Page 202 of Halo

“Nicholas.”

He smiles.

“When did you do it?”

“About a month ago.”

“A month ago?” I set the sandwich down. “Nick, you already knew I was losing my uterus. You knew I couldn’t carry a pregnancy anymore, so why would you pay thousands of dollars to keep eggs I can’t even use?”

“Because you don’t know that you’ll never use them.”

I stare at him.

“Maybe you don’t. Maybe five years from now you decide you don’t want anything to do with them, and that’s fine too. But I wasn’t gonna let a billing department make that decision for you because your life fell apart and you missed some payments.” He shrugs. “They’re yours, darlin’. I just bought you some time.”

I lean over and kiss him.

Immediately, I pull back.

He raises an eyebrow.

“Enchiladas.”

He grins. “Too spicy?”

“Very.”

“Still wanna kiss me?”

I grab his shirt and pull him back.

“I’ll suffer.”

By sometime after three in the morning, I stop bothering to crawl back into bed.

There doesn’t seem to be much point when every twenty minutes another wave of nausea sends me stumbling back across the hall, so I stay on the bathroom floor with my back against the tub and one of Nick’s old T-shirts hanging loose around me. The tile is cold beneath my legs, but I don’t have enough energy to care.

The door opens again.

“I told you to go back to bed.”

“And I told you I don’t take orders well.”

Nick comes in carrying my water bottle and the blanket from our bed. He drapes it around my shoulders before sitting on the floor beside me.

“I’m fine.”

“Darlin’, you’re sitting on a bathroom floor at three in the morning holding a trash can.”

“I’m aware.”

“Just establishing our definition of fine.”

I lean my head against his shoulder.

For a while, neither of us says anything. His hand moves slowly along my back while I stare at the opposite wall and try not to think about whether I’m going to throw up again.

“I ruined the whole weekend.”