About the nausea that was still there.
It started at two in the morning. Again.
I made it to the bathroom.Just.Same as before — no warning, just the body deciding and the rest of me catching up. I knelt on the tile and waited and there was more and then there was more after that and by the time it stopped, I was sitting with my backagainst the tub and my forehead on my knees and absolutely nothing left.
I stayed there.
The tile was cold. September cold — which in Louisiana wasn't cold at all. I could hear nothing but the ringing in my ears and taste nothing but the bile on my tongue.
Judah hadn't woken up. Or if he had he'd made the decision not to come in, which was its own kind of answer about the version of me he was willing to hold.
I put my cheek against the tub.
Thought:flu.
Thought:something I ate.
Thought:it's been two weeks.
That last one sat differently.
I lifted my head.
Two weeks of nausea that came and went without a fever. Without the ache behind the eyes that came with real illness. Without anything, actually, except the nausea and the tiredness that I'd been attributing to stress and everything else I was carrying around like stones in my pockets.
Two weeks.
Twofuckingweeks.
I sat up straighter against the tub.
When was your last period, Mercy?
I didn't answer myself right away. I didn’t want that answer.
August. I thought it had been August. Early August, maybe. The week I'd moved into the manor, the boxes still stacked in the corner of the east bedroom, Judah carrying things up the stairs without being asked.
That was — I counted.
I counted again.
Seven weeks. Maybe eight.
The tile was very cold under my palms. And in truth it wasn’t cold at all.
Seven weeks. Eight. The arithmetic of a body that had been trying to tell me something I hadn't been listening to, because I'd been busy with all the lying I had to upkeep.
When did you last use protection, Mercy?
I almost laughed. It came out wrong — too sharp, too close to the other thing.
We hadn't. Not once. Not from the beginning, not from that first night in July or any of the nights after. It had never come up. He hadn't offered and I hadn't asked and I had been so far inside the gravity of him that the ordinary logistics of consequence had simply —not registered.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.
We'd had sex on his desk to the Lord's Prayer. We'd had sex in his car on a dirt road outside town at eleven on a Tuesday. We'd had sex in the garden after dark against the south wall where the lavender was coming in, his hand over my mouth because the groundskeeper lived in the cottage at the far end and could’ve heard.
Not once had either of us said the wordprotection.
