need to run diagnostics on you as quickly as possible, right?"

I nodded again.

She looked across to Adrian. "Did she hit her head when she passed out, or…?"

Adrian snorted. "No, but she's certainly acting like it."

The woman clamped a little clip onto my first finger and a heart rate monitor popped up on the screen behind her. It took a second, but one-hundred-and-seven flashed up and stayed steady. "Hmm," she said. "That's a bit high, but you're stressed out, so we'll see if it calms down."

"Can I please just have a minute?" I asked again, and the beeping increased. One-hundred-twenty-five. "Please."

She completely ignored me as she grabbed a clipboard from the mobile set of drawers beside her. "So you fainted?"

"Yeah, she passed out," Adrian confirmed.

"Any issues with blood pressure in the past?"

"No," I sighed.

"Have you eaten and drank enough today?"

"Yes."

"Have you taken any drugs or had any alcohol in the last twenty-four hours?"

"She had a cocktail about forty minutes ago," Adrian said.

"No," I clarified. "I had a mocktail ."

His brows knitted together as he looked at me.

"Any history of heart problems?"

"No, none," I sighed.

"Are you pregnant or is there any chance you could be pregnant?"

I opened my mouth to speak, but the words wouldn't come. The woman looked at me expectantly, her eyes glancing at Adrian, but I could feel his gaze locked on me, could feel it tearing me apart with every second that passed that I didn't answer the question.

"Can I please just have a minute?"