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“Yeah, like—”
“Taylor?”
She snapped her head in the direction of the nurse’s quiet voice. A second passed when I wasn’t sure if she was going to stay or go, but she nodded to herself and stood up, following the nurse through the door then stopped when she realized I was behind her and furrowed her brow.
In response, I gestured for her to keep moving. I’d come here with her and wasn’t about to let her go back there on her own. She might’ve been a frigid bitch, but as far as I was concerned, she was my frigid bitch now.
“I don’t need you to come back,” she said, and I raised my attention to the nurse, holding the door open. I expected her to wave me inside, but she didn’t, so I grasped Taylor’s hand.
“I’ll be right out here, okay?”
“Yeah, okay,” she whispered, the tips of her fingers momentarily wrapping around mine.
I squeezed her hand once. “I’ll be waiting.”
She didn’t smile, but she didn’t look scared either, so I took it as a win.
And then I waited. There was a sign about not using phones, so I flipped through an oldPeoplemagazine from the table.
Weirdly enough, Chris “CJ” Cunningham stared back at me from one of the pages. He was an actor turned director and was married to one of Laney’s best friends. Ethan had become pretty good friends with him too. He was even going to be at their wedding. I only hoped it wouldn’t be a whole thing. A celebrity at my sister’s big church wedding? It had the makings of some comedy gone wrong. But Ethan said he was cool, so…
I slapped the magazine down and picked up another one, apparently anxious enough to start worrying about celebrities’ lives.
How long did this take?
I read about gluten-free dinner recipes and a trendy new women’s hairstyle. Bangs were back in.
I’d just sat down in my chair from throwing out my gum when the door opened, and I jumped up. “Are you all right?”
Taylor stuffed a prescription bag into her purse and frowned at me. “Yeah, why?”
I pointed my finger past her shoulder. “You were in there for, like, an hour.”
“It was twenty minutes, Hargrove. Chill out.”
I patted my tie back into place and willed my nerves to subside, lest my bones turn into goo and I melt to the floor. I thanked the nurse at the check-in with a wave and kept my hand wrapped around Taylor’s elbow as we hustled back outside.
“I don’t need you to put me into the car.”
“Shut up and get in,” I muttered, closing the door after her.
Once I was back out on the road, I chanced a glance her way. “Everything go okay?”
She kept her focus out of the windshield. “Yeah. I took one pill in there, and I have more to take when I get home.”
“And that’s it?”
“Yeah. It’s a medical abortion.”
“Right.” I nodded and made a mental note to read up on the process as soon as I could. I should have before, and I felt like a dick for not being more informed. Laney would be ashamed of me. But I’d figured voting for it would have been enough. Now I knew it wasn’t.
Not when I was sitting here, next to my frigid bitch, trying to make her feel better while in the middle of an abortion.
“Where are you going?” she asked when I made a left turn.
“Home.”
“I’m not going home with you,” she bit out.
