“Aww hell, Darce,” he said, crossing to the little heap of a woman crumpled at the edge of her bed, like the hundred or so tissues littering the end table and spilling onto the floor. “What happened?”
“It’s hormones,” she sniffed, trying to pull herself together as she waved him off with one hand. “I’ll be fine tomorrow. Go to bed. Please.”
Right. Not happening. Instead he gathered her up against him, so her head rested at his chest and his arms closed around her.
“Talk to me, honey. Tell me what’s going on.”
For a moment he thought she wouldn’t answer. But he waited her out, stroking a palm over that soft spill of blond down her back, giving in to the impulse to let his fingers play at the ends. And then it was as if the fight and resistance simply drained away as a ragged sob escaped her.
“I’m so tired,” she admitted in a defeated, broken voice. “I’m t-tired of getting sick. I’m tired of f-feeling like every minute my body becomes a little less m-my own. I’m tired of being d-disgusting and weepy and wiped out and confused. I keep telling myself to hang in there, that things will turn around and I’m going to feel better, but I don’t. I feel worse. I’m still sick. Instead of my body getting round, i-it’s lumpy. And—and—I don’t have anything to wear.”
That last one she finished on a sob so tragic it was like a knife to Jeff’s gut. “Wait, what? Anything to wear where?”
“Anywhere. Nothing fits me. Everything is—” she broke off with another wretched sob.
Okay, he was tired. Really tired. But something didn’t compute.
“Honey, why didn’t you get some new clothes?”
She had a credit card and an account his mother had finally gotten her to let him fund. There was plenty of money.
* * *
“These fit fine two days ago! And today I didn’t feel well, and I didn’t want to ask your mom because I figured I’d just go tomorrow.... Only now, everything I put on is all bunchy and rough and tight and scratching and—” the face she made was utter, tortured frustration “—I can’t stand the feel of it touching my stomach. Not. For. One. More. Second.”
Her last words were punctuated by her hands fumbling around at the closures, jerking at the offending garments as she—holy hell—started stripping them off.
Jeff looked behind him at the door, then back at the woman in front of him who was huffing and puffing with outraged indignation over the way her clothes were touching her.
Hormones.
That’s what she’d said.
He’d heard tales about the havoc they wreaked. The kind of lows they’d brought men to when trying to appease the women caught in their violent, unpredictable sway.
Hell one of his buddies’ wives had actually called a divorce lawyer at his suggestion they stop for something healthier than fast food when she was in her eighth month of pregnancy. The guy had laughed when his wife told the story, but there’d been a haunted look in his eyes that said the fear never truly went away.
Which meant the decisions he made in the next critical moments could be the difference between his simply knowing to fear and respect the hormones and being left with that haunted look himself.