It hit him in the neck and fell with a ‘tink’ to the floor.
Azrael paused, said another word, and lowered his phone as he turned to me, his eyes bright, his brow slightly raised.
“M.O.V.I.E,” I signed.
His eyes narrowed. “Use your words, little sinner,” he said almost threateningly.
My jaw tightened. I signed out the title and gestured towards the doctor.
Azrael’s eyes didn’t move from mine. He watched me for three heartbeats before he lifted his chin. “A movie it is. Soon.” He turned away from me again to finish his conversation, and I felt the muscles around my mouth twitch again, one corner lifting for half a second before it dropped.
I was going to watch a movie.
A real movie.
The doctor put a hard round thing against my back and chest, asking me to breathe. He knocked things against my knees and elbows, making them move like magic. He squeezed my hands gently, touched my throat with his fingers, and finally stepped back, taking off his gloves only to put on new ones as if those had been contaminated already. “Everything looks good so far,” he told Azrael, who was finally done with his phone call and now stood directly in front of me across the room, leaned backagainst the counter. “Next the sonogram and then drawing blood.”
Drawing blood? I had looked around this room during the other tests, there were no pencils or paper here to draw with.
Azrael finally pushed away from the counter, leaned his cane back against it, and took off his jacket. He held his jacket in both hands as he walked over to me. “You need to lift up your dress to your waist,” he explained. “He needs to put jelly on your stomach in order to see what’s inside.”
I glanced at the doctor and back. He trusted him, and I didn’t know what trust felt like, but if he trusted him, then I should let him do what he needed to do, right?
After a moment, I nodded and stood. I crouched down, grabbed the hem of my dress in both hands, and pulled it up as I stood.
The second my knees straightened, Azrael had his jacket up, spread in front of me, keeping the doctor from seeing my bare legs.
I felt the tightness leave my chest when my eyes found his.
“Lay back,” he instructed me.
Without hesitation, I hopped back onto the table, trying to keep my dress bunched around my waist, and slid back, laying on my back. He kept his jacket above me until I was settled before laying it over my legs and pussy.
He stepped up onto my left side, the doctor rolling over to my right with a machine right beside him.
He angled the screen towards us before turning to me and holding up a bottle. “This is petroleum jelly. It’s cold and thick, but we need to put it on your skin in order for the sonogram to work.”
I nodded, glancing down at my stomach, at how pale it was. Flat, pale, laced in scars. The newest ones from Thomas I had gotten weeks ago, and others that were years old, including thelong line from that day I had been at that man’s house for two weeks. It was the highest I had ever looked at myself. Even now. Even after the training with Azrael, I still couldn’t find it in me to look at myself in the mirror. I wasn’t sure why. I always just felt an overwhelming tightness in my chest, like the air had left the room. My heart started racing, and I thought it just better I don’t do it. I didn’t need to know what I looked like anyway. It didn’t matter to me. I still had all of Azrael’s attention despite what I saw or didn’t see, so why did I need to know what I looked like?
The doctor held the bottle above my stomach and gently squeezed some of the clear blue jelly on my skin.
My stomach contracted, the chill shocking even though I had expected it. He then replaced the bottle with a stick that was attached to the screen.
My eyes found that screen. I had never seen one before. The screen was thin. Almost as thin as my index finger. The picture on it was all black and blue, grainy. He placed the stick into the pile of jelly and started smearing it around, the pictures changing.
I felt my brows furrow and I pointed at the screen, turning back to Azrael. That’s what the inside of a person looked like? Black and blue and grainy? I thought we were filled with blood. Every time I had been lashed, there had been blood. It had been bright red, nothing like that.
“It doesn’t see blood, it only sees the shape of organs,” he explained. “This is not how it looks inside of us, it’s just an outline.”
An outline?
I turned back to the screen, watching the pictures move, feeling the stick go lower, near the line that cut across from hip to hip. After another few moments, the doctor stopped moving it. “There’s the uterus,” he said, his voice serious. He shifted thestick a little. “Scar tissue, and this…is where the right ovary is supposed to sit.”
I tried to see what they were seeing, but it was just a mass of blue to me. Could they really discern a picture? Did I need glasses?
He shifted the stick. “Similar on the other side. Whoever did this barely knew what they were doing. Lots of scar tissue, lots of damage. Even if you wanted to do invitro in the future, I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Fine. Nothing else is missing?”
