Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 104050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 520(@200wpm)___ 416(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 520(@200wpm)___ 416(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
After a minute, the words tumble out.
“It’s Liam,” I say. “I saw him tonight.”
She lets that hang. “What did he do? Oh no.”
Andie’s my friend, so she knows that I’ve been seeing Liam. She’s also sensed that we’ve been in a bad place relationship-wise because I’ve been in a funk recently. But this is a new low. I can’t find the words. I keep seeing the contract, the neat lines and the blank for my signature, the way his blue eyes never wavered.
“He…” My throat goes tight. “He wants me to have his baby. Not like, right now, but after I fix my fibroids. He gave me a contract. Like a job offer. Like a bribe.”
Andie’s face goes still, the way it does when she’s parsing something inhuman. “He offered to pay you?”
“No.” I want to laugh, but it dies in my chest. “He said he’d give me an A in his class. He said he’d take care of me, all expenses, whatever I needed. If I agreed to be his surrogate. That’s the word he used. Surrogate.”
Andie says nothing for a while. Her hand is warm on mine. She’s not letting go.
I keep going, the story unspooling like a confession.
“We were together, for months. Not just the class stuff. Sex, too. All the time. I thought—” My voice falters. “I thought he loved me. He said it, once. But now I think he just wanted a womb. And I’m not even a good womb! I’m a defective one because of my fibroids, but he says it can be fixed.”
The room is silent except for the tiny, helpless sounds leaking out of me. Andie pulls me closer, arm tight around my shoulders. Her head rests against mine, her hair a soft cloud.
“He’s a monster,” she says, and there’s no pity in it. Just a flat, matter-of-fact rage.
“I thought I was special,” I whisper. “I thought it was real.”
“It is real,” Andie says. “Just not in the way you wanted.”
For a while I let her hold me. The wetness of my clothes seeps through the blanket, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She rocks me gently, the way you’d calm a kid after a nightmare.
Eventually, my brain reboots. The sobs fade to sniffles. I find my voice again.
“What do I do?” I say. “Do I turn him in? Do I sign the contract? Do I disappear?”
Andie leans back, wipes the mascara from my cheek with the edge of her sleeve. “First,” she says, “you get dry. Then you get angry. Then you decide.”
It sounds like a plan, and for the first time tonight, I almost smile.
Andie pushes up from the bed and rummages in her dresser. She tosses me a pair of pajama bottoms and one of her big, worn t-shirts. “Go shower,” she orders. “I’ll make tea.”
I obey. The shower is brutal at first, the water too hot on my chilled skin. But I stand there a long time, watching the black streaks of makeup spiral down the drain, feeling the heat melt the ice in my chest. When I come back, Andie’s waiting with a mug of chamomile and a box of tissues. The blanket is back on my bed, warm and clean.
We sit cross-legged, knees knocking, and I tell her the whole thing. About the sex, about the dinners, about the things Liam whispered in the dark. About the way he made me feel, and the way he broke me.
Andie listens, no judgment, just quiet fury. When I finish, she says, “If you want to go to the school, I’ll help. If you want to keep it quiet, I’ll help with that, too.”
I look at her, really look, and realize that this—right here, the two of us in this tiny room—is what real love feels like. Not the contracts or the promises or the sick thrill of being wanted by someone forbidden.
“I’m so stupid,” I say.
“No,” Andie says, and she means it. “You just wanted something real. That’s not stupid.”
We clink mugs, as if to toast that.
Later, as I drift off under the extra blanket, I think about the future. About the contract, about the surgery, about whether I could ever be that girl again—the one who believed. But for now, I just feel numb. For now, I just listen to Andie’s soft, even breathing, and the rain hammering out its own relentless rhythm.
For the umpteenth time, I think: I am broken.
And I’ll never be fixed.
17
CAN I BE UN-BROKEN?
SIMONE
The walls are the color of skim milk, shot through with veins of commercial beige. The waiting room is an aquarium of dead air and paper gowns. Every surface is antiseptic, the linoleum shining a little too bright under the cheap fluorescents. There’s a bowl of off-brand mints by the window, sweating inside their crinkly wrappers, and a water cooler that burbles like a threat. The only sound is the nervous flick of magazine pages and the occasional cough from behind the clipboard fortress at the check-in desk.