(Part 4 of 5)
Ezra peeled back the cover and showed her the book.
"Didn't I tell you not to read that?"
"Yes, but how else am I supposed to learn what's going on? I'm basically clueless."
"You can read it, but you can't skip ahead," Aria told him. "You think we'll have many more encounters like this once you've read all about childbirth and looked at all those illustrations?" She hadn't even read that far ahead yet.
"You're being ridiculous."
"Hand it over." She held out her hand. "You can have it back in a few weeks."
"I can have it back in about 30 minutes," he stated as he handed her the book. "I doubt you're gonna take it with you to school, or leave it in your car. You're much too smart for that." He knew her too well. "..I won't read it though, if that's what you want."
"It's what I want."
Aria set the book down on the floor in front of the sofa. Ezra reached over to the nearby shelf and pulled off the first book his hand fell upon. It was a crime novel he had started once, but never bothered to finish. Now was as good a time as any. "Let's not make a habit of this, okay?" he said as he flipped through the book, trying to remember where he'd left off.
She hadn't planned on it, but said, "Why not? Didn't you have a good time? I know I did."
"Yes. A very good time. But now you're exhausted and missing school. ..I don't want you to think this is all you are to me," he said, looking over at her from his end of the couch.
Aria lowered her chin to look at him. "Now who's being ridiculous? I came to you! If anything, I should be checking you don't think I think you're nothing more than a booty call."
He almost laughed at her use of the term. "You know I don't think that."
She relaxed her head and looked at the ceiling again. "Which is why I didn't say it."
"You know I'm just as happy doing this with you, sitting, doing nothing, as I am doing that."
"I do know. Me too," she said, then added, "Usually."
He laughed.
"And it was your idea for me to skip school," she reminded him. She would have headed straight back there and probably fallen asleep halfway through history had Ezra not suggested staying. She had already nodded off a handful of times over the past month in the back of her economics class during one of Mr. Egerton's notorious snooze-inducing lectures, not thinking to attribute it to the pregnancy until recently because she hadn't known any better, and it wasn't like she was the first student to do so. She was grateful for a) Mr. Egerton's nearsightedness, b) the fact that she didn't snore, and c) the girl who sat next to her's willingness to let Aria copy her notes at the beginning of the next class without asking questions. If she were ever caught, she planned to tell a half-truth, saying she'd recently switched to decaf and was still adjusting to the lack of caffeine.
"Because right now your rest is more important."
"Okay," she agreed, though clearly, she was already planning on staying.
"So we won't make a habit of it then," Ezra confirmed.
His pressing the point rubbed her the wrong way. Aria leaned up on her elbows and asked, "Do you not want me here? Because I can probably still make it back in time." Or nap in my car in the parking lot, which she had actually already done once.
Mystified, he asked, "What part of what I just said makes you think I don't want you here?"
His tone irritated her. "All of it. Now it seems like you wish I'd never come."
"That's ridiculous. I always want-"
"Stop calling me ridiculous," she snapped.
"I'm not calling you ridiculous, you're putting words in my mouth."
It was like he was intentionally trying to provoke her. "You just said it. You said 'that's ridiculous.'"
"The idea I don't want you here IS ridiculous!"
Aria blinked, hoping the tears developing in her eyes wouldn't fall.
Stop arguing, he told himself. "Tell me what's bothering you."
"Nothing," she sniffed. "I don't know. Nothing." Not very long ago she was sitting on his lap, happier than ever and now she was arguing with him and crying for no reason.
The other day, Aria felt an unearthly rage toward her mother when she discovered her favorite sweatshirt had gone through the dryer, shrinking it just enough for all the zippers to pucker and ripple in the ugliest possible way. She recognized that storming downstairs and strangling Ella with the garment, as was her instinct, would be out of character, so instead she threw it across the bedroom and kicked over the laundry basket and took her revenge in her mind. But she hated seeing the previously neatly stacked pile of clothes in a messy heap on the floor, so she moved it all to the bed and started folding it herself. Tears started falling when the asymmetrical t-shirt with a peacock silk-screened on the front wouldn't transform into a neat little square like the others.
Another day, Ella found her in the living room reading a book and crying. It wasn't a sad book, she was crying nonsensically over a scene involving a dog playing fetch, but Aria pretended that one of the characters had died when Ella asked. It wasn't as if she'd never teared up reading before, so she didn't think it raised any red flags, but she did decide to hang out in her room instead from then on.
Aria started to notice the trend and figured going from one emotional extreme to another was a part of pregnancy she'd have to get used to.
"What is it? What did I do?" Seeing her cry felt like tiny daggers piercing his chest, deflating his lungs.
She didn't answer because he didn't do anything. Instead she cast her eyes downward as another tear trickled all the way down to her chin and hovered there for a second and a half before dropping onto her chest.
Thinking pressuring her to stay may be where he went wrong, he gently suggested, "Look, if you don't want to be here, why don't you go home? Take the rest of the day off, tell your mom you weren't feeling well." Ezra started thinking this would be harder on her than he originally thought. The night he'd given her the ring, he helped her into her coat as she was on her way out and kissed her goodbye, the same as any other day. Then he said "Aria?" and she paused in the doorway. "We're doing this?" he had asked. "We're having a baby?" She spun herself around to see him standing there, awaiting her confirmation. Her lips pressed together and tears rose to her eyes, the happy tears he liked to see, and her head bobbed up and down in quick little shakes before he swept her up in spinning embrace. "We're having a baby," she repeated as a statement of fact and kissed his smiling lips. Her words made it feel like it would be the easiest thing in the world. It was decided. They were having a baby. The end. Wrong.
"No, I can't do that. I can't let her see me if I'm feeling crappy, but not really sick. She'll know something's up." If Ella ever caught her throwing up, she would pretend to have come down with a bug, or perhaps feign food poisoning, whichever seemed more believable at the time, but knew she couldn't get away with it more than once.
Picking up on her choice of words, he asked, "Are you feeling crappy?"
"I don't know, a little bit," she replied, wiping a tear.
"Crappy like we should call the doctor crappy?" Ezra asked, alarmed.
She put her head back on the "pillow" and said, "No, just your run-of-the-mill non-specific general crappiness."
Of course, he believed he was responsible for her current mood, one way or another, and only wanted to make it better, the best he could. "What would make you feel better? I can leave. You can have the place to yourself." He could kill time in the library, though he really didn't want to leave her alone seeming so sad and possibly not feeling well.
"No, please don't." Aria didn't know what was bothering her, but knew she'd feel worse if he left.
Glad he could stay with her, he asked, "Are you hungry? I can get you something to eat," knowing food was often the solution to their problems. His own lunch was sitting in the mini-fridge across the room, and he was always willing to share, or he could grab something from the dining hall, whose offerings weren't half bad compared to most.
"No, I feel very much not like eating right now." She felt no nausea at the moment, but the idea of food did not sit well, conjuring the still-fresh memory of yesterday morning's unpleasant meeting with the upstairs toilet.
At a loss, Ezra sighed and said, "Maybe you need your mom more than me right now. I'll deal with the consequences if you want to tell her." Those consequences scared him immensely.
Aria hadn't told him how much she wanted to do that, how much she wanted to curl up on her mother's lap some days and just cry, and it made her love him more that he'd guessed it. But she wasn't about to ruin the whole plan because she was feeling a little blue. "No, you're all I need. I'm just tired. I'm just gonna sleep."
Ezra hoped he could be the person she needed him to be and that it wasn't a mistake keeping Ella out of the loop. "Do you want me to wake you in time for math or no?"
"Yes."
"Because I'm sure you could make it up. You could.. say you had car trouble." Encouraging her to lie and skip school was not something he'd ever expected to do, nor something he liked doing.
"No, I'm saving that one in case I really need it one day." Aria kept a little file in her brain of assorted excuses and explanations for various situations that might arise. "I'm sure I'll feel better in a little while. Don't let me sleep too long."
"Okay," Ezra said and leaned over her body to kiss her forehead. She closed her eyes and folded her arms, and he wished he could offer her a real pillow or a blanket.
Ezra opened his book and waited for her to fall asleep, which didn't take long once they'd stopped talking. He had literally been in the middle of reading about the mood swings which tend to crop up around the 6th week when Jackie interrupted him earlier and it only just now clicked that's what was going on. It's often hard to see what's happening while it's happening and all too easy to play right into it. He told himself to be more aware of similar radical mood shifts in the future, though knew he'd probably put his foot in his mouth a few dozen more times over the coming months.