Floored Page 13

  "Are you coming in? Or are we meeting in the hallway now?"

  I blinked. "Sorry. My brain is all …" I waved a hand around my head.

  She smiled. "I was a bit foggy in the early parts of both of my pregnancies, so I can relate to the ..." She did some hand waving of her own. "One evening, I found myself quite parched, and when I started pouring water out of our pitcher, I realized—too late, mind you—that I was pouring it onto a dinner plate, rather than into a cup."

  I laughed.

  "What were you thinking about?" she asked. "Anything you want to talk through?"

  Sinking into the chair opposite her desk, I let the thread of that thought snowball for a moment before I answered. "I was thinking about what Charlotte said about conventionality. How the definition of normal or right changes with every generation. Look at me, for example. In their time, I would've been absolutely ruined if I'd found myself in this position. I would've been forced to marry the man who ruined me, no matter the circumstances that led to it. And if I hadn't married him, I—and by extension, my family—would have been ruined in polite society. No choices would've been offered to me."

  "True." Atwood sighed, a soft smile on her face. "And what made you think about that?"

  I shrugged. "Everything, I guess. Even now, people would say the way we're doing things, the father and I, isn't conventional. They'd equate that to right or wrong. Similarly, how many people thought the Brontë sisters were wrong for writing their books? They had to publish them under male pseudonyms to even have a shot at making money from what they did. Society would judge them, define them, and cast them into a set category because their choices defied convention."

  "And you worry that people will define you because of your choices?"

  "No." I shifted in the chair. "Or I don't think that's what I'm doing. We don't wear our choices like a scarlet letter. People only know my choices if I choose to share them."

  She hummed. In front of her was the same navy-blue teacup that she always drank out of, and she paused to take a sip. "That's quite true."

  "We don't need to talk about it." My fingers, knit tightly together in my lap, covered the small bump underneath my black sweater, and I saw her eyes drift there. "Really. I just ... I do that sometimes. Anytime I don't know exactly what I'm doing, or should be doing, I think about them. About the sisters. And how few choices they had, simply because of when they were born, you know?"

  As I spoke, I fought a feeling of defensiveness when no one had even called for a discussion on my choices. Professor Atwood removed her glasses and set them on the surface of her desk.

  "Lia, I know we need to discuss your first draft—and we shall—but for a moment, would you allow an old lady to give a piece of advice?"

  I gave her a look. She wasn't a day over forty-five. Old, my ass. "You're not old, but yes."

  She smiled. "It's natural in this field to fixate quite strongly on the past. We're paid to do so, aren't we?"

  Slowly, I nodded, not entirely sure where she was going with this.

  "I know that you're still sussing out what you'd like to do with your degree once you finish, but no matter what you decide, I'd give you one word of caution." She turned the edge of her teacup to line it up with the edge of her desk, and when the angle was right, she glanced back up at me. "Be careful that you don't anchor your thoughts so firmly on the past that it's hard for you to deal with your future, especially if part of that future is unclear."

  "That's not what I'm doing." But my fingers tightened over my belly, my chest felt a little tight at the gentle delivery of her words. "Isn't it a good sign that I think of them often? That I'm constantly trying to correlate our societal dilemmas with what they went through?"

  "Of course that's good."

  "Then why do I feel like you're chastising me?" Oh, my gawd, were my eyes getting blurry? Was I crying in her office?

  "Lia," she said gently, "I'm not chastising you. But I do see in you something that I used to struggle with myself, and I don't want you to only plant your thoughts on the past when you should be able to look straight to your future."

  My future. My future was one giant foggy question mark.

  And there was time to wave those clouds away.

  I stood, and I saw the regret in her eyes. "I have to go," I told her.

  "We still need to talk about your draft." Her chin lifted. "I apologize if I overstepped."

  "I, uh, I can email you about your openings next week." I slid my backpack straps over my shoulders. "Besides, I have a doctor’s appointment in London."

  In three hours, but she hardly needed to know that.

  She raised her eyebrows. "You're going to London for that? They couldn't get you into a doctor here?"

  Atwood still had no idea who the father was, and explaining that he paid for the friggin’ fanciest doctor in the universe to stick a gel-covered wand up my hoo-hah did not sound like a fun time, given what she'd just said to me.

  "Yeah, it's a long story." I tucked my hair behind my ear. "Thank you for your advice."

  She smiled gently. "I hope your appointment goes well."

  She knew, probably just as well I did, that we were both being fake AF with our polite goodbyes. I wasn't feeling all that thankful over what she said. I felt attacked. I felt ... vulnerable.

  The Tube ride to London felt too long.

  And it felt too short.

  Jude was meeting me at the doctor's office for this appointment because we were going to try to listen for the heartbeat, and for some reason, it was the first time in a long time when I didn't know if I wanted to face him.

  If I was fixating on the past to avoid my own future, wouldn't I be doing that with my own past? I had a laundry list of items to choose from, if that were the case.

  -Father dying when I was young: check.

  -Mother bailing when it wasn't so super fun to be a parent anymore: check.

  -Brother becoming Dad, which made for a very confusing family tree when we had school assignments: check.

  But none of those were even remotely things I wanted to fixate on. Because they were done. Over. Nothing about them could be changed.

  I got off, minded the gap and all that jazz, and let the ebb and flow of the crowd leaving the station guide me up onto the street. The trees were devoid of leaves by this point in the fall, and it felt appropriately barren.

  There was no lush, pretty scenery to distract me from what Atwood said, and even the grandeur of the buildings didn't adequately hold my attention.

  Always looking for a distraction.

  The thought drew me up short, only a block away from the doctor.

  Were Jude and I both guilty of what she'd said?

  I rubbed my belly, wondering if the little strawberry could sense my unease. "Sorry, lil fruit," I murmured. "I'll try to slow the mental anguish."

  Rounding the corner, I spied Jude's tall form against one of the white colonial columns propping up the ornate entryway to the office. He was wearing a black knit hat and aviator glasses that covered half his face. All that was visible was his dark scruff along his jaw and the stern line of his mouth.

  Maybe what we were doing was a distraction and nothing more, this refusal to address what was waiting for us, but when he looked up and saw me, I could not help the way I reacted to that slow, sensual curve of his mouth.

  I knew what that mouth was capable of.

  "Hello," he murmured, sliding a hand over my hip when I approached. Quite naturally, my hands slid up the marble-hard planes of his chest, and I lifted my chin. He took the hint, smart boy that he was. Jude gave me a soft kiss but didn't deepen it. "Good meeting with your advisor?"

  A buzzing sound went off in my head, like a game show contestant had hit the wrong button.

  Not the topic I wanted to touch on.

  "Fine," I told him. "You're early."

  He grinned. "I wanted to scope out the building and see if you were exaggerating about how posh it was."

&n
bsp; Lifting one eyebrow, I pinched his nipple, smiling in satisfaction when he yelped.

  "And you weren't," he finished.

  What I thought about saying next was not what came out of my mouth. What I thought about saying was, Of course, I wasn't exaggerating. But what came out of my mouth was, "Have you told your parents about the baby yet?"

  Jude froze. Hell, so did I.

  Maybe Atwood's advice made me so uncomfortable because she was right. It was a thought I didn't want to dwell on too much.

  Jude gently turned our positions, so my back was against the column, his arm caging me in, an effective barrier from any prying eyes on the quiet, tree-lined street.

  "Not yet," he admitted. His hand snuck under the back of my shirt, and he traced the bumps on my spine. "Soon."

  I opened my mouth, this time not even sure what I was going to say, and he leaned in, sucking my bottom lip into his mouth.

  “H-how was work?” I asked, tilting my mouth away.

  He kissed down my neck. “I hardly want to talk about work when I could be doing this.”

  My fingers curled into the material of his shirt, and even as I recognized what he was doing—serving up a delicious distraction—I wasn't able to find the strength to resist it.

  Not conventional.

  Maybe not even wise.

  But I tilted my head and yanked him closer, earning me a grunt of satisfaction when my tongue slid wetly against his. One of his palms spread wide over my stomach, and I felt a warm glow somewhere in the vicinity of my heart.

  Wise, conventional, whatever word someone else might suggest ... I decided they were all overrated, and I lost myself in his kiss.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Jude

  By the time we were back at my house and Lia had curled up in her favorite corner of my couch, I'd sort of stopped hearing that little whomp-whomp-whomp sound in my head.

  Sort of.

  I scrolled the screen of my phone.

  "Did you know the average heartbeat is up to a hundred and sixty beats per minute?"

  Lia glanced at me, a bemused smile on her face. "I did not."

  "His was fast."

  Whomp, whomp, whomp. Like a horse galloping on hard dirt.

  Now the smile spread on her face. "His? I thought it was my job to get a feel for the sex."

  "Awfully sexist of you." I lifted my phone screen and tried to pretend I wasn't a little embarrassed that I'd been the first to admit which gender I thought the baby was. "Sir Google says that boy heartbeats average a bit higher, so you can sod off."

  She laughed. "There are so many girls in my family, it's just weird to imagine having a boy."

  Weird was not the adjective I would've used.

  Everything laid out in my head like a road map, all the ways I'd be able to do right by him when my parents hadn't done right by me. And maybe everyone did that to a certain extent when faced with impending parenthood. The mistakes of our own families felt like blinking beacons, bright and obnoxious. And not just obvious but easily avoided.

  My parents, from simple, hardworking stock, couldn't imagine anything other than the life they'd both been raised in. My father was a farmer because his father had been a farmer. He dug his hands in the dirt, day in and day out, because it was what McAllister men did.

  Until me.

  And Lewis.

  Though they accepted the life he lived because my brother still worked his fingers to the bone in his pub. He wiped down dirty counters and cleared tables, if need be. He poured drinks and stayed until the middle of the night if required. To them, it wasn't farming the ground for our food, but it was honorable because it was service. But to them, I was nothing more than a show pony who could kick a ball into a very large, very easily found target. My success, in their mind, was rooted in vanity and excess, a failing on their part that I wasn't more content in the life that they'd raised me.

  To them, I didn't serve anyone except myself. No matter that the entire world understood the unifying effects of sport, and the passion and joy and camaraderie of cheering on the same team. The entire world except my bloody family, it seemed.

  To them, it was frivolous, this thing I loved and had dedicated my life to.

  My son—or daughter—would never feel like that.

  Whatever passion they were born with, whatever thing lit them up inside, I'd move heaven and hell to help them hone that into a life. I'd never make them feel like less for loving something different than I did. The opposite actually. If they wanted to paint or draw or write or spin pirouettes or design clothes, I'd tear my hands to blood and bone if I could carve out a place in the world for them to do the thing they loved.

  And I could feel that building up inside me with a zealot's fire as I watched Lia flip channels on the telly in my home.

  Everything else might be going wrong in my life, branching off into directions that felt crooked and dangerously flimsy, except her.

  "A girl is fine by me too," I murmured, sliding a hand up her leg, where it draped over my lap.

  Lia rolled her eyes. "I'd hope so."

  "It was fast, though, wasn't it?" I asked. "The heartbeat."

  Funny, if I laid my hand over my chest, I got the strangest feeling I'd feel it pounding in that same rhythm. Whomp, whomp, whomp.

  She hummed, moving her own hand over her stomach. When the doctor rolled the wand over it as Lia lay flat on the table, it was hardly detectable. "It was amazing." The graceful length of her fingers spread wide over her stomach, and she smiled softly. "I wish I could feel it."

  There was no doubt in my mind she'd be a wonderful mother. If pressed, I might not even be able to articulate why, or not well, at least.

  We'd talked about so little, she and I. And the things she did seem to want to talk about were the subjects I wanted to avoid like a kick to the balls. It was instinct, I supposed. The same way I could stand in front of a keeper for a penalty kick and know in my gut that he'd go left, so I should kick right. I knew she'd be the best kind of mum. Fierce and fearless and intelligent.

  In Lia's lap was her notebook and a dog-eared copy of Jane Eyre that was always in her bag.

  "How did your meeting go?"

  She sighed, moving the notebook and novel to the side so she could burrow further into the couch. "I kinda ... argued with her. Or she argued with me. I don't even know."

  I tilted my head. "What about?"

  Lia's eyes, that deep midnight blue, hit me like a punch to the chest when she looked up at me. She'd looked at me for a lot of reasons, out of lust and out of fear and in anger, but this was something different. There was a hesitation that I couldn't make out.

  My hand squeezed her leg. "What is it?"

  "She said something, and it made me feel a little defensive, I guess."

  Gently, I tapped her leg, so she stretched out. Taking a foot in hand, I dug my thumbs into the arch and listened to her groan, an indecent sound that shouldn't have been so sexy, considering I was rubbing her feet, yet it was.

  "Was it your paper? I thought you were happy with your first draft?" For ten days, she buried herself on her computer, working on ... something important. The world of academia was hardly my comfort zone, but I was still trying to understand what it was she did. What she wanted to do.

  "No, it wasn't my paper. She's still reviewing it, I think." Her back arched when I dug into a spot on her foot. "Oh, holy shit, that feels amazing."

  At Lia's age, I'd been just taking the premier league by storm, one year after my transfer from the German team where I got my start. But maybe to her, that paper was the same type of thrill as hoisting a cup over my head was for me.

  "What are you going to do with that fancy paper?" I asked. Groggily, she lifted her head, and I stifled a laugh at her expression. It reminded me of when my head was clenched tight between her thighs and she'd just about torn the hair from my head as she came to a screaming release a couple of days earlier. "When you finish, I mean. Take the Brontë world by stor
m, as it were?"

  "If you want me to answer"—she hissed in a breath when I moved to the other foot—"you have to stop doing that." I held my hands up, and she exhaled heavily. "I don't know, really."

  My eyebrows lifted. "Meaning ...?"

  "Meaning," she drawled, "I don't know what I want to do with my degree just yet."

  "Aren't you close to graduating?"

  "Yup."

  "With your master's degree."

  She tapped a finger to her nose. "You got it."

  The look I gave her was incredulous. "How do you not know?"

  "Okay, judgy, a lot of people in this world go on and get their doctorate while they decide if they want to write or research or teach. It's not that uncommon." She sat up and folded her arms over that marvelous chest of hers. "I don't think there's anything wrong with not knowing."

  Maybe not wrong, but I tried to wipe the look off my face of total and complete lack of comprehension. How did one not know? She’d devoted years of her life at uni studying this subject.

  I chose my words carefully—pregnant woman and all. "It certainly seems like you have a lot of options."

  "I do." Her chin was pointed at a mulish angle, and it was surprisingly sexy, as was the defiance in her tone.

  "And once you decide which one, you'll be incredible. Prove you were right in wanting what you want."

  Lia's brows lowered over those eyes of hers, confusion clear. "Prove to who?"

  I shrugged. "Everyone."

  She hummed.

  "What?"

  "Nothing," she answered lightly.

  "Bollocks. That's not a nothing tone. Don't try to read anything into it." My entire career was based around proving a point. Every day that I showed up to work my arse off, it was to prove a point. Every time I scored. Every time I left a piece of myself on the pitch, it was the prove a point. "Come to my match on Saturday?" I asked her.

  She smiled. "Of course. Is your family coming to this one? I'd love to meet them."

  To match her smile with one of my own was difficult, but I tried. "I'll ring and ask. It's hard for them to leave the farm."

  Lia sat up and swung her leg over my lap until she’d settled nicely on top of me. My hands slid up her back while her fingers played with the ends of my hair. "It's a big game, though, right?"