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Drake put the picture on the coffee table, standing it up using the easel attached to the frame. “I’d like one for my office. Can we make a copy?”
I nodded.
He pulled me back into his arms and we sat like that for a few moments, enjoying the silence and the warmth from the morning sun, which fell across the floor and onto the sofa.
“Honestly, Kate, this has been the best Christmas ever. Seriously.” He pulled back and looked into my eyes. “I feel as if I have a life now. A real life. Before I met you, I was just existing.”
I nodded. “Me, too.”
My eyes were wet and he smiled and leaned in to kiss me. It was then I pulled out the final gift for Drake. A long white box wrapped in a shiny red ribbon.
“Here,” I said, my voice choked. “One more gift.”
Drake frowned. “Hey, you,” he said and took the present. “We agreed only two presents each. Why did you get me another one?”
“It’s for both of us,” I said as he pulled the ribbon off the box.
“Both of us?” he said, his expression one of curiosity now. “A set of gold pens?”
He removed the wrapping and took the lid off. Beneath the lid was a layer of batting, and then he removed that, eager to see what it was.
He picked it up. My pregnancy test.
Positive.
He turned to me and the look in his eyes was all I needed to send me over into full-fledged tears.
“Oh, Kate,” he whispered, his own eyes wet. He pulled me into his arms, his face buried in my neck, and said nothing, squeezing me tighter and tighter.
Nothing needed to be said. Words seemed trivial compared to the emotions I knew we both were feeling and so we sat there in the apartment on 8th Avenue, wrapped in each other’s arms, the noise from the street filtering in under the open window, the church bells ringing in the distance.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Drake
I learned on Christmas Day that I was going to be a father and the news made me the happiest man on Earth. Kate had become pregnant in late November when I thought there was no way she would because she had so recently stopped her birth control. She was five weeks pregnant and due on August 26th.
If you went back in time to just over a year and a half earlier and watched me go through my very hectic day, you’d have seen a man who was rushing through his life, kept busy so he didn’t have to think too much about the lack of love in his life.
Sure, I had friends. Ken and Dave and the band. I had Lara, my confessor. I had the O’Rileys who acted as a substitute family. I had my submissives, who quenched my thirst for bondage and dominance during sex.
But I had no one who knew me completely, who loved me completely, and who wanted to grow old with me.
That’s what I hid from. That’s what kept me so busy, running from one part of my life to the next, with barely any time to breathe. I told myself that kind of life was not for me but instead, the truth was that I was afraid of having that life, of trying for it, in case I failed. Romance was the one part of my life I failed at -- miserably. I didn’t like to fail. Solution? Don’t even try.
It’s a coward’s solution of course, but at that time, I was afraid of being hurt again. Maureen leaving me for another man – one who gave her what she obviously needed and what I failed to give her – hurt me more deeply than I cared to admit.
Here I was, just over a year and a half later, committed to being a total family man. Wife, child, three-bedroom apartment with a room I was eyeing for a nursery, a smile on my face.
There was only one dark cloud on our horizon and that was Lisa Monroe, who had been too busy with exams and cases to bother me over Christmas, and especially after our little chat at the hospital, but she did ghost me whenever we had a joint conference or during grand rounds. We scrubbed in together on cases, and of course, we had coffee with the group on a regular basis.
She hadn’t pushed things or mentioned Richardson since that day in the hallway, and I hoped that she finally realized that nothing was going to happen between us. Still, I had never forgotten that look in her eyes, and she still insisted on us being ‘friendly’ with each other, although I had to force it.
If she never existed, I would be only too happy.
So it was that I had almost forgotten about Lisa and her threats to expose me if I wasn’t her ‘friend.’ Sadly, that time of peace came to an abrupt end that afternoon as I was leaving the hospital to go home.
“Drake!” she called out to me as I was leaving through a rear staff door.
