Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 345

Chapter 345

When Helix closed for the day and the building fell quiet, I slipped out of my office and walked to my accommodation with my head down, the way a woman walks when she is hoping to be invisible. The shower was hot enough to sting, and I stood under it for a long time, letting the water beat against the back of my neck. When I reached for fresh panties, I noticed the pair I had changed into that afternoon. More spotting. Faint, pink, still nothing like the color my period should be.

I told myself it was stress. I ate a few snacks straight from the box, climbed into bed, and decided I would tell Celeste everything in the morning, the visit from Kingsley and the strange spotting and all of it. She would know what to make of it. She always did.

I fell asleep almost the moment my head touched the pillow.

And then I dreamed.

I was in an operating theatre, all white light and green scrubs and the cold smell of antiseptic. I could not move, could not feel anything below my chest, yet somehow I knew a caesarean was being performed on me. I watched i happen from somewhere above my own body, detached and floating, as the surgeons worked. And then, before my eyes, they lifted a baby boy out of me, wet and small and furious, and his cry pierced my ears like a blade.

I woke with a gasp, sitting bolt upright in the dark. My nightgown was soaked through with sweat and my hands were freezing cold. I pressed one palm to my chest and waited for my breathing to slow. I had never dreamed anything like it in my life. Never. It had to be some stray memory, something I had watched or read about a woman giving birth through a C-section, regurgitated by an exhausted brain.

I tried to lie back down, but the moment my head touched the pillow, a nagging feeling crept in, the cold little prickle of a woman forgetting something important. My mind drifted back to Kingsley, to the way he had looked kneeling on my office floor, and then something clicked.

“No.”

I got up with a start, and the word echoed off the walls of the small room. My heart began to pound so hard I could feel it in my throat.

Because I had not been sexually active before, I had stopped paying attention to my cycle. I never worried about the morning-after pill, because there had been no one to need it for. The only reason I still noted when my period would arrive was so it would not take me by surprise and stain my clothes in public. That was it. That was the entire extent of my diligence.

And Kingsley had not used a condom.

I grabbed my phone and opened my menstrual calendar with shaking fingers, scrolling back to that afternoon I had given myself to him. Eleven days ago. I stared at the date, then at the little ovulation marker beside it, and my stomach dropped clean through the floor.

Unsafe. I had slept with him during my unsafe period, one day before my ovulation day.

“No. No. No. This cannot be.”

If that faint pink spotting in my panties was implantation bleeding, I was going to lose my mind. Why were my own things always different? Why did nothing in my life ever go the way it was supposed to? Other women made one stupid mistake and walked away with nothing but a story. I made one stupid mistake, and apparently my body had decided to turn it into a full-blown crisis.

I checked the time. It was past three in the morning. I needed a pregnancy test, and I needed it now. I threw on

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clothes and walked across the dark compound to the Helix lab, my footsteps echoing off the empty corridors. I searched the lab thoroughly, and relief flooded through me when I realized I could run the test myself with a simple finger prick.

Then I stopped halfway.

If implantation had only just happened, a finger prick would not be enough. My HCG levels would still be low, and I could not afford a false negative. I needed to draw actual blood, a proper sample, for a quantitative 3-hCG test.

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