The Gravity of Us
Page 5

Our love was driven by a mutual respect, by structure. Each big decision we made was always thoroughly thought out and often involved diagrams and charts. The day I asked her to by my wife, we made fifteen pie and flow charts to make sure we were making the right decision.
Romantic?
Maybe not.
Logical?
Absolutely.
Which was why her current invasion of my deadline was concerning. She never interrupted me while I was working, and for her to barge in while I was on a deadline was beyond bizarre.
I had ninety-five thousand more to go.
Ninety-five thousand words to go before the manuscript went to the editor in two weeks. Ninety-five thousand words equated to an average of six thousand seven hundred eighty-six words a day. That meant the next two weeks of my life would be spent in front of my computer, hardly pulling myself away for a breath of fresh air.
My fingers were on speed, typing and typing as fast as they could. The purplish bags under my eyes displayed my exhaustion, and my back ached from not leaving my chair for hours. Yet, when I sat in front of my computer with my drugged-up fingers and zombie eyes, I felt more like myself than any other time in my life.
“Graham,” Jane said, breaking me from my world of horror and bringing me into hers. “We should get going.”
She stood in the doorway of my office. Her hair was curly, which was bizarre seeing as how her hair was always straight. Each day she awoke hours before me to tame the curly blond mop upon her head. I could count on my right hand the number of times I’d seen her with her natural curls. Along with the wild hair, her makeup was smudged, left on from the night before.
I’d only seen my wife cry two times since we’d been together: one time when she’d learned she was pregnant seven months ago, and another when some bad news came in four days ago.
“Shouldn’t you straighten your hair?” I asked.
“I’m not straightening my hair today.”
“You always straighten your hair.”
“I haven’t straightened my hair in four days.” She frowned, but I didn’t make a comment about her disappointment. I didn’t want to deal with her emotions that afternoon. For the past four days, she’d been a wreck, the opposite of the woman I married, and I wasn’t one to deal with people’s emotions.
What Jane needed to do was pull herself together.
I went back to staring at my computer screen, and my fingers started moving quickly once more.
“Graham,” she grumbled, waddling over to me with her very pregnant stomach. “We have to get going.”
“I have to finish my manuscript.”
“You haven’t stopped writing for the past four days. You hardly make it to bed before three in the morning, and then you’re up by six. You need a break. Plus, we can’t be late.”
I cleared my throat and kept typing. “I decided I’m going to have to miss out on this silly engagement. Sorry, Jane.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her jaw slacken. “Silly engagement? Graham…it’s your father’s funeral.”
“You say that as if it should mean something to me.”
“It does mean something to you.”
“Don’t tell me what does and doesn’t mean something to me. It’s belittling.”
“You’re tired,” she said.
There you go again, telling me about myself. “I’ll sleep when I’m eighty, or when I’m my father. I’m sure he’s sleeping well tonight.”
She cringed. I didn’t care.
“You’ve been drinking?” she asked, concerned.
“In all the years of us being together, when have you ever known me to drink?”
She studied the bottles of alcohol surrounding me and let out a small breath. “I know, sorry. It’s just…you added more bottles to your desk.”
“It’s a tribute to my dear father. May he rot in hell.”
“Don’t speak so ill of the dead,” Jane said before hiccupping and placing her hands on her stomach. “God, I hate that feeling.” She took my hands away from my keyboard and placed them on her stomach. “It’s like she’s kicking me in every internal organ I have. I cannot stand it.”
“How motherly of you,” I mocked, my hands still on her.
“I never wanted children.” She breathed out, hiccupping once more. “Ever.”
“And yet, here we are,” I replied. I wasn’t certain Jane had fully come to terms with the fact that in two short months, she’d be giving birth to an actual human being who would need her love and attention twenty-four hours a day.
If there was anyone who gave love less than I did, it was my wife.
“God,” she murmured, closing her eyes. “It just feels weird today.”
“Maybe we should go to the hospital,” I offered.
“Nice try. You’re going to your father’s funeral.”
Damn.
“We still need to find a nanny,” she said. “The firm gave me a few weeks off for maternity leave, but I won’t need all of the time if we find a decent nanny. I’d love a little old Mexican lady, preferably one with a green card.”
My eyebrows furrowed, disturbed. “You do know saying that is not only disgusting and racist, but also saying it to your half-Mexican husband is pretty distasteful, right?”
“You’re hardly Mexican, Graham. You don’t even speak a lick of Spanish.”
“Which makes me non-Mexican—duly noted, thank you,” I said coldly. At times my wife was the person I hated the most. While we agreed on many things, sometimes the words that left her mouth made me rethink every flow chart we’d ever made.
How could someone so beautiful be so ugly at times?
Kick.
Kick.
My chest tightened, my hands still resting around Jane’s stomach.
Those kicks terrified me. If there was anything I knew for certain, it was that I was not father material. My family history led me to believe anything that came from my line of ancestry couldn’t be good.
I just prayed to God that the baby wouldn’t inherit any of my traits—or worse, my father’s.
Jane leaned against my desk, shifting my perfectly neat paperwork as my fingers lay still against her stomach. “It’s time to hop in the shower and get dressed. I hung your suit in the bathroom.”