Page 43 of Misadventures with a Professor
“No,” I say out loud, just to make extra certain my brain processed the word. “No. This is not happening.”
This can’t be happening.
I go downstairs in only my thin cotton robe and make my way down the flagged path to the river. It’s still very early morning, with only a faint-pink sun and river fog like a shroud over everything, and more than life itself, I want to go crawl back in bed with the handsome, snobby professor I’ve come to love.
Oh shit. Do I love him? Because this is a hell of a time to decide. But even with my lingering nausea and fear, I think I know the answer.
Yes.
Yes, of course, I love Professor Graeme. His dirty games and his sharp words and his brilliant intellect. His rare flashes of warmth and kindness, his hidden passion and fire just waiting for the right person to patiently uncover them…
I love him.
And I may be pregnant with his child, and somehow I just know he’d never forgive me if that were true, no matter how innocent of it I may be. No matter how accidental, no matter how not my fault, the one wound he bears is so deeply tied to a baby, and how can I, just a silly little student, ever hope to heal him of it?
First thing’s first, I order myself. No sense in worrying about something that might not even be true. I’ll get dressed and find a pharmacy and get a pregnancy test. And then I can decide what comes next and what it means for my professor and me.
I’m to the pharmacy and back to the cottage before Oliver is finished with his run, and I have a plan. I’ll go to the bathroom—the small water closet by the snug, the one we hardly ever use—and I’ll use the tests. Yes, tests plural, because I couldn’t decide on a brand, and despite having everything from the best nursing bras to the best infant formula, Consumer Reports doesn’t have a buying guide for pregnancy tests. So I bought three different brands of pregnancy tests, just to be safe.
But when I lock myself inside the bathroom, I’m gripped by a slow, creeping hesitation. Like I’m being gradually, gradually frozen in ice, until I’m sitting on the floor across from the sink with my head between my legs just staring at the tile. The nausea from the early morning has faded, leaving only a tingling kind of displacement in its place, like my stomach and my heart have traded places.
Just go pee on that stick. Just do it.
But even standing up right now feels like a herculean feat—like if I stand up, I’m accepting whatever happens next, and I’m not sure I can do that.
I’m not sure I’m strong enough to do that.
But as romantic as it would be to spend the rest of the day on the floor in a state of languishing gloom, I’m not immune to the ticking clock of Oliver’s run. And my ass is cold from the tile. And my own despair is getting a bit boring—it’s not like me to despond over a problem. It’s like me to tackle the problem head-on, with research and enthusiasm and a big Zandy Lynch grin, and dammit, that’s what I’m going to do now.
So I get up and perform the oddly ignoble ritual of peeing on the different sticks and then lining them up according to size and waiting and watching.
It’s strange to think that my entire future is concentrated in these little plastic rectangles full of urine and chemical dyes. Strange to think that whatever these rectangles reveal in the next minute or two is going to completely redirect the course of my life for better or for worse, and oh my God, they’re finally starting to turn colors, they’re finally starting to stripe over with weak washes of blue and—
I sit back down on the floor, except this time I don’t stare at the tile, I stare at my hands, as if I expect them to be different. As if I expect my entire body to be different.
Nothing’s different.
But everything is. Everything has to be.
Because I’m pregnant, and I’m pregnant with a baby I know Oliver won’t want.
I set a timer on my phone and give myself five minutes. Five minutes to freak out—to scream or to cry or whatever I need to do—and then when the timer beeps, I wipe away my tears, sweep the tests with their condemning plus signs into the trash, and go find my laptop to make a plan.
Oliver comes into the study with shower-damp hair and rolled-up sleeves that show off the strong lines of his forearms and wrists. He’s scrubbing at the wet hair with his fingertips and frowning in that way that tells me he’s already several layers deep into some new insight of his, but he stops when he sees me at my desk and he smiles.
God, that smile.
It’s so wide, with lines bracketing those sculpted lips, and it changes his entire face from scornfully distant to sincere and boyish.
“Good morning, Miss Lynch,” he says, and I slam my laptop shut so he won’t see all the incriminating tabs I have open, and I smile back at him, hoping he won’t see how forced it is.
“Good morning, Professor,” I say, and then he bends in to kiss my neck. He didn’t shave this morning, and his stubble leaves the most delicious burn wherever his soft lips touch me. It’s the best kind of sting, and for a minute I let everything else fade away—the pregnancy, the panic, the plan—and just melt into the feeling of him. My professor. My Oliver.
He withdraws too soon, dropping a kiss on my head before he goes to his desk. “You’ve nearly finished with all the books, I see.”
“I still have a lot of the newer ones to do,” I say automatically, and then I stop myself because I don’t know that I’ll get to the newer books. I don’t know that I’ll be able to get to anything else at all, because I don’t know what’s going to happen after I tell Oliver I’m pregnant.
Unless you don’t tell him…
