She drifted off, apparently not realizing that I was dangling off a fucking cliff here while waiting for her to finish her sentence.
“What?” I urged.
“Nothing, never mind.”
I groaned internally.
They were never a good match? Never kind? Never a gentleman? Did they hurt her? Did they make her feel uncomfortable?
I decided I hated them, all of them, whoever they were. I wanted to cast curses on them, hack into their high school AOL and air their dirty laundry, subscribe them toHighlights, thoseinfernal magazines my mom made me read as a kid. And I wanted to press Ellie for more, so I could hate them more, plot more, but we were already parked outside the pharmacy, and Ellie had unbuckled her seat belt, with her hand on the door handle.
“I’ll be right back,” she promised, and then she was gone.
I watched her walk away, trying not to stare at the fluttering hem of her little black sundress as she walked. It was so short and looked so good, I wanted to fucking scream.
Twiddling my thumbs on the steering wheel, I contemplated turning off the engine and following her inside, but that was overbearing, wasn’t it? I was already pushing my luck by being here tonight, so I waited. I waited and waited for what felt like an eternity before Ellie returned to the car. She carried a bulging bag thathadto have more than one prescription in it, making me frown.
“What’s all that?” I asked as soon as she hopped back in the jeep.
“It’s the medication MFM prescribed to me,” she said as though that explained everything.
“Right.” I nodded, pretending I wasn’t having a panic attack and trying to keep my hands from twisting around the steering wheel, knowing she would notice. “Can you tell me more about that now, and why it looks like they prescribed you an entire pharmacy?”
The laugh that burst through Ellie’s lips trickled over me like a sprinkler on a hot day, putting me more at ease.
“It’s just one medication.” Her voice was patient and calm, and that made me feel better, too. “But they also gave me this—” She paused as she rummaged in the shopping bag, pulling out a red box with a white lid that I immediately recognized. And all the ease I felt vanished. “Sharps container,” she finished.
“Why…” The word came out strangled, and I had to retry. “Why do you need a sharps container, El?”
Even to my own ears, my voice sounded wooden.
She put the container in her lap and angled her body toward me, a placid expression on her face.
She was so calm.
How was she so calm?
“Do you remember…” she began, and I wanted to interject thatyes, I did remember. I remembered everything about her, and I had this horrible, horrible feeling that she was about to bring up one of my least favorite memories. “So, after I left the hospital when I had the pulmonary embolism,” she restarted, “they gave me a medication called Lovenox to take for a few days. Do you remember that? It was a shot administered in my stomach, and you helped me with it.”
I blinked a few times, wondering how this was even a question. Did I remember the way she squeezed her eyes shut, wincing as I injected a blood thinner into her stomach in the days after she’d been hospitalized? Of course I fucking remembered. And I hated every goddamn minute of it.
“Yes,” I rasped, pushing the word out. “I remember.”
She nodded and then pulled out a paper pharmacy bag from the plastic one. “This is the same medication.”
I’d been half expecting her to say it, but my stomach still lurched. Panic rose to my throat, making it hard to get the next question out. “You don’t—you don’t have another clot, do you?”
“No,” she reassured me, and I dropped back into my seat. I hadn’t even realized my body was moving across the jeep cabin, as though I would have been able to perform some kind of first aid right here and now to help if she had said yes, despite knowing it didn’t work like that. “No, I don’t. But they are worried that the increased hormones in my system put me at a higher risk of clots throughout the pregnancy, given my history. So I’m supposed to take this as a preventive measure.”
“How long…” I gave a wary once-over at how big the sharps container was and the bulge of the pharmacy bag. “How long do you have to take it? Just for a few days again or…”
My words dried up at the look that crossed over Ellie’s face.
She’d hated those shots, the ones I’d needed to give her in her stomach, and something told me she was about to say?—
“The whole pregnancy,” she confirmed, and when she saw my enraged expression, she quickly added, “But it’s a low dose, and it’s safe, and it significantly decreases the risks that my doctor is concerned about.”
“When you say the whole pregnancy, you mean…”
