This was not what I was expecting. It completely threw me off.
“I’m surprised,” she mused as she held the baby to her chest, patting its butt. “I’ve expected you to show up for weeks. Figured you must have forgotten all about me.”
“I could never forget you,” I said quietly with a shake of my head. “No one told me anything until recently.”
“I’m sure you know why by now,” she stated, taking a seat farthest from me as possible. My heart hurt at that. I wanted her as close as possible, but understood her need for space. I was sure that once I touched her, even a simple touch, I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands to myself.
I already didn’t want to keep my hands to myself. Motherhood suited her very well.
Something I was not expecting.
“For so long, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t figure out why you would leave me just like that. Without any warning or any explanation. There was no word from you at all,” I stated, my voice growing colder with each word that passed my lips. “I…I didn’t know what to do. Why would you just fucking leave, Avidya? Why?”
“You once said you’d take the choice away from me if I were to end up pregnant,” she said. How could her voice be so calm at this? Had she been thinking about what to say all along if I happened to show up on her doorstep just as I had? “I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t just sit back and let you kill my child because you didn’t want to be a father. So I did the only thing I could do.”
“So you just left? Just like that? You could have just talked to me about it. I would have listened!” I nearly yelled. I stood up in my fit of anger, running my hands over my face.
“I knew you wouldn’t listen if I even tried, Zach,” she said with a sad shake of her head. “I saw how you froze up at the mention of any child that we would have ever had. That right there gave me all the information I needed. I didn’t have a choice. Not when it came to what I want out of life.”
“You did!” I seethed, slapping my hands against my legs. “You had every choice you ever needed.”
“Not when it came to this,” she stated without a beat. “That choice was taken away. Everyone knew that having a child was not in your plans. Even your own parents knew that!”
“Is it even mine?” I huffed out. As the words passed my lips, I regretted them. I saw how Avidya’s face paled at my question and I wanted to die for even asking such a shitty thing.
“How could you even ask me something like that?” Avidya asked, appalled. “Of course, he’s yours.”
I was a total dick. I knew I shouldn’t be saying things out of anger, as it was what got us into such a situation to begin with.
“If the only reason you showed up was to insult me like that, you may as well go back,” she went on, pointing at the door in the process. “I will never let you talk to me like that. Nor toourson. That right there is another reason why I left.”
“Oh? You have a list of reasons?” I asked on a laugh.
“Do I need a list?” she responded, her voice hard and cold. “It’s bad enough you hate children. It’s sick that you wanted me to have an abortion. It was horrible that I had to leave you so I could keep the one thing I ever wanted.”
“I gave you everything you asked for,” I said, my voice hard to match hers.
“I never asked for anything but to keep a child that we made,” she stated in fury. “It was the only thing I wanted, and you had it all planned out. You already knew what you would do to make sure no baby would be born from my body.”
As her voice rose in volume, the baby she still held began to cry and squirm in her arms. His cry turned into more of a demanding wail by the second and Avidya’s burning glare could have made me a pile of ashes right where I sat.
I deserved her anger and much more. I hadn’t come here to fight with her, only to prove that I could be the man that I wanted to be.
I had my work cut out for me, and now I wasn’t so sure I would get my wife back.
