A Wild Ride(2)

So, yeah, I was questioning his attraction to me, and thus my own value as an object of attraction. Plus, it was just a dick remark.

John pulled the car to a stop at a red light, and I felt the words bubbling up. I tried to stop them, but they came out anyway.

"I think I might be pregnant."

John was silent, but I watched his knuckles tighten on the steering wheel, and the corners of his mouth flatten out and turn down. His pale blue eyes narrowed, and he sighed, almost imperceptibly, but not quite.

"You think?" His voice was carefully neutral.

Which only pissed me off. Okay, yeah, I didn't want to be pregnant, but where did he get off being mad about it? This was how John got mad: quiet, carefully neutral, always in control, just the narrow eyes and tight knuckles and subtle frown.

"I'm almost a week late. Not for sure, but it's possible. I haven't taken a test or anything, but I'm never late."

He didn't look at me, didn't respond, just carefully accelerated through the green light, a practical man driving a practical car carefully.

"Well, should we take a test, then? Just make sure?" John pulled the gearshifter into second, still looking straight ahead.

"I guess," I said. "We can stop at CVS on the way home."




 

 

He just nodded. And that was when I lost it.

"That's it? No reaction?" I wasn't yelling yet, but I was winding up to it. "You're just gonna be all practical? Calm? Say something, damn it!"

John looked at me, a raised eyebrow his only expression of surprise. "What do you want me to say? You are or you aren't. We don't know yet, so there's no sense panicking."

"Would you panic, if I was?"

He shrugged; yes, that was his reaction. A shrug.

"You wouldn't, would you?" Definitely yelling now; my voice was filling the tiny car. "You would just carry on, practical and calm and...goddamn it, so f**king boring! You wouldn't be happy about it, you wouldn't be mad. You'd just deal with it and move on. God, I'm so sick of your motherfucking practicality! Be extreme about something! React, for once!"

"Leo, you know how I feel about you swearing so much," he said, as calm and unflappable as ever.

I wanted him to be flappable, just once. My mouth opened to swear, or curse, and then something inside me just stopped. Time went gloopy and I saw us, five years from now. We'd have a little girl, pleasant looking and nice, and John would come home from the bank, and we'd be pleasant, and we'd have our pleasant house, and our pleasant flat-screen TV, not too big, and our little dog, not too big, not too yappy, just right. Then, in ten years...the girl would be older, joined by one more, a boy, just as nice and well-behaved, and the TV would be new, but the same. And the dog would be the same, nice and calm and practical, and John too, through it all, would be nice, and calm, and pleasant, and he'd have his hair, thinning maybe, gray maybe, and he'd be still trim and slim and we'd have sex every Saturday, maybe Sunday morning every once in awhile.

I nearly vomited.

John carefully pulled the car to a stop at a red light, and I was shaking, my stomach in my throat, and I couldn't help seeing John as he'd been in ten years, in my mind: the same, just older. And me, the same, just older. Unexcited. And our life: predictable and pleasant.

I pulled the ring off my finger and tossed it on the dash, grabbed my clutch purse, my precious Coach bag, the one nice thing I own, and I got out of the car, in the pouring, sluicing rain. In my heels. I ran out into traffic as the light turned green, and cars honked, and John yelled calmly for me to come back.

I swear to f**king god, John is the only man capable of yelling calmly.

I just gave him the finger, thumb out, Detroit-style. I kept running, made it to the sidewalk and kept going, running blind through the cold, pelting rain. Something snapped beneath my feet and I stumbled, tripped, and fell to the ground, slapping the rough concrete with my hands, ripping my dress. I whimpered and sat down on my butt, splashing into a puddle. I looked at my hands and saw that I'd cut up the heels of my hands on the sidewalk, and my knees were bleeding. My heel had snapped, causing to me to trip. My Coach purse, my two hundred and fifty dollar Coach purse was lying submerged in a puddle on the grass next to the sidewalk, a muddy bog. Rain beat down on my head, my hands and knees throbbed, and my left wrist started to ache, and my purse was ruined and all my things in it wet, which meant my cell phone was ruined, my uninsured, one-year old iPhone. I heard a car pull up next to me, and a window hum open a few inches. 

"Get in, Leo," John said. "You're hurt and wet. Get in and I'll take you home. I don't know what got into you. You'll catch pneumonia."