AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Though she was already an athlete, and anything but overweight, the idea was compelling. Less weight would also make her easier to partner. She would be more likely to be promoted to principal if she were even lighter than she was.
That was the beginning of a downward spiral.
The ankle hurt, she cut her calories, she was low in energy, she was sloppy and forgot to baby the ankle, it hurt again, she cut her food intake, and on and on it went.
Her father would never have allowed it if he had been there to see, but by then, he had moved out to a low-cost suburb to start over.
By the end of the season, she was haggard, hobbled, and haunted. And the company doctor told her that she was being pulled for six months to rest the ankle.
It was a big blow, and it was tough to take. But she had one more thing driving her. The last light in her heart was the idea of finding true love. Every single ballet she had ever performed in ended either with a happily ever after or with a tragedy of lost love.
But on Terra-58, if a woman wanted to be eligible for marriage, she had to first produce a primary heir. This was done with the help of a fertility clinic.
Alexis had always been too focused on her dance to worry much about all that. So maybe this was a blessing in disguise. She decided to spend the time she was benched from ballet working on having a baby so she could start that other part of her life.
But from the very first appointment at the clinic, she learned she had destroyed that hope, too. A restricted diet coupled with extreme exercise meant she hadn’t experienced her monthly in a year. And that meant no babies.
Meetings with a nutritionist came next. She watched her body fill out enough to bleed again.
And though she was scared at times that she might never dance again, the return of her nutritional health brought back her positive outlook.
Suddenly, though things were worse than ever on paper, she was beginning tofeelbetter.
But then her first fertility procedure didn’t work. Neither did the second. And that was the end of her meager savings.
At the end of the six months, the doctors did more scans and determined that her ankle was physically sound - as strong as before, maybe stronger after all the physical therapy.
She went back to dance for the company, in the corps now instead of as a soloist. And she took a second job at a grocery store stocking shelves overnight to save for a final treatment.
And that one failed too.
But Alexis had always been a positive, motivated person. Instead of letting the bad news drag her back to hell, she decided to relax for a day or two and spend as much time as possible in the park, brainstorming what to do next.
Then her friend, Haven, from the fertility support group feeds, told her about a special opportunity - an agency that would match her with a man from another planet who wanted a child.
His seed wouldawaken her womb, whatever that meant, and she would bear him a baby. She would be paid handsomely, and on her return home, her own treatments would be more effective from the interspecies encounter. It all sounded like a bunch of non-scientific nonsense to her, but science hadn’t gotten her too far up to that point.
The only downside was that certain species required a physical mating act and even the use of the surrogate’s eggs as a donor as well as a surrogate.
As soon as Haven finished telling her about it, Alexis was on the hush rail with her medical files loaded up on her bracelet.
She never would have imagined agreeing to such a thing a year ago.
But the more time she spent in the real world, outside of the theater, the more she realized she wanted to be a mother.
Children played in the park, sang in the schoolyards, ran up and down the city streets asking their parents for ice cream money.
Their joy reminded her of her own happy childhood, and the simplicity of life in those days.
A child was no longer a means to an end for her.
Now it was the end goal. It meant everything. She didn’t even care about finding a love match anymore.
She was determined to have a child.
And assuming the child would want to eat, she needed to nail these turns so that she could take a larger role at the company.
“Would you like to go again,” a voice seemed to come from all around her, snapping her out of her thoughts and back to the present.
