Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 346

Chapter 346

Drawing my own blood was risky. It was also the only option, because I refused to let anyone else in that lab do it. I was not about to make myself the subject of gossip before the sun had even come up.

I tied the tourniquet around my arm and sat there sweating, my hands shaking so badly I could barely hold the needle still. I tried three times to get it into the vein, and each time I missed, until finally I gave up and dropped the needle onto the counter with a clatter. Drawing your own blood with a needle was hard enough on a good day. Doing it when your hands would not stop trembling was impossible.

So I decided to wait until daybreak and go to a lab far from the city, somewhere no one would recognize me. I walked back to my accommodation, freshened up, and changed into clean clothes. I could not bring myself to get back into bed. I just sat on the edge of it and checked my phone every few minutes, watching the clock crawl

toward dawn.

At the first light of day, I left Helix and flagged down a cab, and I gave the driver the address of a Lab on the outskirts of the city, a small place I had found in an online search at four in the morning.

The Lab was still locked when I arrived, so I stood outside in the cool grey light and waited, hugging my arms against my chest. A few minutes later, a woman in a white coat unlocked the door, and I went inside, had my blood drawn, and sat in the waiting room with my heart lodged in my throat.

One hour later, I stood outside that clinic staring at the test results in my hand as though they belonged to

someone else.

But the text on the paper was as real as the paper itself.

Name: Patricia Spears

Age: 30

Pregnancy: Positive.

I was almost four weeks pregnant. Like a fool, I had gotten pregnant for Kingsley Duke. I sat down on a low wall at the corner of the clinic, in the shade of a struggling tree, and I stayed there for two hours thinking. About everything. About the life growing inside me, and the man who did not love me, and the long, lonely stretch of years that had carried me to this exact spot. 5

By the time I stood up, my mind was made. I was going to get rid of the baby. I would never use a child to make a man stay with me. I would never start a family with a man who did not love me, and I would never raise a child in the wreckage of my own desperation. Not that. Never that.

I pressed my palm flat against my stomach, and the words came out in a whisper that broke somewhere in the middle.

“I am sorry, little one.” My thumb moved in a small, slow circle. “You deserve better.”

I did not make the decision lightly, no matter how quickly it came to me on that cold clinic wall. I turned the possibilities over the way a woman turns over a stone in her palm, weighing each side before she throws it.

Vacuum aspiration was the first answer my mind offered, and for a while it seemed the cleanest one. A quick procedure in the hands of a proper doctor, a short stay, and it would all be over. But a procedure like that meant a hospital, and a hospital meant records, and records meant the long arm of my family reaching in to shake me like a broken toy. The risk was not something I could swallow. My family could not get wind of this.

My younger sister, Vivian would have a field day. She had spent her whole life turning my misfortunes into

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entertainment, the way some people turn on the television, and this particular misfortune would keep her fed for a year.

And my parents, God, my parents, who had always played favorites as naturally as other people breathed, would never let me live it down. They would hold it over me at every dinner, every holiday, every phone call I was already too tired to answer. I could hear my mother’s voice already, soft and disappointed and somehow more cutting than a shout.

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